The Santa Ana Unified School District (SAUSD) in California is pausing the implementation of an ethnic studies curriculum to settle a lawsuit brought by a cohort of Jewish civil rights groups which accused the educational program of containing antisemitic content.

As previously reported by The Algemeiner, the suit alleged that SAUSD gave students and parents virtually no notice of its ethnic studies plans and that secrecy was its intention, citing internal emails obtained through a Public Records Act request in which SAUSD officials discussed how to “address the Jewish question” and plans to avoid dialogue with the Jewish community by consulting outside groups for advice on the best path forward. Court documents also described a troubling incident in which members of the Jewish community were called antisemitic slurs, accused of racism, and followed to their cars after raising their concerns about the curricula during a school board meeting in May 2023.

Plaintiffs for the case included the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), StandWithUs, and the American Jewish Committee.

The settlement announced on Thursday calls for SAUSD to “cease instruction” of several ethnic studies courses until their contents are fully disclosed to and agreed on by the public. SAUSD will also ensure that any district-issued content regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is impartial and that teachers refrain from using the classroom as a soapbox for their personal views.

“Ethnic studies should never become a vehicle for sneaking dangerous, antisemitic materials into our schools. That is the law, plain and simple, and we’re glad to have stopped this in Santa Ana schools,” L. Rachel Lerman, the Brandeis Center’s vice chair, said in a statement. “Unfortunately, this dangerous and deceitful behavior is being attempted in other school districts as well. This should serve as a cautionary tale. We are watching those jurisdictions and will not hesitate to address similar violations of the law. School boards must operate in the light of day, and not ‘under the radar’ as SAUSD described its own conduct.”

Antisemitism in K-12 schools has continued to surge, according to the ADL’s latest data. In 2023, antisemitic incidents in US schools increased 135 percent, a figure which included a rise in vandalism and assault. The lawsuit against SAUSD was one of many filed against K-12 education institutions across the country in 2024 to address the problem.

In February 2024, the Brandeis Center filed a complaint alleging that the Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) in California has caused severe psychological trauma to Jewish students as young as eight years old and fostered a hostile learning environment.

The problem exploded after Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the suit charged. Since then, BUSD teachers have allegedly used their classrooms to promote antisemitic tropes about Israel, weaponizing disciplines such as art and history to convince unsuspecting minors that Israel is a “settler-colonial” apartheid state committing a genocide of Palestinians. While this took place, high-level BUSD officials allegedly ignored complaints about discrimination and tacitly approved hateful conduct even as it spread throughout the student body.

At Berkeley High School, for example, a history teacher allegedly forced students to explain why Israel is an apartheid state and screened an anti-Zionist documentary. The teacher sharply squelched dissent, telling a Jewish student who raised concerns about the content of her lessons that only anti-Zionist narratives matter in her classroom and that any other which argues that Israel isn’t an apartheid state is “laughable.” Elsewhere in the school, an art teacher, whose name is redacted from the complaint for matters of privacy, displayed anti-Israel artworks in his classroom, one of which showed a fist punching through a Star of David.

A number of K-12 institutions that faced legal complaints chose to settle the cases brought against them.

In June 2024, the Community School of Davidson, a charter school located in North Carolina, agreed to settle a complaint alleging that administrators failed to address a series of heinous antisemitic incidents in which a non-Jewish student, whose name is redacted from the public record, was called a “dirty Jew,” told that “the oven is that way,” and battered with other denigrating comments too vulgar for publication. The abuse, according to the complaint, filed by the Brandeis Center, began after the child wore an Israeli sports jersey.

That some month, the Clark County School District (CCSD) in Las Vegas, Nevada resolved a discrimination lawsuit which alleged that it failed to protect an autistic Jewish student from a heinous antisemitic incident in which someone scratched a swastika into his skin at school, an injury that was not discovered until he returned home.

The young man, who wears a kippah and is nonverbal, was assaulted in March 2023. In addition to being physically harmed, someone tore up a bag worn by his service dog. Because the school at which the incident took place, Ed W. Clark High School, had not installed surveillance cameras, there remains to this day little information about when and where the incident took place.

Commenting on SAUSD’s decision to respond to the concerns of Jewish parents and community leaders by enacting policies which will prevent antisemitic discrimination, StandWithUs chief executive officer Roz Rothstein added, “This lawsuit allowed us to uncover serious issues with the SAUSD’s implementation of California’s ethnic studies laws, leading to the critical results of ensuring that antisemitic material will no longer be included in these course and improving the district’s process for adopting such future courses.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

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