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A Millennial rabbi built a synagogue where others have closed. Her maverick ideas are becoming a model.
SOUTH PHILADELPHIA — On a cold weeknight, a few dozen people packed into a synagogue that defies every conventional rule of American Jewish life.
It is Orthodox and led by a woman. Its sanctuary is divided not into two sections, but three: men, women, and a small area for nonbinary congregants. It has no mandatory dues. And instead of struggling to survive, it is expanding so quickly that it has already outgrown its building.
Founded in 2019, the South Philadelphia Shtiebel has become a closely watched experiment in American Judaism — an urban congregation built from scratch in a neighborhood where no new synagogue had taken root in decades, and where most religious institutions had long since retreated to the suburbs.
A century ago, the idea of an Orthodox synagogue thriving in South Philadelphia would not have seemed unusual at all. In the early 1900s, the neighborhood was home to an estimated 150,000 Jews — mostly immigrants — packed into row houses within walking distance of work, markets and extended family.
Jewish life revolved not around grand sanctuaries but around dozens of small, informal prayer spaces known in Yiddish as shtiebels. More than a hundred of them dotted South Philadelphia’s blocks, often tucked into storefronts or private homes, intimate rooms where daily life and religious life blurred together.
Most of those shtiebels disappeared long ago, casualties of suburban flight and institutional consolidation. The South Philadelphia Shtiebel takes its name from that vanished landscape not as a reenactment, but as a wager.
The timing could easily have sunk the project. The Shtiebel launched only months before the COVID-19 pandemic upended communal life. Yet even during lockdown, around 40 people were still showing up each Shabbat. When the small Vespa scooter shop where the congregation first gathered became untenable due to the pandemic, the community improvised — meeting in backyards, public spaces and parking lots. Today, the congregation leases a two-story industrial building.
On a typical Shabbat morning, the sanctuary fills with roughly 175 people — a mix of young families, retirees, longtime Orthodox congregants and people still learning the prayers. And as attendance has grown, the question facing the Shtiebel is no longer whether it works, but what happens next, and whether this kind of community can scale without losing what makes it feel human.
What has emerged here is not a nostalgia project, but a congregation aligned with the DIY attitude of how people now choose institutions: voluntarily, relationally, and on their own terms.
Its growth has not been accidental. It reflects a series of choices — about space, ritual, leadership and belonging — made deliberately by its founder.
Welcoming the LGBTQ+ community
Rabbanit Dasi Fruchter grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland, the granddaughter of a rabbi who served pulpits across the country. She arrived in Philadelphia single and actively pursuing solo parenthood, but embraced the nonlinear turns of that journey, which led her to connect with and marry Daniel Krupka, a software engineer who had been serving as the congregation’s gabbai. Together they are raising a growing family.
She was ordained at Yeshivat Maharat, the Modern Orthodox seminary in the Bronx, and also holds a dual master’s degree from New York University in Jewish Studies and nonprofit management. She has been trained in community organizing, with an emphasis on relationships over programs.
She launched the Shtiebel with an acute awareness of how easily people fall through the cracks of Jewish life — not because they lack commitment, but because the systems around them are built for someone else.
“The approach here is that everybody is enough,” said Fruchter, 36. “We value the fact that you’re here and we’re not looking around at who’s not.”
Around 15% of the congregation identifies as LGBTQ+, Fruchter said. It’s a figure she offers not as a marker of ideology, but as a reflection of who has found their way into the room. That ethic is visible before a word is spoken. The sanctuary’s three sections all center around the bimah and are separated by a mechitza, or barrier, that still allows everyone to see, and hear, what is happening.
Fruchter is careful about how she describes the choice. It is not, she insists, an attempt to flatten difference or sidestep halacha, Jewish law, but an effort to acknowledge everyone. “We’re not trying to create a perfect solution,” she said. “We’re trying to create a place where people don’t have to disappear in order to pray.”
