A new California law which aims to combat antisemitism in K-12 schools is being targeted in a federal lawsuit filed by a group which calls itself the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC).

As previously reported by The Algemeiner, the legislation, signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom last month on the anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, requires the state to establish a new Office for Civil Rights for monitoring antisemitism in public schools, 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.

State lawmakers introduced the measure, also known as Assembly Bill (AB) 715, in the California legislature followed year-on-year increases in incidents of K-12 antisemitism, including vandalism and assault, which has surged 135 percent since 2023. Among the spike in incidents, a Jewish girl was beaten with a stick and teased with jokes about Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, students chanted “Kill the Jews” during anti-Israel protests, and partisan groups smuggled far-left, anti-Zionist content into classrooms without clearing the content with parents and other stakeholders.

In a statement announcing its lawsuit, the ADC argued that Arabs are victims of discrimination and that fighting antisemitic harassment in accordance with the new law undermines First Amendment protections of speech unfettered by governmental interference. Furthermore, the ADC argued that the law amounts to a hijacking of American policy by Israel, an argument advanced by neo-Nazis, including Nicholas Fuentes, and commentators who promote their views such as Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens.

“Our children’s rights are not negotiable. Compromised politicians in California do not have the right or authority to muzzle our children and strip away their First Amendment rights,” ADC national director Abed Ayoub said in a statement. “AB 715 does exactly that: It rips up the First Amendment and hands classrooms to a foreign agenda. By signing this bill into law, Gov. Newsom has made it clear — he has sided with foreign interests instead of students and parents.”

The group’s legal director, Jenin Younes, added, “AB 715’s intent and effect is classroom censorship. It — probably intentionally — does not feign the conduct it targets, then points schools to federal guidance that blurs legitimate criticism of a foreign state with bigotry. That combination guarantees arbitrary punishment of educators, chills valuable classroom instruction and discussion, and deprives students of the vigorous debate the Constitution protects.”

On Monday, Roz Rothstein of StandWithUs, a California-based advocacy group, told The Algemeiner that ADC’s lawsuit is meritless and being falsely represented as defending civil liberties and rights.

“The ADC lawsuit has nothing to do with civil rights. Its purpose is to prevent California from taking urgent action to address the urgent crisis of Jewish students and teachers facing rampant hatred, bullying, and discrimination in classrooms across the state,” Rothstein said. “By smearing Jewish Californians as ‘foreign interests,’ the ADC showed why a bill to fight antisemitism in schools is so necessary. This assertion echoes classic antisemitic tropes used by the Nazi party and others to justify violence against the Jewish people and plainly serves to only spread antisemitic hatred, not fight it.”

ADC is not the only anti-Israel group that has filed a lawsuit in recent weeks seeking to block efforts to combat antisemitism, purportedly in the name of civil rights.

Last month, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) — an organization that has been scrutinized by US authorities over alleged ties to the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas — sued Northwestern University, arguing that an antisemitism prevention course violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and that it serves as a “pretense” for censoring “expressions of Palestinian identity, culture, and advocacy for self-determination.”

The group castigated a training video featured in the course while appearing to suggest that the behavior perpetrated by anti-Israel activists that Jewish civil rights groups have aimed to stop — such as beating up Jewish students, calling for their deaths, and advocating the destruction of their ancient homeland by terrorists — is inherent to both Palestinian and Arab culture.

CAIR’s activity in the US has prompted a storm of controversy. In September, US Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) exposed materials which CAIR distributes in its local activism — notably its “American Jews and Political Power” course — to spread its beliefs. Some of it attempts to revise the history of Sharia law, which severely restricts the rights of women and is opposed to other core features of liberal societies.

In another anti-Israel move made in October, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the largest and oldest US organization for defending faculty rights, argued that a range of antisemitic and discriminatory faculty speech and conduct are key components of academic freedom.

In a letter to the University of Pennsylvania administration regarding antidiscrimination investigations opened by the school’s Office of Religious and Ethnic Interests (OREI), the group charged that efforts to investigate alleged antisemitism on campus and punish those found to have perpetrated can constitute discrimination. Additionally, the AAUP described Penn’s efforts to protect Jewish students from antisemitism as resulting from “government interference in university procedures” while arguing that merely reporting antisemitism subjects the accused to harassment, seemingly suggesting that many Jewish students who have been assaulted, academically penalized, and exposed to hate speech on college campuses across the US are perpetrators rather than victims.

Meanwhile, antisemitism in the US continues to rise to historic and harrowing statistical levels.

According to data issued by the FBI in August, hate crimes perpetrated against Jews increased by 5.8 percent in 2024 to 1,938, the largest total the agency has recorded in over 30 years of the counting them. Jewish American groups noted that this surge, which included 178 assaults, is being experienced by a demographic group which constitutes just 2 percent of the US population.

Additionally, a striking 69 percent of all religion-based hate crimes that were reported to the FBI in 2024 targeted Jews, with 2,041 out of 2,942 total such incidents being antisemitic in nature. Muslims were targeted the next highest amount as the victims of 256 offenses, or about 9 percent of the total.

“Leaders of every kind — teachers, law enforcement officers, government officials, business owners, university presidents — must confront antisemitism head-on,” Ted Deutch, chief executive officer of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), said in a statement when the figures were published. “Jews are being targeted not just out of hate, but because some wrongly believe that violence or intimidation is justified by global events.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.