The week after Hamas' attack on Israel on October 7, 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 am black.”
Pearlman, a 38-year-old midwife, wanted to cry. She moved to Berkeley thinking it would be a space where her son wouldn't be a token black Jewish child, that she could be celebrated for all the things that make her who she is.
Instead, he said, he watched Ezra erase his Jewish identity as the climate at his high school became more hostile toward Israel and Jews. His art teacher, she told him, was projecting “resistance art,” including a fist through a Star of David on a map of Israel, on a big screen. Day after day, the walls of his classroom were filled with posters promoting a “strike against genocide” and publishing the daily number of Palestinian deaths.
“He never tells me anything,” Pearlman said of her son, a typical video game-loving teenager. “The fact that he shared this was unusual.”
On October 18, Pearlman said, Ezra's classmates joined a walkout in which some students shouted, “Kill the Jews.”
In the months after the Hamas attack, Berkeley Unified School District administrators failed to prevent teachers and students from engaging in “severe and persistent” harassment and discrimination against Jewish children, according to a federal civil rights complaint filed Wednesday with the United States Department of Education.
The complaint, filed by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and the Anti-Defamation League, alleges that Berkeley public schools ignored reports of bullying and harassment of Jewish students based on their ethnicity, shared ancestry and national origin. District leaders, it alleges, “knowingly allowed” classrooms and schoolyards to become a “viciously hostile” environment.
Since the brutal surprise attack by Hamas and the relentless Israeli bombing of the Gaza Strip, students, parents and politicians have warned that anti-Semitism is rife on college campuses.
But this complaint, the first anti-Semitism case filed with the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights against a public school district since Oct. 7, alleges that anti-Semitism is prevalent in public schools that teach students as young as second grade.
In Berkeley, he alleges, middle and high school teachers staged walkouts toward Gaza during school hours, sometimes leaving no instruction to students who fell behind in class. In another case, he says, an elementary school teacher ordered second graders to write “anti-hate” messages, such as “Stop bombing babies,” on sticky notes, and then posted the notes outside the classroom. the school's only Jewish teacher. .
The complaint alleges that the students followed their teachers' lead. At one high school, students chanted “Kill the Jews” during a walkout. Some Jewish children reported that their classmates asked them what their number is, a reference to the numbers tattooed on Jews during the Holocaust.
“The conflict between Israel and Gaza has led to a huge crisis of anti-Semitism in schools,” said Rachel Lerman, general counsel and vice president of the Brandeis Center. “We can see in the Berkeley schools that what is happening is clearly anti-Semitic: when there are protests over Gaza, with students shouting 'Fuck the Jews' or 'Gas the Jews,' then you have an anti-Semitism problem. Is [as] “as clear as day.”
In response to the federal complaint, Berkeley Unified School District Supt. Enikia Ford Morthel said the district continually encourages students and families to report “any incidents of bullying or hate-motivated behavior” and “vigorously investigates” each report.
The district had not received official notification of the federal complaint, Ford Morthel said, but would work with the Office for Civil Rights to support a “thorough investigation.”
“We believe classrooms are spaces where all students need to feel safe, seen, felt and heard,” Ford Morthel said in a statement. “We work to make these spaces responsive and humanizing for our diverse students, today and every day.”
Ezra remained in school when many of his classmates joined the strike on October 18. Pearlman said other Jewish students who attended, because they supported the Palestinian cause, left as the chants quickly changed from “From the river to the sea” to “Kill the Jews.”
“They realized, 'This is not good,'” Pearlman said.
At a later walkout at Martin Luther King Jr. High School, Pearlman watched adults unlock and open doors for students to leave campus. Pearlman was not bothered when the students chanted, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” a chant that Palestinian activists say is an expression of solidarity with the Palestinians, but that many Jews interpret as a call to destruction of Israel.
But then, he said, the chants turned into “KKK.” She felt like she was living in an upside-down world as she watched children move through the crowd and ask protesters: “Are you Jewish? Are you Muslim?”
“Oh, hell no,” he said he heard the students respond: “Fuck Israel. “Fuck the Jews.”
He said he reached out to school administrators, but they did nothing.
“I don't blame the kids,” he said. “I hold administrators responsible for not stopping hate speech. When it comes to Jews, it's just, 'Hey, they'll get over it.'”
