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Rabbi arrested, banned from Cleveland universities over his anti-Palestinian activism
(JTA) – For days, students and police at Cleveland State University had been trying to figure out who stole a banner belonging to a campus Palestinian rights group.
The banner, which belonged to the student group Palestinian Human Rights Organization, read “CSU Solidarity for Palestinian Rights” and was illustrated with an outline of Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip collectively emblazoned in the Palestinian flag. A dove holding an olive branch appeared on top of the image.
Then, on Jan. 19, police charged their top suspect: a local Orthodox rabbi, whose presence on campus had become all too familiar. A few days later the man confessed to the theft on Instagram, announcing that he had stolen the banner from the school’s student center “as an act of civil disobedience.”
“This incitement to annihilation of Israel should have never been permitted at CSU,” Rabbi Alexander Popivker, a 46-year-old Cleveland Heights resident whose neighborhood is six miles from the school, wrote on social media accompanied by a picture of the flag he stole.
It was far from Popivker’s only recent run-in with local university students.
A former Chabad-Lubavitch emissary in Naples, Italy, who now works in the Cleveland area as a handyman and part-time rabbi for a Russian-speaking Jewish community, Popivker has become known around town as a vigilant and omnipresent pro-Israel advocate. He can often be spotted counter-protesting at local pro-Palestinian demonstrations, or putting on displays of his own, with his wife Sarah on hand filming every contentious encounter.
One major theme of his protests, and his worldview, as he explained to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency: “Palestinians and Nazis are the same thing.”
For the last year, Popivker had been making weekly trips to Cleveland State, occasionally accompanied by other students or community members, to give public demonstrations that elaborate on that idea — sometimes with the aid of swastika-emblazoned props. In the early going, the university provided him with police protection and said his visits to campus were protected by free speech laws.
But he also sought out students online and in-person whom he deemed to be “brainwashed” by anti-Zionist messaging. One such online campaign against a law student prompted the student to file an order of protection against Popivker last fall, an order supported by a prominent Jewish dean at the university. Popivker promptly violated the order by returning to campus.
Cleveland State University main campus, Cleveland, Ohio. (Getty Images)
In late January, university authorities had enough. They arrested Popivker and, following a hearing, declared him persona non grata on campus, banning him from the university grounds for at least two years. Popivker has also been banned from nearby Case Western Reserve University, where he had advocated before focusing on Cleveland State.
In the midst of a nationwide university climate in which pro-Israel advocates claim Jewish students face regular antisemitic harassment for their real or perceived Zionist beliefs, here was a documented case of the opposite: a Jew and outspoken Zionist, who has no affiliation with the schools at which he advocates, accused of harassing anyone he perceived as a threat to Israel, including students who had never sought him out directly.
The Ohio chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations has spoken out numerous times against Popivker and praised university police for arresting him; a petition the group backed, labeled “Stop harassment on campus” and mentioning Popivker by name, has garnered close to 700 signatures.
Jewish groups, including civil rights groups, have been less forthcoming about situation. Hillel International declined to comment for this story, and the directors of Cleveland’s regional American Jewish Committee and Jewish Community Relations Council offices did not return requests for comment. Jewish on Campus, a nationwide university antisemitism watchdog group that tracks what it defines as anti-Zionist social media harassment of Jewish students, also did not return a request for comment.
Jared Isaacson, the executive director of Cleveland Hillel, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the center was “not very familiar with this story.” Cleveland Hillel coordinates Jewish student life at a consortium of Jewish universities including Cleveland State and Case Western, where its student center is located, as well as at least one other school where Popivker has made his presence on campus known in some form.
But, Isaacson said, “Cleveland Hillel is deeply committed to countering antisemitism and hate in all forms, and we believe that no student — Jewish or otherwise — should ever feel threatened or intimidated because of their identity.”
Popivker says he has support from the New York-based Lawfare Project, which bills itself as an “international pro-Israel litigation fund.” He told JTA that the organization “is watching over my cases and providing guidance.”
In a statement, the Lawfare Project called Popivker “a Jewish civil rights activist” but did not confirm that it is backing him, saying only that the group is “currently reviewing the matter.”
The group, which frequently files lawsuits on behalf of students who allege antisemitism on their campuses, said in a statement to JTA that the order of protection was a “double standard” that “should be alarming to anyone who cares about the fight against Jew-hatred.”