For Soren Simcha Barnett, a nonbinary congregant who uses they/them pronouns, that distinction mattered. When Barnett, 28, first arrived in early 2022, the idea of praying behind a mechitza was unfamiliar — and uncomfortable. “That would have been a red line for me,” they said. They had grown up in a Conservative synagogue and had never experienced gender-segregated prayer.
Still, they stayed.
What drew Barnett back was that they were taken seriously. They learned the melodies. On Shabbat mornings, they stand close enough to the action to help when the Torah is lifted off the bimah, hands ready, just in case. “I love being in the thick of it,” Barnett said. “We’re literally not in the margins.”
That sense of belonging, Barnett said, came with limits, though. About six months after they began attending regularly, Barnett asked Fruchter about expanding ritual roles for nonbinary congregants, such as leading services. Fruchter said no, a decision rooted in her reading of halacha.
“That hurt,” Barnett said. “I really wanted to be able to do everything I’m capable of.” But again, the disappointment did not send them away.
What mattered, they said, was not the answer but the process: that the question was taken seriously, and that the boundary was named rather than ignored. Barnett stayed. “I was willing to grapple with the complexity,” they said.
If Barnett’s story is about negotiation, Gary Saft’s is about commitment.
Saft, 35, a gabbai and the head of the Shteibel’s volunteer security team, is broad-shouldered, bearded, and impossible to miss. He grew up Reform and spent years assuming traditional Judaism had no place for him. “I didn’t see where I fit,” Saft said.
Saft began searching for a community after his father died in 2020, and he found it at the Shtiebel. Today, Saft prays daily, keeps kosher, walks to shul, and helps run services. “This shul is now a huge part of my life,” he said.
A sense of belonging
By all accounts, what holds the community together, more than anything else, is song.
For many congregants, music is the primary way in. Even those still learning Hebrew can participate fully, buoyed by a group that carries them along. Fruchter’s own voice is strong and steady, but it rarely stands alone. She sings with the room, not over it. Over time, congregants say, that has changed who feels comfortable raising their voice. Women sing loudly. So do people who might once have stayed quiet. Authority here is not projected; it circulates.
Lisa Levy, 66, a three-time cancer survivor, moved to Philadelphia after decades in New York City. She arrived newly retired and living alone. She describes herself as “conservadox” — committed to Orthodoxy, but wary of rigid lines.
What she did not encounter, she said, was pressure. “There are no dues,” Levy said. “You pay what you can afford. No questions.”
For Levy, that mattered. Many synagogues, she said, quietly assume a level of financial stability that leaves some people on the margins — especially older congregants or those navigating illness. At the Shtiebel, presence itself felt like the baseline contribution. “It’s more like a minyan than a shul,” said Levy, who lives three blocks away.
For Jamie Goldberg, 33, the Shtiebel became real when she started showing up pregnant.
Goldberg began attending in mid-2022, just before the birth of her first daughter. She and her husband, Stuart, had grown up in Reform and Conservative settings and spent years searching for something that felt both serious and accessible. “I learned the traditional prayers in my late 20s,” she said. “I didn’t grow up knowing how to follow along.”
Now she has two young daughters and serves on the Shtiebel’s advisory board. In the past year alone, she said, roughly two dozen babies have been born into the community. On Shabbat afternoons, families spill out to nearby playgrounds after naps, an informal ritual that has become its own gathering. Growth here is not abstract. It is measured in strollers.
That future comes with questions. There is no Jewish day school in South Philadelphia. Families will eventually have to drive children to the suburbs or help invent something new. After years of the Shtiebel’s children’s programming being volunteer-run, it’s now supported by a mix of people in paid positions and community members.
“It’s a place where people can grow,” she said.
Where the conversation never stops
During the week, the sense of belonging migrates online. The Shtiebel uses Slack, the messaging platform, as its connective tissue: organizing meal trains, coordinating who will read the Torah at services, sharing names of people who are ill and need prayers, checking in on each other, offering extra seats at Shabbat tables. There is no need for a printed directory or a hallway bulletin board.
