RSS
Jewish Students, Parents Can Sue School District Over Ethnic Studies Course, California Court Rules
Illustrative: Pro-Hamas activists calling themselves the United Front for Liberation lead march through Valley Plaza Mall. The ‘Ceasefire’ rally began at Wilson Park in Bakersfield, California, on Dec. 16, 2023. Photo: Jacob Lee Green via REUTERS CONNECT
A California court has cleared the way for students and their parents to sue school districts across the state over the adoption of ethnic studies curricula containing antisemitic components which discredit Jewish self-determination in Israel while promoting harmful tropes.
The Algemeiner was notified of the decision by The Deborah Project, a legal nonprofit that filed the lawsuit which precipitated the ruling. In that case, the organization sued the Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) over its using ethnic studies materials, which fostered aggressively discriminatory beliefs about Israel and the Jewish community, without offering parents the chance to review and approve of its contents.
The Superior Court of California, Alameda County ruled that the materials could be discriminatory and illegal to the extent that they violate civil rights laws, establishing what The Deborah Project decribed as a “landmark” precedent for future litigation.
“Jewish parents have been waging battle against antisemitic ‘instructional materials’ and instructors that expose their children to harm and hated,” Deborah Project legal director Lori Lowenthal Marcus said in a statement. “This is the first judicial decision addressing claims that the use of biased material violates the law. Now it’s clear: indoctrinating kids that Jews are evil oppressors discriminates against Jews; districts can be held to account and forced to stop doing it.”
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, Jewish civil rights groups have reported that antisemitism in the BUSD 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, according to a civil rights complaint filed in February 2024 by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). BUSD teachers have allegedly used their classrooms to promote antisemitic stereotypes 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 forced students to explain why Israel is an apartheid state and screened an anti-Zionist documentary, according to the lawsuit. 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.
Teachers even attempted to intimidate Jewish parents who complained, the complaint continued. Just days after the Oct. 7 atrocities, a second-grade teacher, who hung a Palestinian flag in the window of her classroom, threatened the family of a concerned father after learning he had reported her conduct. “I know who you are, I know who your f—king wife is, and I know where you live,” the teacher allegedly said to him at a school event. Later, in a Facebook post, the teacher defended her politicization of the classroom, proclaiming, “I’ve been a non-neutral educator for all 20 years I’ve been a teacher.”
California lawmakers recently made a major move to address K-12 antisemitism by passing Assembly Bill 715, which would require the state to establish a new Office for Civil Rights.
Receiving near-unanimous support, the legislation passed the state Senate earlier this month in a 35-0 vote with five abstentions and then, hours later, cleared the state Assembly in a 71-0 vote with nine abstentions. If signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, it would also establish an Antisemitism Prevention Coordinator, set parameters within which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may be equitably discussed, and potentially bar antisemitic materials from reaching the classroom.
Pro-Hamas groups, left-wing nonprofits, and teachers unions have emerged to denounce the bill even as it declined codification of the widely recognized International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism — the exclusion of which constitutes a significant compromise for Jewish and pro-Israel activists. Additionally, the bill’s effect on the ethnic studies curricula the Deborah Project fought in court remains unclear.
“This isn’t just curriculum — it’s about whose histories and lived experiences are allowed in our schools,” the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said in a statement, imploring Newsom to veto the bill. “By anchoring enforcement to a politicized definition of antisemitism and inviting politically motivated complaints, AB 715 sets a dangerous precent of censorship and erasure.”
Antisemitism in K-12 schools has increased every year of this decade, according to data compiled by the ADL. In 2023, antisemitic incidents in US public schools increased 135 percent, a figure which included a rise in vandalism and assault.
On Sept. 9, EndJewHatred (EJH), a Jewish civil rights nonprofit group based in New York City, declared war on K-12 antisemitism, launching a new “End Hate in Education” initiative in the US and beginning preparations for a push into the Canadian media market.
“For too long, classrooms have been used as platforms for pushing divisive ideologies that undermine our core values,” EJH founder Brooke Goldstein said in a statement. “Across the United States, K-12 schools and college campuses have become incubators of extremist ideology, including pro-terror and radical Islamist agendas. The End Hate in Education campaign is about reclaiming our schools, defending civil liberties, and ensuring that every child — regardless of background — can learn in an environment grounded in truth, respect, and constitutional values.”
In press materials, EJH outlined six objectives for the campaign — “curriculum transparency,” “rejecting political indoctrination,” “accountability through funding,” “examination of the rule of foreign funding,” “strategic legal action,” and “grassroots mobilization” — all of which serve its larger, ambitious goal of eradicating from public schools not just antisemitism but all forms of “hate and harassment.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
RSS
Sydney Teen Arrested for Knife Attack on Jewish Man Amid Surge in Antisemitic Hate Crimes
Demonstrators hold a placard as they take part in the ‘Nationwide March for Palestine’ protest in Sydney, Australia, Aug. 24, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Hollie Adams
A teenage boy in Sydney has been arrested for allegedly attacking a Jewish man at knifepoint on a train — the latest antisemitic incident in a troubling rise of anti-Jewish hate crimes across Australia.