Lawfar recently settled a multi-year lawsuit with San Francisco State University over student reports of antisemitic harassment on campus stemming from anti-Zionist activists disrupting an event featuring the mayor of Jerusalem. The settlement compelled the university to hire a coordinator of Jewish student life.
Popivker will have his work cut out for him if he fights the charges. He had exhibited “behavior detrimental to the university community” by stealing the Palestinian banner and separately affixing an Israeli flag to university property, Matthew Kibbon, Cleveland State’s associate vice president of facility services, wrote in the university’s decision declaring him persona non grata.
The rabbi “was not banned for the content of his speech, but how he chose to exercise it,” a Cleveland State spokesperson told JTA in a statement. The university also provided JTA a list of recent campus police interactions with him, including the initial Jan. 11 report of the banner’s theft; Popivker’s visit to campus on Jan. 18, during which police advised him that the student’s order of protection did not permit him to be there; and his return visit on Jan. 25, during which he was arrested.
From Popivker’s perspective, he is simply speaking out on Israel’s behalf for a campus that has a large pro-Palestinian activist presence but few Jewish students. (There are fewer than 200 Jewish undergraduates on Cleveland State’s campus out of 11,784 students, according to Hillel International.) His goal is to educate, he says, informed by his status as a Jewish refugee from the Soviet Union. And he believes he is being targeted by local pro-Palestinian activists, who, he said, have gone after his kippah and Israeli flags.
“I never attacked anyone. I never raised my hand up to anyone,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, saying that he was motivated by civil rights icons Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis. “I’m going to a public university. I’m staying in the free speech zone. And I raise awareness about what’s going on. There’s a bunch of students that have become my friends that come to study with me regularly.”
One of those students, senior Tyler Jarosz, told JTA he became friends with Popivker after seeing him visiting campus to advocate for Israel. Not knowing much about Jews or Israel himself — “I thought Israel was a very peaceful state,” Jarosz said — the student was taken with Popivker’s demonstrations and said he learned a great deal from them.
“He didn’t just lecture me like a teacher would,” Jarosz said. “He was actually very engaging. He asked questions.”
Jarosz said he never witnessed the rabbi harassing anyone on campus, and said he always tried to engage people in peaceful dialogue, despite what he described as harassment directed at him by some Muslim students. He recalled one Popivker visit to campus for Israel’s independence day, when the rabbi was offering falafel to students, and said he witnessed one student throw the falafel back at him and threaten to “rape” him.
Other students tell a different story. One campus paper, the Cauldron, reported that the rabbi has targeted visibly Muslim and Arab students on campus, demanding to know their views on Israel. Popivker “makes me wary of coming into campus,” a student member of the Palestinian Human Rights Organization group told the Cauldron. “I’m forced to be on constant edge and take the longer way to class in order to avoid him.” Another student told a different campus newspaper, “It’s almost as though he deliberately looks for Palestinian individuals just to target them.”
The chair of the law school’s National Lawyers Guild student chapter told the Cleveland Jewish News that their group’s efforts to engage Popivker in reasonable dialogue failed when he began using “racial slurs and insulting language.”
A swastika Alexander Popivker drew on a Palestinian scarf (alleged by some students to be a keffiyeh, or ritual Muslim prayer scarf) while mounting a pro-Israel demonstration on the campus of Cleveland State University. Popivker then shared the image to his Instagram, Feb. 3, 2023. (Screenshot)
In images from one Popivker demonstration, the rabbi can be seen drawing a swastika with a Sharpie marker on what the Cauldron reported was a keffiyeh, a scarf worn by Arabic men, but which Popivker told JTA was a Palestinian scarf with no spiritual significance. He has also yelled phrases including “Palestinians are Nazis” and “Palestinians are the KKK,” and constructed a stage with images further linking Palestinians to Naziism, according to reports. Popivker’s own Instagram videos show him approaching groups of students to argue about Israel as he films them, calling some of them “terrorists” when they go after his flags. One of his video captions mentions “a Middle Eastern looking student.”
Cleveland State increased its safety protocols as a result of Popivker’s activities, locking some additional entrances around campus. But much of his activities have been online, too.
