Harassment of Jewish students has soared since the Oct 7 massacre
The Trump administration on Thursday launched two separate federal civil rights investigations into antisemitic persecution of Jewish students inside California’s Etiwanda School District and the American Musical Dramatic Academy (AMDA) in New York, according to the advocacy groups that prompted the action.
The probe of Etiwanda schools—a 14,000-student district in California’s Inland Empire—stems from a March 6 complaint to the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, alleging that a 12-year-old girl “was subjected to repeated anti-Semitic bullying, harassment, and discrimination that continued to escalate due to inaction from the school.” At New York’s AMDA, one of the top schools for developing Broadway stars, a Jewish student allegedly “faced retaliation after she reported anti-Semitic harassment shortly after beginning studies at the performing arts college.”
Both complaints—filed by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and the Anti-Defamation League—were deemed credible enough by federal officials to initiate a probe, which will determine whether the schools violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by permitting discrimination against Jews. They are the latest federal actions aimed at stemming Jew hatred in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror spree, which fueled a massive rise in antisemitism across American college campuses and even primary schools.
The Etiwanda school district, which is 16 percent white, is in a county where the Jewish population is estimated to be at less than 1 percent. At the Etiwanda Intermediate School, which teaches sixth through eighth grade students, a Jewish girl was struck repeatedly with a stick and told to “Shut [her] stupid Jewish ass up” when yelling for help, according to the complaint. “She was then pinned against a table and choked for several seconds, until she escaped.” The student also faced harassment inside the classroom, including in one case where the student was publicly “humiliated” and told, “This wouldn’t be an issue if you weren’t Jewish.”
The Brandeis Center, ADL, and pro-Israel organization StandWithUs subsequently notified the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights of more disturbing behavior in the school district that allegedly included “students giving Nazi salutes in the hallways, the drawing of swastikas, praise of Hitler and the Nazi Party, Holocaust taunts and anti-Jewish slurs.” The original complaint documents instances in which “a student allegedly said, ‘I love making Jews uncomfortable, especially with Hitler jokes'” and another where a student was called a “stupid Jew.”
“The continuing harassment is significant because the Brandeis Center, ADL and StandWithUs allege that the district’s inadequate response to the original incidents left the hostile environment in place, allowing anti-Semitic conduct targeting the same victim to continue incident after incident,” the organization said in a press release.
The situation at AMDA, on Manhattan’s heavily Jewish Upper West Side, was similar. One openly Jewish attendee reported that after Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror spree, flyers “glorifying violence against Jews” were “deliberately placed under only her dorm room door.”
AMDA reportedly investigated the incident and found that “several students had intentionally targeted the Jewish student.” However, the performing arts school ultimately imposed a “mutual no-contact directive” on both the Jewish student and her abusers, a decision that the complaint alleges penalized the Jewish student for reporting to law enforcement what would likely constitute a hate crime.
“Rather than protecting the student from retaliation after she reported the anti-Semitic harassment, the complaint alleges that AMDA allowed the retaliation to continue and failed to punish the students for violating the directive,” the organizations said.
The abuse allegedly continued into the Jewish student’s second year, when AMDA “refused her request to keep the students responsible for the harassment away from her and later declined to discipline one of the students even after security footage confirmed that he had violated the directive.”
In other cases, the student reported being excluded from school group chats created for those in her program. Students in those forums, the complaint alleges, “disparaged her and made anti-Semitic comments” and engaged in ” repeated efforts to marginalize and harass the student.”
“The complaint alleges that AMDA was repeatedly notified of the retaliation but failed to stop it,” according to the advocacy groups, which said that the “hostile environment ultimately became so severe that the student withdrew from the school.”
“Jewish students who report anti-Semitism should be protected and not forced to endure an avalanche of hate and retaliation while their education and mental health suffers,” said Kenneth L. Marcus, the Brandeis Center’s chairman and CEO. “These investigations show that schools have an obligation to respond effectively and proactively when Jewish students speak up against the hate they encounter. When schools fail to respond to anti-Semitism, their silence sends a message that can cause hostile situations to worsen and retaliation to flourish, resulting in students being deprived of a normal educational experience.”
AMDA and the Etiwanda school district did not respond to a Washington Free Beacon request for comment on the matter. The Education Department also did not respond to a request for comment on the probes.
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