Steve Schauder noticed that immediately.
Schauder, 61, the executive director of the Jewish Relief Agency, moved to South Philadelphia last spring after what he called a “trial Shabbat.” He had previously been a dues-paying member of synagogues across denominations. What struck him here was not just the warmth, but the infrastructure beneath it. “It never stops,” he said of the Slack messages. “I wander on every day, just to take a look.”
Schauder was also struck by what didn’t happen at the Shtiebel. The synagogue is intentionally apolitical. It’s careful about keeping partisan politics out of communal spaces. Congregants span the ideological spectrum, he said, and that diversity is treated as a given rather than a problem to solve. “You can walk in there whatever your background and politics are,” Schauder said.
On a Shabbat morning, a Donald Trump voter might be sitting next to a Zohran Mamdani supporter. What matters is not agreement, but a choice, Schauder said, to prioritize what he called “joyful Judaism” over the culture wars that have fractured so many other institutions.
The Shtiebel has taken shape amid the quiet collapse of many American institutions — houses of worship, unions, neighborhood associations — leaving fewer places where people are expected to encounter one another across differences.
In that sense, the congregation is not only a Jewish experiment but a civic one: an attempt to rebuild habits of shared life in a society that has grown increasingly siloed, polarized, and private. What happens inside the Shtiebel — negotiating disagreement, making room for difference, choosing presence over purity — mirrors a broader struggle over whether communities can still hold together without demanding sameness.
But Fruchter bristles at the idea that the Shteibel’s success can be reduced to a program, platform or politics. What she calls the synagogue’s “secret sauce” is not a tool so much as a discipline: “It’s being intentional about seeing and witnessing everybody with what they need,” she said.
Sometimes that attention registers in small ways. A congregant mentions liking Dr Pepper; it shows up at the kiddush they sponsor. Other times it demands structural work: rethinking seating for those with sensory needs, slowing down ritual explanations, or redesigning space so people who would otherwise drift away can stay. None of it is scalable in the abstract. All of it requires time, memory, and a willingness to keep revising.
“Folks who are stepping up and stepping in not only feel belonging,” Fruchter said, “but that they’re really being seen, cared for and nurtured.”
A model, and its limits
What Fruchter built has also reshaped the landscape beyond South Philadelphia. At a moment when many American synagogues are shrinking, consolidating, or aging in place, the Shtiebel has become an unlikely case study in what Jewish life looks like when it grows outward rather than inward.
But growth, Fruchter is quick to note, does not automatically produce stability.
Instead of mandatory dues, the Shtiebel operates on what she calls an NPR-style model, funded through voluntary monthly support. About 120 households currently donate each month, she said — including some supporters who don’t live in South Philadelphia but believe in the mission. Those recurring contributions cover about a quarter of the annual budget. The rest comes from a mix of larger individual gifts — typically in the $10,000 to $25,000 range — and national grants supporting the Shtiebel’s work, including initiatives around Orthodox feminism and efforts to reimagine synagogue life.
The result is a congregation that looks robust from the outside, but still operates like a lean startup on the inside. In its early years, Fruchter lived in the synagogue to keep costs down. “I think what happens with that kind of growth is that the infrastructure struggles to keep up,” she said.
One constant challenge, she added, is perception. “Sometimes we’re seen as being very flush because of our success.” The reality, she said, is more fragile: building governance, raising money, and maintaining a physical space while attendance climbs — all at once. “That footing takes time,” she said.
That tension, between visibility and vulnerability, is part of what other Jewish leaders have been watching closely.
Rabbanit Leah Sarna, the spiritual leader of Kehillat Sha’arei Orah in the Philadelphia suburbs, credits the Shtiebel with shifting expectations.