Last fall Popivker trained his attention on a law student who was involved with campus Palestinian rights groups and had made some anti-Israel posts online, including sharing an image of a child whom pro-Palestinian groups claimed had been a victim of an Israeli bombing, and sharing a socialist group’s post quoting, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
Documents show that Popivker emailed and called the student’s employer and law school seeking to have her disciplined for her beliefs, writing among other things that she was a “mouthpiece of terrorism and racism against Jews.” He also made Instagram posts targeting her. In response, the student filed for and received the order of protection against him, which Popivker later claimed was unwarranted because he had never met the student in person.
In its statement to JTA, the Lawfare Project homed in on this sequence of events, saying that Popivker’s decision to email the student’s school and employer about what he believed to be antisemitic social media posts was “a tool routinely used by civil rights activists to fight discrimination.”
Popivker asked Jarosz to send a letter attesting to his character for the order of protection hearing, which he did. “Alex understands and respects everyone of every background that he comes across,” the student wrote in his letter. “I have personally witnessed the demonization they have done of him.” Speaking to JTA weeks later, Jarosz said the court case was “bogus,” but said he was unaware of the emails, social media records and phone transcripts reviewed by JTA showing that Popivker had contacted the student’s employer and school.
At the order of protection hearing, a transcript of which Popivker sent to JTA, a key witness who advocated for the restriction was law school dean Lee Fisher, a former attorney general and lieutenant governor of Ohio. Fisher is Jewish.
“We share a hatred of antisemitism,” Fisher told Popivker during the hearing, according to the transcript. The dean also identified himself as “pro-Israel, very much so.” But Fisher made clear he was critical of Popivker’s activities on campus. Asked by Popivker about a specific social media post the student had made, Fisher responded, “Even if she made a mistake by posting it, it did not warrant the kind of reaction I believe that you had.”
Fisher had also met with Popivker previously, in a session mediated by a local rabbi who was a friend of Popivker. “I told him that I was concerned for the health and safety of our students,” the dean said during the hearing. He had implored Popivker to stop his campus activities, but the rabbi refused.
It’s the initial order of protection, which Popivker said had already effectively banned him from campus, that the rabbi says he truly opposes. He saw it as evidence that “they were basically working together with Palestinians” to “cover up the fact that they have an antisemitic group that openly propagates a destruction of Israel.” Popivker visited campus several times after receiving the order of protection but was permitted to stay with only a warning from campus police, Jarosz recalled.
This state of affairs lasted until the rabbi stole the Palestinian student group banner to, he said, “shine a light on this antisemitism.” Popivker described to JTA how he entered the student building, walked up to the third floor where he knew the banner was, and used scissors to remove it and take it with him: “Clip, clip, clip.” He was subsequently thrown in jail — his second such stint in Cleveland for pro-Israel activities, he said, criticizing local law enforcement for not providing him with kosher food while he was behind bars.
Outside of campus, Popivker is active in other areas. Last year, he organized a GoFundMe to support the family of a former classmate of his who was killed by an Islamic State supporter in a terrorist attack in Beersheba, Israel. He also applied to fill a January vacancy on the Cleveland Heights city council, but later withdrew his application.
After being barred from Cleveland State University, Rabbi Alex Popivker took to holding his anti-Palestinian protests on a street outside a local casino. (Courtesy Popivker)
While Popivker may preach nonviolence, his social media activity points to more radical ideologies, as well. On Instagram, he has shared an image of the flag of the Jewish Defense League, an extremist Jewish group that advocates violence against enemies of Jews, founded by convicted terrorist Rabbi Meir Kahane, as well as an image with a logo of Im Tirtzu, a right-wing Israeli group that has in the past been accused of inciting violence against Israeli human rights groups. Popivker told JTA he is not a member of either group, but that “if I think it’s aligned with what I believe in, I’ll share it.”
Popivker says that, for now, he’s done with his brand of “civil disobedience” and won’t be making his weekly visits to Cleveland State’s campus. “I do have five wonderful boys and a loving wife, and as much as Cuyahoga [County’s] jail is an educational experience in life in many ways, I do not want to go there every week,” he said.
Instead, days after his arrest and campus ban, Popivker posted a photo of himself with an Israeli flag to social media — this time outside a casino a mile away from campus.
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The post Rabbi arrested, banned from Cleveland universities over his anti-Palestinian activism appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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New Report Exposes Docters Without Borders for Pursuing Anti-Israel Activism
A Palestinian woman helps a burn victim, Maria Abu Aawad, at a Doctors Without Borders (MSF) hospital in Zawaida, in the central Gaza Strip, Jan. 26, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Mahmoud Issa
A new report is raising questions about whether one of the world’s most prominent humanitarian organizations has crossed the line from medical advocacy into political campaigning in its approach to Israel and the war in Gaza.
