Santa Clara Unified School District has ‘allowed an egregiously hostile environment to fester’ for Jewish students, suit says
A teacher at a public high school in California showed 10th-grade students a Turkish propaganda video that equated Israel’s war on Hamas to the Holocaust and suggested Jews should be “ashamed” as a result, according to a new lawsuit community activists filed against the district.
The incident was just one example of the “pervasive discrimination and bias against Jewish students” in the Santa Clara Unified School District, according to the Department of Education Title VI complaint filed by StandWithUs and the Bay Area Jewish Coalition this week.
According to the complaint, Santa Clara teachers and officials have used their classrooms to push claims that Israel commits “genocide” and promoted maps that replace the entire Jewish state with “Palestine.” In one class held last March, an unnamed history teacher in the district showed students a video that accused Israel of “committing Holocaust in Gaza,” the suit states. The video was published by TRT World, a news outlet that is a registered foreign agent for the Turkish government.
The news comes as the Trump administration cracks down on anti-Semitic harassment at schools, which has surged since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks against Israel. The administration has launched Department of Education civil rights investigations and threatened to cut billions in federal funding to schools that don’t comply.
The complaint says Jewish and Israeli students in Santa Clara have been “subjected to repeated harassment, intimidation, marginalization, and discrimination based on their Jewish ancestry since at least 2023.” The district has “allowed an egregiously hostile environment to fester for its Jewish and Israeli students,” said Jenna Statfeld Harris, senior counsel and K-12 specialist at StandWithUs Saidoff Legal department, in a statement.
The Turkish video in question showed photos of Jewish Holocaust victims juxtaposed with photos from Gaza, including “untraceable” images of children with Arabic writing on their arms that the segment compared to the tattoos Nazis branded on concentration camp victims. It also featured an interview with a Holocaust survivor who accused Israel of “killing children” and said she was “ashamed” of being Jewish.
“I am actually ashamed sometimes to acknowledge that I belong to the tribe that is killing innocent people,” said the woman in the video.
The same teacher, who is still teaching at the school, also distributed classroom materials to her 10th grade class to raise “awareness” about Israel as an “oppressive apartheid state” that is pursuing a “genocide,” according to the complaint.
In a separate case, another teacher equated Hamas’s hostage-taking with Israel arresting terrorists. An Israeli student who complained faced “bullying” from other students in the class, who made “loud statements like, ‘I don’t want to sit next to this Zionist.’”
The complaint also notes that a “Multicultural Festival” at a Santa Clara high school featured a map of “Palestine” superimposed over the entire country of Israel, and students were encouraged to get a mock passport stamp from the booth that read “Free Palestine.” An Israeli flag was also stolen from the school’s display of national flags.
Other “anti-Semitic harassment” within the Santa Clara district included middle school students taunting Jewish peers with slurs such as “F— you, Jew, go kill yourself” and claiming that “all Jews should have burned in Auschwitz,” the suit alleges.
“It is both shocking and heartbreaking that it has come to this. After 1.5 years of continuous attempts to constructively address the situation to no avail, SCUSD Jewish students feel abandoned, leaving us no choice but to file this official complaint,” said David Rosenberg-Wohl, who represents the Bay Area Jewish Coalition.
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