The Palo Alto Unified School District, whose 21 schools educate about 10,125 students in the San Francisco Bay Area, sponsored a trip to a mosque last year promoting Islam as “uniquely aligned with social justice work,” a new lawsuit alleges.
David Rosenberg-Wohl, CEO of Hershenson Rosenberg-Wohl, which represents the plaintiffs, told JNS that he was unaware of any other academic program or “state seal of approval” similar to the alleged actions of Palo Alto High School.
“A public school is the state government, and the state has no business selecting and promoting a particular faith as the faith that represents social justice, a political argument, which is increasingly being adopted by young people and progressive educators,” he said.
“It makes the religion a statement,” Rosenberg-Wohl told JNS. “It harnesses the religion, one religion, in support of a particular political message.” (JNS sought comment from the district.)
Community Members for Religious Neutrality in Public Schools-San Francisco Bay Area, which seeks to maintain religious neutrality in public schools, and local Jewish, Hindu and Zoroastrian parents are plaintiffs in the suit, filed on Aug. 7 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
Palo Alto High School allegedly organized a trip to the Muslim Community Association-Bay Area as part of the school’s “social justice pathway” course track for sophomores, juniors and seniors in fall 2025.
The suit states that the school organized prior trips to the mosque but to no other house of worship.
Students were encouraged on a fall 2025 visit to the mosque to wear Islamic attire, with which they were provided, and they were given Qurans to take home and were taught that Islam particularly “promotes social justice,” according to the suit.
Students on the trip were also “exposed” to Zahra Billoo, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’s San Francisco Bay Area office, whom the suit describes as “a controversial speaker known for publicly documented hostile and discriminatory statements regarding Jews and sharply ideological political views.”
In a 2021 speech, Billoo urged Muslims to oppose “polite Zionists,” including the Anti-Defamation League, Jewish Federations, Hillel chapters and “Zionist synagogues.”
At the fall 2025 visit, Billoo was “allowed unfettered access to students to advocate personal religious and political views without balancing perspective or adequate supervision,” the suit alleges.
“Choosing that person as a speaker emphasizes the connection of politics, Islam and progressive ideology as an argument,” Rosenberg-Wohl told JNS.
The suit states that the school-sponsored trips violated the First and 14th Amendments of the Constitution, since they had the “purpose and effect of endorsing and preferring one religion, specifically Islam, through a public-school program.”
Rosenberg-Wohl told JNS that the suit “is not about money.”
“This is about making sure that there’s a clear policy and the clear policy is enforced, that religion doesn’t belong in schools,” he said. “It is perfectly appropriate to teach religions in a comparative, sociological or historical context.”
People should understand differences between faith traditions. “Some schools address that head on, and some choose not to,” he told JNS. “But to bring it in indirectly and favorably is improper.”
He expects the number of plaintiffs to grow, and “many” have expressed support for the suit, with some weighing whether to join, he told JNS.
“It’s a broad community,” Rosenberg-Wohl said. “It’s not a Jewish-Muslim issue.”
“All religious traditions have strong components that emphasize the need to do social good, to repair the world, to take care of the poor, to respect the stranger,” he said.
“All of these things are not specific to any one faith, and for the state to put a thumb on the scale and say, ‘Yeah, but this one in particular is,’ is a disservice to that particular faith and denigrating to others,” he told JNS.