The analysis — published by NGO Monitor, an independent Jerusalem-based watchdog group that monitors nongovernmental organizations — scrutinizes the statements and activities of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), also known as Doctors Without Borders, following the Palestinian terrorist group’s Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza.
“Despite the slaughter of over 1,200 people, the injuries to thousands, and the kidnapping of over 250 hostages into Gaza [during Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities], MSF’s public communications and almost daily updates immediately pivoted to a singular focus on condemning Israel’s response,” the report says.
NGO Monitor also points to a December 2023 finding by former MSF Secretary General Alain Destexhe, who found that many MSF employees celebrated Hamas’s brutal incursion into Israel, contending that “over 40 percent of statements by staff, including senior figures, praised Hamas and the attacks.”
Destexhe warned last year that “MSF is no longer neutral; its humanitarian language now serves a political cause.”
According to NGO Monitor’s report, MSF, which purports to be a neutral provider of emergency medical care, has increasingly adopted language and positions that align with political advocacy, including accusations that Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza. NGO Monitor argues that such claims are not supported by verified evidence and risk distorting the realities of a complex and ongoing conflict.
The report contends that MSF’s public messaging has relied on incomplete or unverified information while omitting key context, including the role of Hamas in embedding military infrastructure within civilian areas such as hospitals and residential neighborhoods. Israel has repeatedly cited these conditions as a central challenge in its efforts to target terrorist networks while minimizing civilian harm.
Further, the report accuses the MSF of “systematically omitting essential details and context” such as “the basic military requirements faced by Israel for neutralizing a terror organization with a massive underground tunnel network embedded in civilian infrastructure, and in which hostages were hidden.”
Critics highlighted in the report say that by failing to acknowledge these dynamics, MSF presents a one-sided narrative that could mislead policymakers, media organizations, and international institutions. The watchdog group further argues that statements from globally recognized NGOs carry significant weight and can influence legal proceedings and diplomatic pressure against Israel.
The report criticizes the MSF for asserting that Israel’s military tactics are tantamount to “death sentences,” claiming that the humanitarian organization “sought to leverage its influence” on world leaders” to pressure them to curtail supposed “indiscriminate violence unleashed on a helpless people.”
NGO Monitor also raises concerns about accountability within large humanitarian organizations, calling for greater transparency in how public claims are verified and communicated. It suggests that NGOs operating in conflict zones must maintain strict standards of neutrality to preserve credibility and avoid contributing to misinformation.
MSF has repeatedly defended its work in Gaza, emphasizing the dire humanitarian conditions and the urgency of medical needs on the ground. The organization maintains that its statements are based on firsthand observations by its staff and reflect the severity of the crisis facing civilians.
The report came out two months after Doctors Without Borders publicly acknowledged that armed individuals — many of them masked — were present inside the large compound of Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza, citing intimidation of patients, arbitrary arrests, and suspected weapons movement as reasons for halting some of its work there.
The admission, buried in a rarely referenced FAQ page on the group’s website, lends factual support to claims long asserted by Israeli authorities about the use of medical facilities by Hamas and allied terrorists during the conflict in Gaza.
Last year, NGO Monitor obtained documents revealing that Hamas has long run a coordinated effort to penetrate and influence NGOs in the war-torn enclave — contradicting years of denials from major humanitarian organizations.
The study showed how Hamas has for years systematically weaponized humanitarian aid in Gaza, tightening its grip over foreign NGOs operating in the territory and exposing patterns of complicity and collaboration that contradict the groups’ persistent denials.
According to the documents, Hamas officials designated specific points of contact with “highly respected” international NGOs, including Doctors Without Borders and several others.
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Trump Admin Investigates New York City for Antisemitism Following Nonprofit’s Exposure of ‘Palestine Teach-Ins’
A general view of the US Department of Education in Washington, DC, on Dec. 1, 2020. Photo: Graeme Sloan via Reuters Connect
The Trump administration is investigating the New York City Department of Education (DOE) for allegedly violating federal civil rights laws by failing to stop K-12 teachers from procuring students for membership in anti-Zionist study groups, an enterprise which the government says will flood public school classrooms with antisemitism.