Pearlman pressured administrators to allow Ezra to attend a different art class. But her new art teacher wore “Free Palestine” patches on her clothes and told the students about the mental health day she says she needed because of the war in Gaza and the protests she faced. she had to attend.
Ezra stopped attending Jewish events for teens every Wednesday night. When he reviewed his ancestry project for ethnic studies, the only part of his ancestry that he included was the black side of him. He did not mention that he was Jewish or that his ancestors were Holocaust survivors.
“I'm a little offended, friend,” she told him. “What's up with your whole Jewish side?”
“Eh, it's not really the right weather for that,” Ezra said.
Chiara Juster, the mother of an eighth-grade student at Willard Middle School, said students called her 13-year-old daughter a “midget Jew” in the hallway between classes the week before Oct. 7. After changing classes to avoid harassment from her classmates, her daughter found herself in a classroom with a history teacher displaying a Palestinian flag and signs calling for a ceasefire. She began to feel unsafe when her teacher urged the students to join the watermelon club after school (the watermelon has become an unofficial symbol of Palestinian solidarity in the protests) if they wanted to know the truth about what is happening. in Gaza.
“Students don't feel safe,” said Juster, 43, a former lawyer. “Inside the classroom, schools need to create a truly safe environment. Don't brainwash; “Don’t try to influence children with a particular set of beliefs.”
Juster took his daughter out of Willard. But she didn't feel comfortable sending her to neighboring Martin Luther King Jr. High School after hearing that students had chanted “Kill the Jews.” She is now educating her daughter at her home.
“We came to Berkeley because we thought it would be safe,” Juster said. “I never thought I would take my son out of school for anti-Semitism. “If it were any other ethnic minority, it would not be tolerated.”
At a time when educational institutions across the country are struggling to find ways to balance the free speech of public educators and students with rhetoric that can be interpreted as hostile or discriminatory, the complaint contends that Berkeley went too far in allowing teachers to promote personal political opinions. .
The teachers, the complaint alleges, violated the district's “Controversial Topics” policies which state: “Teachers within BUSD are dedicated to creating safe spaces where students can explore different points of view.” Another district policy prohibits teachers from using their positions to promote “historical, religious, political, economic or social bias.”
The complaint accuses Berkeley professors of using class time to “indoctrinate other students with anti-Semitic rhetoric, tropes, and false information about Israelis and Jews.” He cites the example of a teacher who posted a photo on social media on October 7 of a bulldozer breaking through a fence: “Today a historic act of resistance occurred in Palestine,” the teacher wrote.
“While this complaint is not intended to regulate the private speech of BUSD teachers,” the complaint argues, “these teachers bring their personal and biased views into the classroom and make their students feel more unsafe with their public views.” “.
The complaint alleges that parents' concerns about BUSD schools were ignored for months.
In November, more than 1,300 members of the Berkeley community signed a letter to the superintendent and the Berkeley Board of Education stating that they were “shocked, disappointed, and frightened by the district's lack of attention” to Jewish children. The letter also urged administrators to “take active steps to ensure that our Jewish children feel physically and psychologically safe at school.”
The complaint alleges a series of incidents of harassment of Jewish students by classmates and teachers. For example, after a parent reported a second-grade teacher for anti-Semitic behavior, the teacher approached the parent and threatened: “I know who you are, I know who your f—ing wife is, and I know where you live.”
As a result, children who once wore Star of David pendants hid visible displays of their Judaism, the complaint states. Although some Jewish and Israeli students have left the district, the complaint states, others remain enrolled but fear going to school.
“There is no obligation more solemn or basic than to protect our children from the moment they walk through the doors of their schools,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, executive director of the Anti-Defamation League. “To fail so monumentally that children feel forced to hide their Jewish identity for fear of reprisal is downright shocking.”
Since October 7, communities across the country have alleged that anti-Semitism is on the rise, including graffiti and vandalism at Jewish stores and synagogues, as well as physical attacks on people wearing Star of David pendants.
The Anti-Defamation League tracked 3,283 anti-Semitic incidents reported between October 7 and January 7, a 361% increase from the 712 incidents reported during the same period the previous year.
Palestinian Americans have also noted an increase in incidents of hate and discrimination. The Council on American-Islamic Relations said last month that it received 3,578 complaints of anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian discrimination during the last three months of 2023, a 178% increase from the same period a year earlier.
