Federal complaint alleges Berkeley schools allowed antisemitism
The week after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, Ilana Pearlman asked her 14-year-old son, Ezra, a ninth-grader at Berkeley High School who is Black and Jewish, if he felt safe.
“Oh, yeah, I’ll be fine,” he told her. “I’m Black.”
Pearlman, a 38-yearold midwife, wanted to cry. She moved to Berkeley thinking it would be a space where her son would not be a token Jewish Black kid, that he could be celebrated for all the things that make him who he is.
Instead, she said, she watched Ezra erase his Jewish identity as the climate at his high school became more hostile to Israel and Jews. His art teacher, he told her, projected “resistance art” — including a fist punching through a Star of David on a map of Israel — on a large screen. Day by day, his classroom wall filled with signs promoting a “walkout against genocide” and posting the daily death toll of Palestinians.
“He never tells me anything,” Pearlman said of her son, a typical video-game-loving teen. “The fact that he shared this was unusual.”
On Oct. 18, Pearlman said, Ezra’s classmates joined a walkout in which some students shouted, “Kill the Jews.”
In the months after the Hamas attack, administrators at Berkeley Unified School District failed to stop teachers and students engaging in “severe and persistent” harassment and discrimination against Jewish children, according to a federal civil rights complaint
filed Wednesday with the U.S. Department of Education.
The complaint, filed by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and the Anti-Defamation League, alleges Berkeley public schools ignored reports of bullying and harassment of Jewish students on the basis of their ethnicity, shared ancestry and national origin. District leaders, it alleges, “knowingly allowed” classrooms and schoolyards to become a “viciously hostile” environment.
Since Hamas’ brutal surprise attack and Israel’s relentless bombardment of the Gaza Strip, students, parents and politicians have warned that antisemitism is rife on college campuses.
But this complaint — the first antisemitism case filed with the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights against a public school district since Oct. 7 — claims antisemitism pervades public schools that teach students as young as second grade.
In Berkeley, it alleges, middle school and high school teachers organized walkouts for Gaza during school hours, sometimes leaving no instruction for students left behind in class. In another case, it says, an elementary school teacher directed second-graders to write “anti-hate” messages, such as “Stop Bombing Babies,” on sticky notes — and then posted the notes outside the classroom of the school’s only Jewish teacher.
The complaint alleges that students followed their teachers’ lead. At one middle school, students chanted “Kill the Jews” on a walkout. Some Jewish children reported that their classmates asked what their number is — a reference to the numbers tattooed on Jews during the Holocaust.
“The Israel-Gaza conflict has spiked a huge antisemitism crisis in schools,” said Rachel Lerman, general counsel and vice chair of the Brandeis Center. “We can see from the Berkeley schools that what’s going on is clearly antisemitic: When you have rallies for Gaza, with students yelling ‘F— the Jews’ or ‘Gas the Jews,’ then you have an antisemitism problem. It’s [as] plain as day.”
Responding to the federal complaint, Berkeley Unified School District Superintendent Enikia Ford Morthel said the district continuously encourages students and families to report “any incidents of bullying or hate-motivated behavior” and “vigorously investigates” every report.
The district had not received official notification of the federal complaint, Ford Morthel said, but would work with the Office of Civil Rights to support a “thorough investigation.”