A new civil rights complaint filed against the Berkeley school district alleges that administrators ignored “severe and persistent” harassment of Jewish students in the months following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks and Israel’s ensuing war in Gaza.
The complaint, filed by Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and the Anti-Defamation League, describes an environment at the Berkeley Unified School District so hostile toward Jewish students that some are afraid to go to school because of bullying by their peers and an antisemitic and anti-Israel environment cultivated by teachers. Parents’ attempts to work with school district administrators have been unsuccessful, the complaint alleges.
“We really feel there was no choice,” Marci Miller, a senior attorney at the Brandeis Center, said about the decision to file the complaint Wednesday with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. “The families who are described in the complaint have tried repeatedly to work with the administrators at Berkeley Unified. Their complaints, essentially, have been ignored.”
While universities have been the subject of similar complaints — UC Berkeley was hit with a federal complaint by the same group in November — this is the first K-12 school district to have a Department of Education civil rights complaint related to antisemitism since Hamas’s attack on Israel in October, which killed 1,200 people, with 250 taken hostage, and has been followed by Israel’s months-long war in Gaza that’s killed more than 30,000 Palestinians, many civilians.
District spokesperson Trish McDermott said BUSD has received formal complaints from 15 parents or guardians related to antisemitism or Islamophobia since Oct. 7, adding that most of the investigations are close to complete. She declined to break the numbers down further.
The district says it stands against all forms of hate and addresses problems in the community when they arise. “We continue to uphold our stance against all forms of hate and are proud of our legacy of diversity and inclusion,” Superintendent Enikia Ford Morthel said in a statement responding to the complaint. “If and where there are problems in our community, we work together to address them.”
The incidents detailed in the civil rights complaint run the gamut from allegations that children were taunted about the Holocaust or for having big noses to incidents some say are more ambiguous. Disagreements about the incidents and what they mean are part of a broader discussion taking place across the country amid deep and growing divisions over the war and its deadly toll.
Students in Berkeley, the complaint says, have been bullied by their peers for being Jewish or Israeli.
According to the complaint: A student at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School had students tell him, “You have a big nose because you are a stupid Jew” and “I don’t like your people.” Other students reported being asked “what their number is,” in reference to Holocaust tattoos, or hearing chants about killing Jews or KKK at student walkouts. And one family whose child was bullied and called a “midget Jew” at Willard Middle School decided to pull her out of school.
The 41-page complaint, based on input from over 100 parents or students, also describes teachers posting an “overwhelming” amount of what it describes as antisemitic and anti-Israel material in class as well as teachers expressing antisemitic stereotypes and defamations. The complaint claims the school district violates its policy on controversial issues by allowing teachers to “indoctrinate other students with anti-Semitic rhetoric, tropes and false information about Israelis and Jews.”
As examples, the complaint mentions a classroom activity in which second-graders were instructed to write “messages of anti-hate” on sticky notes to hang in the school hallway, and a number of kids ended up writing “stop bombing babies.” The sticky notes from the activity were posted outside the class of the school’s only Jewish teacher, according to the complaint.
The complaint also includes images of a poster calling for a fight to end Apartheid featuring a young man in a keffiyeh throwing a rock. In one example, the complaint says, a teacher referred to Israel as an Apartheid state.
In the weeks following Oct. 7, Ilana Pearlman’s son transferred out of his art class after his teacher shared a fist with a Palestinian flag punching through a Star of David that appears to be on an Israeli flag and map of Israel. He said the image made him feel unsafe and he wished another perspective was represented in class.
Afterward, Pearlman realized her son wasn’t alone: Other students were transferring classes and describing being afraid to go to school. She started soliciting people’s experiences with antisemitism in Berkeley schools. She documented 57 incidents in all, she said, many of which she shared with the Brandeis Center and Anti-Defamation League.
Barbara Schubert’s daughter, Simone, also transferred out of the same art class. When her new art teacher started wearing a keffiyeh and “Free Palestine” patch, she enrolled in an online art class through San Francisco City College. At school, posters calling for a ceasefire and insensitive comments make her feel “sick to her stomach,” her mother said “There’s times she doesn’t want to go to school.” The school deemed the comments didn’t qualify as a symbol of hate, Schubert said.