“In Philly, Dasi really normalized the idea of a Modern Orthodox shul led by a woman,” Sarna said. When her own congregation went searching for a spiritual leader and hired her in 2024, she said, opening the role to women did not trigger the kind of upheaval it might have elsewhere. Fruchter even spoke at Sarna’s installation. “By then,” Sarna said, “people had spent a Shabbat at Dasi’s shul. It wasn’t theoretical anymore.”
Sarna said that because the Shtiebel has no membership dues, inclusion comes first, and fundraising never really stops. “That model means you’re constantly in a fundraising stance,” Sarna said.
In a neighborhood of young professionals who want to live urban lives, and not decamp to the suburbs, Fruchter’s approach has been especially powerful. The two congregations, Sarna said, have even developed what she called “purposeful handoffs,” directing people to the other as life circumstances change: city to suburbs, suburbs to city. Rather than competing, they function as part of a shared ecosystem.
Much of the Shtiebel’s cohesion still runs through Fruchter herself — a concentration of responsibility that has fueled its growth, and may yet test its limits. Asked whether the Shtiebel model could be replicated elsewhere, Sarna paused. The structure, she said, might travel. The person at the center of it might not. “You need someone who’s as talented and warm and magnetic as she is,” Sarna said. “That part is the least replicable.”
The greater Philadelphia area, where the Jewish population hovers around 350,000 people, may be uniquely suited to such experiments. “America was founded here,” Sarna said. “It’s the birthplace of ideas.”
The experiment has, perhaps, yet another advantage. Chaim Saiman, a law professor at Villanova University in Philadelphia and a thought leader in the Modern Orthodox movement, believes congregations like the Shtiebel should also be seen as competing with Conservative shuls for a slice of the membership who may be looking for something more traditional.
“These sorts of shuls are often born on the decay of mainstream Conservative shuls, which are not growing or are hemorrhaging,” Saiman said. “There’s a market for a community with liberal sensibilities but whose liturgy and Shabbat and kosher practices are more traditional.”
The challenge ahead
For Fruchter, those dynamics are less abstract than personal. Many of the people who find their way to the Shtiebel arrive with long Jewish histories — years in Conservative congregations, half-finished religious journeys, fluency in tradition paired with frustration at the structures around it.
They haven’t rejected Judaism so much as struggled to find a community that fit the way they were living. The work of the Shtiebel, she said, has been to meet those people where they are, and then ask what kind of community they are willing to build together.
“In a shul today,” she said, “we shouldn’t bolt chairs to the floor.”
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Amid blazing heat and rising tides, artists find beauty and desperation in these biblical times
Daniel Rothbart’s floating aluminum and glass forms are at once playful and lyrical, biomorphic and other-worldly; prehistoric and futuristic. They are set in a pond and two small pools in Staten Island’s Snug Harbor, a hidden pastoral gem that once served as a safe haven for sailors.
Overflowing with colorful flowers and plants and shrubbery, the scene is idyllic, short of the oppressive, steamy heat that has settled over the landscape. But then that’s part of it too. Rothbart’s Serpentine Sibyls: A Floating Sculptural Installation, animated by winds and currents, are site-specific and immersive. He is keenly in tune with its ecology.
“No, my work has not always addressed political issues, but water is a fraught medium,” he told me over the phone. “You can’t work with water without addressing its importance to life on this planet and climate change and stewardship. Water has always fascinated me.”
Growing up in the Pacific Northwest the ocean was a constant alluring presence. And as a Jew, the water’s historical, cultural and religious traditional significance is defining, he said.
“There’s the purification ritual of the mikveh, the parting of the Red Sea, the washing of hands and feet before entering the temple in Biblical times and the casting off of sins, Tashlich on Rosh Hashanah. Water diplomacy and technology has always been central in Israel. Making the desert bloom.”
Rothbart, a multidisciplinary artist whose work has been exhibited across the globe, is the author of Jewish Metaphysics as Generative Principle in American Art, which examines how Jewish mystical traditions, especially Kabbalah, informed abstract American art in the post-World War II years.
