Complaint: Some California schools allowed discrimination against Jewish kids

The week after the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist 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-year-old 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 terrorist 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.

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.”

Ezra stayed in school when many of his classmates joined the Oct. 18 walkout. Pearlman said other Jewish students who attended — because they supported the Palestinian cause — left as the chants moved swiftly from “From the river to the sea” to “Kill the Jews.”

“It dawned on them: ‘This is not good,’” Pearlman said.