Editor’s Note: On its website, the Berkeley Unified School District condemns antisemitism and celebrates Jewish American Heritage Month.
WASHINGTON, D.C. (Press Release) — The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced on Tuesday, May 7, it has opened a formal investigation into a complaint that the Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) failed to address non-stop “severe and persistent” bullying and harassment of Jewish students in classrooms, hallways, schools yards, and walkouts since October 7, 2023.
BUSD Superintendent Enikia Ford Morthel is also being called to testify Wednesday before the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce about BUSD’s antisemitism problem. This is the Committee’s first K-12 hearing on antisemitism. It has held two hearings on college antisemitism where Committee members questioned the heads of Harvard, MIT, the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia.
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination based on race, color, and national origin, including discrimination against Jews based on their actual or perceived shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics, in educational institutions that receive federal funding. Under the law, harassing, marginalizing, demonizing, and excluding Jewish students based on the Zionist component of their Jewish identity is unlawful. UNESCO has cautioned that “Jew” and “Zionist” are often used interchangeably today in an attempt by anti-Semites to cloak their hate. President Biden’s US National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, released in May 2023, observed that “When Jews are targeted because of their beliefs or their identity, when Israel is singled out because of anti-Jewish hatred, that is antisemitism. And that is unacceptable.”
The Title VI complaint being investigated by the Department of Education was filed by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and ADL (the Anti-Defamation League), and it documents dozens of incidents such as students shouting “f— the Jews” and “KKK,” graffiti stating “Kill Jews,” and teachers indoctrinating students with anti-Semitic tropes and biased, one-sided anti-Israel propaganda disguised as education. BUSD has not only failed to address the cascading anti-Semitism, according to the complaint, it has permitted retaliation against parents who complained.
The organizations first filed the complaint in February calling on the Department of Education to intervene. They documented numerous incidents including antisemitic comments, such as “kill the Jews,” non-Jewish students asking Jewish students what “their number is,” referring to numbers tattooed on Jews during the Holocaust, Jewish students being told “I don’t like your people” and being derided for their physical appearance, and Jewish students being blamed and demonized.
The complaint also documented how students have had to endure antisemitic teacher rants and class activities and teacher-promoted “walkouts” that praise Hamas. In fact, during an unauthorized teacher-promoted walkout for Palestine, no teachers intervened as students shouted, “Kill the Jews,” “KKK,” “Kill Israel,” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
On Monday, the organizations expanded the complaint, advising OCR that in the last three months, anti-Jewish bigotry and harassment has only escalated and the environment has become even more hostile and threatening. Some of the new incidents described in the expanded complaint include, “Kill Jews” scrawled at Berkeley High School, “Kill all Zionists” written at the bus stop used by many Berkeley High School students to get to and from school, children on the playground saying “Jews are stupid,” a ninth-grader bullied after his parent reported antisemitic incidents, teachers continuing to teach one-sided anti-Israel propaganda disguised as education, and removal of posters condemning antisemitism and supporting Israel’s right to exist, while anti-Israel and pro-Hamas posters remain undisturbed.
Parents have repeatedly reported antisemitic incidents to the administration, but BUSD has done nothing to address, much less curtail, the hostile environment that has plagued BUSD since October 7, and is continuing to pick up steam. Instead of addressing teachers’ antisemitic behavior, BUSD officials have chosen to disrupt the Jewish students’ learning by moving them into new classes, further ostracizing and marginalizing them from their peers and normalizing antisemitic behavior.
Jewish students report being worried about mob violence, including being “jumped” at school. Many have said they remove their Stars of David and no longer wear Jewish camp t-shirts, and that they are learning to keep their heads down, hide their Judaism and move through their school days in fear. Some students have left the district due to the pervasive bullying.
“Berkeley would never sit idly by and allow vicious threats, harassment, and intimidation of any other minority group, yet when it comes to Jews, seven months of crickets. Making matters even worse, they are permitting teachers, their employees, to indoctrinate students with lesson plans chock full of antisemitic tropes and anti-Israel propaganda,” stated Kenneth L. Marcus, founder and chairman of the Brandeis Center and the former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education for Civil Rights for George W. Bush and Donald Trump.
“Reprehensible is an understatement here. It is high time BUSD enforces federal and state law to address the dangerous anti-Semitism snowballing in front of them.”
“We believe there’s a disturbing and clear pattern of antisemitic intimidation and harassment in the Berkeley school system, and we are pleased the Office of Civil Rights has opened a formal civil rights investigation,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, ADL CEO. “Jewish grade school students — like all students — deserve the ability to attend school in a climate free of prejudice, threats or bias.”
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Preceding provided by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, in cooperation with the ADL.