Erudite and heady, Rothbart said that his work can be viewed through the lens of tikkun olam, the Jewish imperative to help repair a fractured world, but it also borrows from Japanese culture, outer space imagery, Marcel Duchamp’s dadaism and Greek mythology.
The title of his exhibit references Sibyls, the Greek female prophets who were consulted in catastrophic times, not unlike our current era cursed by floods and wildfires and heat waves.
Rothbart started thinking about floating sculptures in 2007 for a piece he was conceiving for the Venice Biennial. A city surrounded by water cried out for it. Japanese glass fishing floats came to mind.
“The Japanese fishing floats would wash up on shore in Oregon where I grew up,” he recalled. “I loved the fragile recycled pieces of glass that came from the orient and that I could de-contextualize a common object and in so doing create something new.”
To anchor the sculptures, Rothbart and his assistant kayaked to the middle of the pond. There, once he established where he wanted each sculpture, he dropped each form, now attached to two to five-pound iron weights.
“The sculptures are sensitive to any existing life in the water,” he said. “The pond here has turtles and fish. I’ve found that the animals adjust to the new forms. I love the relationship between life in the pond and the foreign objects.”
Three artists, one flood
The Interchurch Center in upper Manhattan is currently hosting Noah, A Future of Hope, 3 Faiths/ 3 Artists/ 1 Story. A traveling exhibit, it employs the story of Noah and the flood to gently remind viewers to save, protect and celebrate the environment. The topic is explored respectively through a Christian, Muslim and Jewish vision. The artists — Yona Verwer, a Dutch-born Jew, Brian Whelan, a British-born Christian of Irish heritage and Hady Boraey, an Egyptian Muslim — each merge their religious identity with personal aesthetics and the need to advocate for the environment.
“Each artist was invited to create eight paintings that visually inspire our imaginations to heal our world by honoring our intricate connection to the earth as our sustainer, and by maintaining a sacred balance with all her life forms,” said curator Paul G. Chandler in his introductory remarks at the exhibit’s opening night reception. “In this way, the story of the ark, its animals, and the flood, take on contemporary relevance as we face today’s climate crisis.”
Seven is a significant number in each religion, so Chandler selected seven core lessons, each reflecting some part of the Noah story, for the artists to address. The eighth painting from each artist served as a kind of synopsis of the work that was to follow.
Water is a common image throughout the exhibit; indeed, water plays a major role, not only in Judaism, but in Christian and Islamic rituals as well, from Christian baptism to the washing of feet and hands before prayer in a Mosque.
When I asked Chandler if he could guess the religion of each artist on the basis of their paintings he said he could for the Jew and Christian, but wouldn’t have had a clue that Boraey emerges from an Islamic tradition.
“His paintings have an individual aesthetic and a more universal feeling. Still, you never see the face of Noah in his work. In Islamic tradition you can only view him from the back. To see his face is idolatry. Jews have the same tradition, but may not adhere to it as rigidly.”
Some of Verwer’s work incorporates Hebraic texts and characters. In “Care for the Species,” a figure is blowing a shofar. Similarly, Chandler said, he’d know that Whelan’s paintings were made by a Christian. They are literal illustrations of key moments in the Noah story.
His depiction of Noah evokes a figure right out of vaudeville, grinning broadly, sporting a little hat and in more than one instance looking slightly confused.
“Christians turn catastrophe into a kind of children’s bedtime story,” Chandler said. “It’s very Christian to sanitize the story. Jews don’t do that.”
“My being Jewish — a religious Jew—has had a bearing on how I look at everything,” said Verwer who says that water and its preservation is deeply important to her not least because for more than 2,000 years Judaism has had many rules to safeguard water. As a Holland native, she, like Rothbart, grew up near water and so it was always part of her universe.
Verwer’s work is also exhibited in an accompanying solo show, Fluid Futures-Living Waters, which features eight paintings that explore ocean pollution through a comic sensibility. One piece, bal tashchit (prohibition against needless destruction) depicts an octopus, submerged in deep ocean waters, clutching a soda can in its mouth.