The US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) said last week that reports regarding the activities of a group which calls itself “NYC Educators for Palestine” prompted its inquiry. First publicized by the North American Values Institute (NAVI), they range from teaching extracurricular courses on “Palestinian resistance” to holding “Palestine teach-ins” on federal holidays.
NAVI has noted that public sector union leaders enrolled in the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) are some of the group’s most eager participants and endorsers. The problem, according to critics, is that their affiliation implies the approval of a city government that the Trump administration says should be ending the practice.
NYC Educators for Palestine targets children as young as five, the US Education Department alleged in a press release announcing the action, describing long sessions in which teachers drill into them the notions that Israelis are “genocidal white supremacists” and that Hamas terrorists are “martyrs.”
The group also targets high school students preparing to transition to college and the workplace as well. In January, it held a “teach in” on the Martin Luther King holiday, casting a wide net for children “ages 6-18.”
The inexorable outcome of the group’s indoctrination is the radicalization of students who will point to disinformation confected by anti-Zionist activists as cause to abuse their Jewish classmates, the Education Department said.
“No child should be taught by his or her teachers to hate their peers. Neither should Jewish children be taught that being Jewish somehow makes them inherently guilty or proponents of hate and violence,” Assistant Secretary of Education for Civil Rights Kimberly Richey said in a statement. “Discrimination has no place in our schools, and, unlike the previous administration, the Trump administration will not turn a blind eye to antisemitic harassment. [The Office for Civil Rights] will investigate these appalling allegations to ensure the equal treatment of all students.”
According to NAVI, the leading supplier of money and support for the NYC Educators for Palestine’s initiatives is a little-known nonprofit titled “Rethinking Schools,” which describes its mission as “strengthening public education through social justice teaching and education activism.”
Rethinking Schools in turn is a beneficiary of the National Education Association (NEA), the largest teachers union in the country, and the Lannan Foundation — a benefactor of Mohammed El-Kurd, an anti-Zionist activist who has trafficked in antisemitic tropes, demonized Zionism, and falsely accused Israelis of eating Palestinians’ organs. The Schwab Charitable Fund, founded by investment banker Charles Schwab in 1999, has also donated some $78,000 to Rethinking Schools, according to NAVI.
In an exclusive interview with The Algemeiner, NAVI chief strategy officer Josh Weiner said that NYC Educators for Palestine’s activities clearly violate civil rights laws even as they transgress professional ethics.
“First off, they’re actively advertising and speaking at these events and sharing their status as New York City public school teachers to attract attendance, which is misleading for suggesting that they are sponsored by the Department of Education or New York City,” he explained, noting that the group will hold at least six more events before the end of the academic year. “Essentially what they’re doing is training students to be hostile toward fellow students based on their identity as Jews as Israelis. That likely creates a hostile environment at school and limits their access to an equal education.”
The federal government’s intervention in the matter is “long overdue,” Yael Lerman, executive director of StandWithUs Saidoff Law, a legal advocacy group based in California, told The Algemeiner in a statement.
“Jewish and Israeli students are afforded the same protections as every other child under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act,” Lerman said. “Schools are not free for qll political activism — especially when that activism creates a hostile environment for students based on their identity. When educators blur the line between instruction and indoctrination, and when repeated warnings from parents and advocacy groups go unaddressed, federal intervention becomes necessary. This case matters not just for New York City but for school systems across the country.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Social Justice Academy in California Tormented Jewish Student After Oct. 7 Attack, New Lawsuit Says
Illustrative: High school students participating in anti-Israel demonstration on Jan 26. 2024: Photo: Michael Ho Wai Lee / SOPA Images via Reuters Connect
Another California public school district has been accused of allowing antisemitic discrimination and harassment in a disturbing new civil lawsuit filed by The Deborah Project, a legal advocacy group that has contested a slew of similar cases across the state.
The victim in the case is Eden Horowitz, a female Jewish student from Alameda County who says the San Leandro Unified School District (SLUSD) stood down while students and instructors at the Social Justice Academy of San Leandro High School tormented her for nearly three years.
“This case exemplifies a disturbing trend: schools that champion social justice while turning a blind eye to antisemitism,” Jerome Marcus of The Deborah Project said in a statement announcing the action. “We are holding these institutions accountable to their own shared values.”
The complaint that says that, on paper, Horowitz should have fit in at the Social Justice Academy, which says that its mission is to uplift minority students by teaching them to oppose “power oppression, capitalism, white supremacy, imperialism, colonialism, racism, sexism, homophobia … and transphobia.” In addition to being Jewish, she is a multiracial American of Brazilian, African American, Native American, and Eastern European heritage — an archetype of the kind of student sought by progressive institutions across the US.