On Wednesday, the New South Wales Police confirmed that a 16-year-old boy was charged earlier this week over the antisemitic knifepoint assault of a Jewish man on a train.
According to police reports, two assailants approached a 66-year-old Jewish man as he neared the train doors. They allegedly attacked him with a knife while shouting antisemitic remarks before fleeing the scene.
Shortly after the attack, the man was given medical attention on-site, though no major injuries were reported, before filing a formal police report.
NSW Police arrested the 16-year-old in Padstow, a suburb in Sydney’s southwest, but authorities are still searching for the second attacker as the investigation continues.
He was charged with intent to commit an indictable offense, common assault, publicly threatening violence based on religion, and intentionally intimidating someone to cause fear of physical harm.
As of now, the teenager remains in custody, having been denied bail and arraigned in a children’s court on Wednesday.
Antisemitism spiked to record levels in Australia — especially in Sydney and Melbourne, which are home to some 85 percent of the country’s Jewish population — following the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
According to a report from the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), the country’s Jewish community experienced over 2,000 antisemitic incidents between October 2023 and September 2024, a significant increase from 495 in the prior 12 months.
The number of antisemitic physical assaults in Australia rose from 11 in 2023 to 65 in 2024. The level of antisemitism for the past year was six times the average of the preceding 10 years.
Since the Oct. 7 atrocities, the local Jewish community has faced a wave of targeted attacks, with several Jewish sites across Australia subjected to vandalism and even arson amid an increasingly hostile climate.
RSS
UN Sanctions on Iran Loom After Vote to Delay Fails
Members of the United Nations Security Council vote against a resolution by Russia and China to delay by six months the reimposition of sanctions on Iran during the 80th UN General Assembly in New York City, US, Sept. 26, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz
United Nations sanctions on Iran are set to be reimposed on Saturday, Britain’s UN envoy said on Friday after a Russian and Chinese Security Council resolution to delay them failed, prompting Tehran to warn that the West bore responsibility for any consequences.
The decision to restore sanctions by Western powers is likely to exacerbate tensions with Tehran, which has already warned that the action would be met with a harsh response and open the door to escalation.
The Russian and Chinese push to delay the return of sanctions on Iran failed at the 15-member UN Security Council after only four countries supported their draft resolution.
“This council does not have the necessary assurance that there is a clear path to a swift diplomatic solution,” Britain’s envoy to the United Nations, Barbara Wood, said after the vote.
“This council fulfilled the necessary steps of the snapback process set out in resolution 2231, therefore UN sanctions targeting Iranian proliferation will be reimposed this weekend,” she said.
UNITED NATIONS SANCTIONS RETURN ON SATURDAY
All UN sanctions on Iran are due to return at 8 pm EDT on Saturday (0000 GMT) after European powers, known as the E3, triggered a 30-day process accusing Tehran of violating a 2015 deal meant to prevent it from developing a nuclear weapon.
Iran denies seeking nuclear weapons.
Diplomats had said the resolution to delay sanctions for six months had been unlikely to pass, after last-ditch talks between Iran and Britain, France, and Germany failed to break a deadlock.
Nine countries voted no, while two abstained.
Russia’s deputy envoy to the United Nations accused the Western powers of burying the diplomatic path.
US BETRAYED DIPLOMACY, E3 BURIED IT, IRAN SAYS
“The US has betrayed diplomacy, but it is the E3 which have buried it,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi told the council, saying the snapback was “legally void, politically reckless, and procedurally flawed.”
“Diplomacy will never die, but it will be more difficult and more complicated than before,” he told reporters after the Security Council meeting.
The European powers had offered to delay reinstating sanctions for up to six months to allow space for talks on a long-term deal if Iran restored access for UN nuclear inspectors, addressed concerns about its stock of enriched uranium, and engaged in talks with the United States.
The US representative at the council said Iran had failed to address E3 concerns meaning a return of sanctions was inevitable, although she left the door open for diplomacy.
France said the return of sanctions was not the end of diplomacy.
UN sanctions would come into force immediately on Saturday, while European Union sanctions would return next week.
Iran’s economy is already struggling with crippling sanctions reimposed since 2018 after US President Donald Trump ditched the pact during his first term.
The sanctions would restore an arms embargo, a ban on uranium enrichment and reprocessing, a ban on activities with ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons, a global asset freeze and travel bans on Iranian individuals and entities, and would also hit its energy sector.
Addressing the UN General Assembly earlier on Friday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose country bombed Iran’s nuclear installations with the United States in June, said the world should not allow Iran to rebuild its nuclear and military programs.
“We lifted a dark cloud that could have claimed millions and millions of lives, but ladies and gentlemen, we must remain vigilant,” Netanyahu told the General Assembly on Friday.