“I don’t feel a painting is finished if I haven’t laughed at least once,” Brian Whelan said. “But it also needs a message.”
His major challenge was Chandler’s insistence that the paintings embrace a note of optimism.
“I don’t see any hope in what’s happening to this planet,” said Whelan. “My work mostly follows in the tradition of East Anglican medieval narrative paintings found in churches dating back to the 14th-to-16th centuries.”
For me his strongest piece is “Humans Outside the Ark Perished,” which appears in his linked, one-man show, 40 Days and 40 Nights. Here we see desperate hands reaching towards Noah for safety. A mouse sits alongside Noah, a poignant image. It’s safe and sound compared to the desperate humans.
Of the three painters, Boraey said his work was the least likely to be connected to any one particular religion. Unable to obtain a visa to the States he spoke to me on the phone from the Northern coast of Egypt.
He said his piece “The Great Collapse” spoke most vividly to both the Noah story and the ecological precipice we’re now facing as a result of climate change.
In the foreground, we view Noah from the back gazing out across a body of water at masses of people crushed together and almost immobilized as they hopelessly struggle to move forward. In the background hangs a giant and cratered blue moon sinking below the horizon and into the ground. It is at once foreboding and exquisite.
Having participated in exhibitions in the Middle East and Europe, Boraey said he was most influenced by the surrealist art movement in Cairo in the late 30s. The marriage between folkloric and political motifs is its hallmark.
The Noah tale for him is “both pessimistic and optimistic because hope is always there and they survived at the end of the story,” he said. “Noah saved humanity. He reminds us that we have to be very careful with the earth.”
In harmony with nature
Back at Snug Harbor, the late afternoon heat dome has made the airless, sun-baked space even more relentless than it was earlier in the afternoon. Rothbart’s visitors are slowly straggling out of the park, some wiping away sweat with bits of tissue, others fanning themselves; still others pouring water from their bottles onto reddened necks and arms and legs indifferent to the water splashing on to their clothes.
“Talk about global warming and climate change,” he told me. “This weather only drives home the point of just how serious this is and how we have to learn to live in harmony with nature and our environment.”
Serpentine Sibyls will run through Sept. 28.
Noah: A Future of Hope will run at the Interfaith Center through Aug. 26 and then continues its global tour.
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Fire at Postville, Iowa, kosher meat processing plant shuts down production ahead of the High Holidays
(JTA) — A major fire at one of the largest kosher meat processing plants in the United States is poised to increase the price of kosher meat ahead of the High Holidays, in addition to devastating the plant’s local community.
Investigators in Postville, Iowa, said on Wednesday that the fire that devastated AgriStar Processing started accidentally in the facility’s laundry room. The fire, which began on Tuesday, destroyed at least 75% of the plant and has put more than 600 people out of work, Fire Chief Jeff Bohr told the local TV network KCRG.
The fire has also interrupted a linchpin of kosher meat production, according to OU Kosher, the oversight agency run by the Orthodox Union.
“The damaged facility means a significant portion of kosher beef and chicken slaughtered and sold in the US will not enter the kosher supply chain,” Rabbi Moshe Elefant, the organization’s CEO, said in a statement on Wednesday. “Kosher consumers will feel the impact of the tightening supply with reduction of availability.”
Elefant said OU Kosher was working to “find solutions for ramping up production at other plants” while warning that the crisis could fuel bad actors.
“Unfortunately, when supply is limited, it creates opportunity for unscrupulous individuals who seek to make money by preying on the well-meaning Kosher observant public,” he wrote.
Jarad Bernstein, the executive director of the Jewish Federation of Greater Des Moines, said the fire represented “a terrible situation” in an email to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“The impact on the local community and the business will be large,” he said.
