Jewish parents and teachers, who sued the Los Angeles Unified School District and others over ethnic studies materials that they say promote Jew-hatred in city public schools, can revive their case after a federal appeals court overturned the decision of a lower court.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled on Friday that the lower court was wrong to permanently dismiss the lawsuit, which The Deborah Project filed in 2022 on behalf of Jewish parents and teachers. The plaintiffs can now revise their complaint and explain better how Jewish students were harmed by the materials, the court said.
The ruling “changes everything,” according to Lori Lowenthal Marcus, legal director of the Deborah Project, which represents Jews, who face educational discrimination, on a pro bono basis.
“The trial judge ruled completely against us,” she told JNS. “The Ninth Circuit undid that altogether.”
“Now the case goes back to the trial court, with the roadmap from the Court of Appeals for how to adjudicate the claims, which we will re-plead, according to that roadmap, in an amended complaint,” she said.
The case, filed on behalf of Jewish parents and teachers, challenges materials tied to the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium.
The materials tell students that Jews are not indigenous to the Middle East, describe Israel as a “colonialist” and “settler state” founded through “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing” and “apartheid,” and call Zionism a “nationalist colonial ideology,” according to the complaint.
The lower court dismissed the case after ruling that the families had not shown that the curriculum harmed their children personally. The Ninth Circuit said that the plaintiffs could try to show that their children experienced “an independent act of antisemitism causally linked to the curriculum’s use within LAUSD or the school.”
That distinction is central to the case, Lowenthal Marcus told JNS.
“The trial judge claimed that if we couldn’t prove that direct connection, plaintiffs could not claim harm,” she said. “As we all know, antisemitism is a mutating virus that changes and spreads as it comes into contact with more people.”
If a teacher tells students that Jews only arrived in the Middle East after the Holocaust and usurped Palestinian land, students might repeat those claims to classmates and at anti-Israel protests, Lowenthal Marcus said, setting up a hypothetical example.
“The source of that harm is Teacher A,” she told JNS. “But Student X is barred from entering a building because of what they learned at the protest. The instructional material caused or at least contributed to the end result.”
Lowenthal Marcus told JNS that Jews who are ostracized, bullied or attacked for supporting Israel or refusing to denounce the “genocide” were harmed if teaching materials were the source of the Jew-hatred.
“That’s the essence of a hostile environment,” she said.
“The court recognized the contagion of antisemitism, which doesn’t stay localized in a single classroom but instead, like a virus, spreads and mutates as it expands throughout a larger communal system,” the Deborah Project stated.
“As its proponents intend, classroom materials propagandizing against Israel generate widespread hostility and even hatred towards Jews and their commitment to Israel,” it said. “That hostility is expressed in student-on-student bullying, graffiti and other conduct that silences and intimidates Jewish kids, making them afraid to have their Judaism as well as their commitment to Israel known.”
THe materials also “even imposes pressure on Jewish students to publicly disavow their commitment in an effort to stop the hostility,” it said.
The ruling could have implications beyond Los Angeles, according to Lowenthal Marcus.
“The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals encompasses federal courts in California, Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and the eastern and western districts of Washington state,” she said. “But because no other courts of appeal have ruled on this issue, courts in other jurisdictions may also be guided by it if they have a case directly on point.”
The Ninth Circuit also wiped out more than $500,000 in legal fees and costs that the lower court had ordered the plaintiffs to pay.
The case now returns to the lower court, where the Jewish families and teachers can file a revised complaint and continue their challenge.
“We begin amending our complaint with the guidance of the Court of Appeals’ decision,” Lowenthal Marcus said.
A victory in the case would be “a tremendous blow against the sweet-sounding, but toxic reality of what passes for ethnic studies,” she told JNS.
“A topic that was supposed to be about ensuring that all students understood the customs and histories of different ethnicities living in their region instead became a nuclear weapon for spreading divisiveness, hatred of others and, in our clients’ cases, brutality towards Jews,” she said.