Multiple students have transferred classes and some described being afraid to go to school, according to the complaint. In each case, the complaint says, the school responded insufficiently, failing to complete an investigation or putting the onus on students to change their schedule rather than require that teachers change their behavior.
Pro-Palestinian Jewish parents say complaint is distorting what’s happening in schools
A different group of Jewish parents dispute the allegations in the complaint, arguing that many of the incidents cited misconstrue criticism of Israel as antisemitism and that the overall effect is a distortion of what’s happening in Berkeley schools.
“It irresponsibly fabricates or exaggerates a majority of incidents described, and needs to be laid bare for what it is: another harassment tactic intended to censor teaching our children about Palestine,” reads a statement from BUSD Jewish Parents for Collective Liberation.
Liz Jackson, a BUSD parent involved with the group, called the complaint a “defamatory piece of creative writing mischaracterizing the call for Palestinian human rights, or Palestinians’ right to live, as somehow dangerous, or threatening to Jewish students.”
The group says most allegations of antisemitism in the report are “falsely framed as acts of antisemitic hate” or fabricated altogether.
It was not antisemitic for second-graders to write “stop bombing babies” on sticky notes, the group wrote. “Who disagrees with that message?” Jackson asked. Jackson claimed the sticky notes were not targeting a Jewish teacher but were posted on a bulletin board that happened to be outside a Jewish teacher’s classroom.
A petition organized by Jewish parents, now signed by 1,300 people, had previously surfaced several of the incidents described in the federal complaint. The petition called on the school district to condemn hate and make it easier for students to report harassment.
As Berkeleyside reported in November, the petition included examples of antisemitic behavior at Berkeley schools, including students saying “kill the Jews” in the hallways, and alleged that the school allowed a hateful climate toward Jewish people in general to fester. This, the petition said, led students to hide their Jewish identity and stop wearing their Stars of David to school. (Stacey Zolt Hara, who posted the petition online, is a board member at Cityside, Berkeleyside’s nonprofit parent organization.)
Shortly after the petition was posted, BUSD Superintendent Enikia Ford Morthel said the district had received a few anonymous reports regarding hate speech on campus that lacked sufficient detail to investigate. There were no direct reports of most of the incidents described in the petition, the district said at the time.
“Those reporting the alleged incidents would not provide their name, or student name, or any details about when or where these incidents occurred, making it really hard for us to follow up,” Ford Morthel said in November. “Chasing unverifiable incidents takes away from the time and resources of our staff.”
Christina Harb, a Palestinian American school teacher at BUSD, said people in Arab and Muslim communities had also felt unsafe. “I’m a lot more worried for my safety than I really had to think about before,” Harb told Berkeleyside. She said some Muslim and Arab students had been called terrorists at school and some families had considered pulling their students out of school.
Jackson, a volunteer with Palestine Legal, said Muslim, Arab and Palestinian students in Berkeley schools have reported feeling unsafe to come to school, being physically threatened and being called racial epithets.
Antisemitism and anti-Muslim discrimination are on the rise
Over the last few months, people have used the public comment period of Berkeley school board meetings to voice their views about what should and shouldn’t be allowed in classrooms.
Many have defended teachers’ right to teach about Palestine, and teachers have said they have felt surveilled. Others have described the curriculum as a one-sided narrative that leaves no room for the Israeli perspective. Some directors on the school board have come out in support of teachers’ freedom to teach about this topic.
“Everything can be discussed,” said Berkeley parent Mati Teiblum, “But the idea that teachers basically use it as a platform to propagate their own political opinions while disregarding students’ feelings and safety — it was unacceptable.”
Incidents of antisemitism have spiked nationwide since Oct. 7. The Anti-Defamation League reported a three-fold increase in antisemitic incidents in the last three months of 2023, compared with the previous year.
Anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian discrimination is also rising. The Council of American-Islamic relations reported a 178% increase in incidents in the last three months of 2023, compared with the previous year.