“We must not allow Iran to rebuild its military nuclear capacities, Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium. These stockpiles must be eliminated, and tomorrow UN Security Council sanctions on Iran must be snapped back,” he said.
RSS
K-12 Union Antisemitism Is Politicizing Classrooms, New Report Says
Illustrative: A pro-Hamas demonstrator uses a bullhorn during a protest at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) on March 11, 2025. Photo: Daniel Cole via Reuters Connect.
Public sector education unions have turned K-12 classrooms into theaters of anti-Zionist agitation, thereby alienating Jewish teachers and students, according to a new report by the Defense of Freedom Institute (DFI).
Titled, “Breaking Solidarity: How Antisemitic Activists Turned Teacher Unions Against Israel”, the report examines several major teachers unions and their escalation of anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish activity following the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel — a series of actions which included attempting to sever ties with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), staging protests in which teachers led chants of “Death to Israel,” and teaching students that Israel constitutes an “settler-colonial” state which perpetrates ethnic cleansing against Palestinians.
In New York City, report author Paul Zimmerman writes, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) has advanced from fostering popular support for anti-Zionism among students to seeking cover from government by placing one or more of its fellow travelers in high office. The UFT endorsed the New York City mayoral candidacy of Zohran Mamdani in July, calling the avowed socialist and Hamas sympathizer a potential “partner.”
“The historical record shows that, whatever their shortcomings, previous generations of teacher-union leaders stood up to antisemitism in K-12 schools on behalf of their Jewish members and promoted strong US support for Israel in the face of existential attacks on that country,” the report states. “Now, antisemitic activists grossly dishonor that legacy by weaponizing teacher unions to spread antisemitism, intimidate Jewish teachers, and recast the classroom as a battlefield against the West.”
Zimmerman outlines three concepts for reforming union conduct, reserving a significant role for the US Congress, which holds the power to investigate the union bosses and subpoena them before its relevant committees. He also calls on teachers to register their opposition by withholding compulsory union dues which ply union leadership with both resources and legitimacy.
“In the end, however, the millions of teachers who want no part in indoctrinating their students in anti-Western ideology — including antisemitism — or supporting unions that care more for supporting radical candidates and causes than making schools safe for Jewish educators and students must vote with their feet,” he concludes. “These teachers. who simply wish to help their students learn about the world and lead productive and meaningful lives, should consider abandoning their unions and cutting off the dues that subsidize this ugly agenda.”
Union antisemitism is receiving increased national attention, as previously reported by The Algemeiner.
On Monday, Jewish students employed as graduate workers by Columbia University filed a federal complaint against their campus labor union — Student Workers of Columbia, an affiliate of United Auto Workers (UAW) — alleging that its bosses devote more energy and resources to pursuing “radical policy proposals” than improving occupational conditions.
The National Right to Work Foundation (NRTW), a nonprofit organization which fights for worker mobility and freedom of representation that is providing the students legal counsel free of charge, said in a release shared with The Algemeiner that the students, who have formed the advocacy group Graduate Researchers Against Discrimination and Suppression (GRADS), are subjected to abuses which magnify problems inherent in compulsory union membership — chiefly that they may be forced to accept as representatives of their interests union bosses who act in “bad faith” and hold offensive beliefs.
NRTW pointed to another similar example in August, writing in a letter to the US Congress’s House Committee on Education and the Workforce that higher-education-based unions controlled by United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE) are rife with antisemitism and anti-Zionist discrimination.
“Tracing its roots to communism in the 1930s, the UE is a radical, pro-Hamas labor union that has a long history of antisemitism,” the NRTW, one of the US’s leading labor reform groups, wrote on July 30 in a message obtained by The Algemeiner. “The UE openly supports the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement, which is designed to cripple and destroy Israel economically. Today, the UE furthers its antisemitic agenda by unionizing graduate students on college campuses and using its exclusive representation powers to create a hostile environment for Jewish students. The hostile environment includes demanding compulsory dues to fund the UE’s abhorrent activities.”
In July, the National Education Association (NEA) teachers union’s Representative Assembly to ban the ADL, a measure that would have proscribed the union’s sharing ADL literature which explains the history of antisemitism and the Holocaust. In the lead up to the vote, a website promoting the policy, titled #DroptheADLFromSchools, attacked the ADL’s reputation as a civil rights advocate and knowledgeable source of information about antisemitism, the very issue the group was founded to fight.
The ban garnered the support of extreme far-left groups — such as Black Lives Matter, Faculty for Justice in Palestine, and Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) — and others which have praised the use of terrorism against Israel and the broader Western world to advance a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which necessitates destroying the Jewish state. Its approval by the Representative Assembly prompted the ADL to say that the activists behind it were attempting to “isolate their Jewish colleagues and push a radical antisemitic agenda on students.”
Ultimately, the NEA Executive Committee refused to enact the ban, drawing praise from the ADL for having moved “reject this misguided resolution that is rooted in exclusion and othering.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.