However, the complaint alleges that Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel caused students and faculty to cancel out everything that once merited Horowitz’s being embraced by the SJA community. Overnight, her “intersectional” racial identity became second to the fact that she is Jewish, and her lawyers say that attending the Social Justice Academy became a daily tribulation.
One teacher, Erica Viray Santos, led the movement against her, the complaint charges. In class, Santos made a show of accusing Israel of “genocide” and proclaimed that she would not teach key units on the Holocaust. Allegedly, Santos also publicly paraded her contempt for Horowitz, denouncing her in arguments with the school’s principal that she initiated within earshot of the class. Meanwhile, her classmates began calling her a “Zionist” and a “racist,” according to the lawsuit.
The profusion of anti-Jewish sentiment fused with near manic obsession over the Middle East conflict to inspire criminality, the complaint continues. As the SJA community fulminated over Horowitz’s refusal to accept their views, someone allegedly graffitied antisemitic messages alluding to the Holocaust and other classic antisemitic tropes in a school bathroom. Having already refused to acknowledge the situation’s rising severity despite receiving a stack of complaints related to it, SLUSD officials responded to the hate crime with more indifference, according to the suit. District officials saw to the graffiti’s erasure, delayed condemning it, and later dropped its search for the culprit.
Ultimately, the district allegedly found cause to punish the Jewish victim. While her bullies walked free, the Social Justice Academy “expelled” her from every initiative she had joined to foster the better world envisioned in the school’s mission statement. It then, according to the complaint, refused to perform services related to disability accommodations for the student to sabotage her academic performance and “isolated” her from everyone else. Topping off what her lawyers describe as “retaliation,” SJA placed her in a probationary program under the threat that she would be expelled from the school if she did not fulfill its cumbersome requirements.
By that point, a doctor had clinically diagnosed Horowitz with depressive and anxiety orders, and she was suffering panic attacks. Her parents’ last recourse for remedying the situation, filing a lawsuit, ultimately prompted SJA to act on its threat to expel her, which it did after an attorney notified a district official of the coming action.
SJA staff allegedly announced the news to the student body as a way of “further humiliating” Horowitz, who then received failing grades in every course.
On Friday, SLUSD declined to comment on the troubling allegations, telling The Algemeiner it “is aware of the lawsuit, and because it is an active legal matter, cannot comment at this time.”
In the meantime, Horowitz’s attorneys say that SLUSD has to be held accountable for “state-sponsored exclusion” and for corrupting progressive values to use them as instruments of racial hatred.
“Faculty didn’t just ignore the antisemitic abuse — they fueled it,” said Ryan Weinstein, counsel for The Deborah Project’s partner in the case, Ropes & Gray LLC. “When confronted with the truth, the district didn’t investigate it; it retaliated. We are seeking systemic change to ensure that ‘social justice’ is never again used as a shield for discrimination against a Jewish student — or any student.”
All of California is under scrutiny over K-12 antisemitism, as The Algemeiner has previously reported.
In February, a consortium of Jewish advocacy groups — the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and StandWithUs — sued the state, alleging that Jews have been called “k—kes,” threatened with gang assaults, and subjected to chants proclaiming “F—k the Jews” at anti-Israel demonstrations promoted by faculty.
In one highly disturbing incident described in the legal complaint, fifth graders from the Oakland Unified School District were filmed telling their teacher, “Another major thing that I’ve learned is that the Jews, the people who took over, basically just stole the Palestinians’ land” and “one thing that’s really surprising to me, and that appeals to me is that the US is helping the Jews.” In another incident, the Oakland Education Association created a curriculum in which the intifada — two prolonged periods of terrorism in which Palestinians murdered Israeli civilians — was taught to third graders as a nursery rhyme.
“Jews consistently are being targeted with hostility because of who they are, including in California and particularly in K-12 public schools. This lawsuit seeks to remedy that,” StandWithUs chief executive officer Roz Rothstein said in February. “It is imperative that California K-12 schools not be co-opted by those seeking to indoctrinate students into antisemitic hate. However, Jewish students and parents indicate that this is precisely what is happening in California. Shockingly, those tasked with enforcing non-discrimination laws in our schools have failed to intervene effectively to put a stop to this growing problem.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.