The fire is not the first time that a crisis at AgriStar has sent the community into a tailspin. In 2008, a federal immigration raid at the plant, then known as Agriprocessors, netted the arrest of hundreds of workers and led to the arrest and conviction of the company’s longtime CEO Sholom Rubashkin on 86 counts of bank fraud, mail fraud and money laundering. It also led most of Postville’s Jewish residents to leave the town, which had developed as an unusual stronghold of Orthodox life in eastern Iowa.
Saying that “many people” believed Rubashkin’s 27-year prison sentence had been excessive, President Donald Trump commuted Rubashkin’s sentence in 2017. Rubashkin’s conviction stands.
Canadian Jewish billionaire Hershy Friedman purchased Agriprocessors and reopened it as Agri-Star. He told JTA in 2016 that he had done so after being urged by Jewish leaders to ensure competition in the kosher meat processing industry.
“It wasn’t done for financial purposes; it was done to really cater to the Jewish community,” he said about the purchase. “During the time Rubashkin was closed, the price of beef roughly doubled. After we acquired it, it came right back down.”
Friedman also said he had shored up the company’s employment practices, which had run afoul of the law, and made improvements to the slaughter process that had made Agriprocessors a target of animal rights activists.
Agri-Star said in a statement on Wednesday that it appreciated the first responders who “worked tirelessly and selflessly to protect lives and contain the fire” and the employees who had shown “inspiring” care for each other. It also indicated that it did not yet know the future of the plant.
“We understand there are many questions about what comes next,” Agri-Star wrote on social media. “While we are still gathering information and evaluating our short-term plans, we are committed to sharing verified updates as soon as they become available. We appreciate your patience as we work through this process thoughtfully and responsibly.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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California law on antisemitism in schools will be enforced after free speech challenge is defeated
(JTA) — A California law to prevent antisemitism in schools will be enforced after a federal judge dismissed a challenge from teachers and students who said it violated free speech.
U.S. District Judge Noël Wise on Tuesday ruled against a lawsuit opposing Assembly Bill 715, which went into effect in January. The new law introduces measures to curb the “widespread surge in antisemitic discrimination, harassment, and bullying” faced by “Jewish and Israeli American pupils across California.”
As part of the law, California is establishing an Office of Civil Rights with a new statewide antisemitism prevention coordinator for public schools, who has not yet been appointed. The law mandates teachers to provide “factually accurate” instruction rather than “advocacy, personal opinion, bias, or partisanship.” It requires local educational agencies to take action if they find that instruction or school-sponsored materials are discriminatory.
A group of teachers, students and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee filed a challenge in November. They said the law was unconstitutionally vague, chilled speech in the classroom about Palestinians and discriminated against Palestinian, Arab and Muslim students and perspectives.
Wise said it was too soon to consider these claims, given the uncertainties still surrounding the new Office of Civil Rights, its leadership and how it will define and respond to antisemitism. She also said that teachers and students did not provide sufficient evidence of infringements on free speech, and teachers could not claim speech rights on the job.
“Teacher Plaintiffs are not acting as private citizens and therefore do not have First Amendment rights while teaching,” Wise said in her ruling.
She also dismissed the claim that the law would discriminate against non-Jewish students. “The existence of an Antisemitism Coordinator does not change the Office’s overarching purpose to stop discrimination generally; it merely reflects the State’s decision to accord specific funds to a specific problem,” she said.
Malak Afaneh, a staff attorney at ADC, said the group was reviewing the court’s decision and considering its options.
“AB 715 has already caused educators to alter the way they teach out of fear that classroom discussions or activities could trigger complaints or investigations,” Afaneh said in a statement. “When teachers feel compelled to abandon cultural identity projects or avoid discussions about Palestine, it is students who are denied the opportunity to engage with diverse ideas and perspectives.”
The Jewish Community Relations Council of San Francisco celebrated Wise’s decision as “great news.”
“This ruling, and the fact that the case has been dismissed with prejudice, affirms that AB 715 is a strong, legitimate approach to protecting Jewish students — and all students — against harassment and discrimination,” the group said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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