A San Francisco Bay Area school district didn’t do enough to respond to an incident, in which a student told a teacher of his Jewish peer that “they deserved the Holocaust,” the California Department of Education found in a report dated June 9.
On Feb. 3, “Student B” made an antisemitic comment to an AP statistics teacher at Westmont High School, in Campbell, Calif., about “Student A,” with whom the teacher was speaking.
“Don’t talk to that Jew. That’s why the Holocaust happened. I’m glad it happened,” the student said, according to a report from the Campbell Union High School District.
JNS sought comment from the district, whose six schools have 8,600 students in the greater San Jose area, and from the high school.
A complaint to the district, which was filed on Feb. 4 and supplemented a week later, alleged that the teacher “pointed at Student A, smiled and laughed and took no remedial action.”
“In this class, students regularly make derogatory remarks directed at various protected characteristics,” and the “teacher takes no remedial action in response,” the district stated in its report.
The state education department stated that it found that the district’s conclusion that the “teacher maintained a discriminatory classroom environment is consistent with law.”
Lilac Kibel told JNS that her son, Yoav, called her that day “shaking” from the incident. He never calls her during the school day, Kibel said.
Yoav was “very disappointed” and “humiliated” and told the teacher, “‘Seriously, this is how you’re going to deal with this?’” Kibel told JNS. “The teacher just shrugs.”
When she and her son met with the principal, the latter was “a little bit dismissive,” Kibel said.
He told Kibel and her son that the district was investigating and, as such, it was out of his hands, she told JNS. She said that she started crying and shaking and told the principal that her family fled Spain 500 years ago due to the Inquisition.
“I’m sitting here in 2026, my son just had an antisemitic event and there’s nothing that you can do?” she said that she told the principal.
After pleading with him, the principal told her that he would get back to her in a few days, Kibel told JNS.
The family was later told that Yoav could study AP statistics at a nearby high school, according to Kibel. The district verified that and the principal “facilitated” the offer, because the offending teacher was the only one offering instruction in AP statistics at the school, the state education department found in its report.
“This is his senior year. He needs to start introducing himself to new students, new environment,” Kibel told JNS. “He did sports, so he misses all the events for the sports in his last year.”
“Instead of graduating with his good taste after four years of hard labor and work, he needs to be the one that everybody talks about him and asking about what really happened in that class,” she said.
It was once taboo to question whether Jews deserved the Holocaust. “Is it a legitimate question now—we are debating if it’s something that should happen or shouldn’t happen?” Kibel told JNS. “Yoav, at this point, told me, ‘I just want to disappear. I don’t want to be in this scenario. I didn’t choose it. Why me?’”
The district launched an investigation, and Kibel said that her family received the results in May. The district’s findings, which JNS viewed, stated that the teacher denied having heard the antisemitic remark and said that he didn’t point and laugh at Yoav.
The investigator didn’t find the teacher’s explanation credible. It was “more likely than not” that he heard the offending comments and laughed, per the district’s April 24 report.
The district found that the way that the teacher handled the situation had nothing to do with the student’s Jewish background. The teacher “maintained a classroom environment in which students used inappropriate language” that “often occurred without any intervention.”
The district found that the teacher “failed to properly maintain the classroom environment, including failing to provide a welcoming classroom free from discrimination
and/or harassment, in violation of district policy” and that the district will be “taking appropriate action to address these findings.”
Kibel told JNS that despite the district’s findings about the teacher, it found that “the principal was OK, the superintendent was OK, the system worked perfectly fine.”
The teacher is still teaching at the school, she told JNS
“As far as I know, nothing happened to the teacher,” she said. “He’s going to let this thing happen for our children to come. For the next generations.”
An appeal was filed with the state’s education department about the district’s findings.
The department determined that the district’s response was insufficient, and it required the district to provide training to all teachers at the school about maintaining a classroom free from discrimination by Sept. 1.
The training must have “particular emphases on antisemitism and addressing inappropriate peer conduct” and provide messaging throughout the school on how students can report instances of discriminatory classroom environments to administrators, per the department’s ruling.
“We got a letter from the superintendent that instead of doing whatever the state asked them to do in the beginning of September, they’re going to do it in the middle of September, sometime on Sept. 15,” Kibel told JNS.
“They’re already trying to push back,” she said.
After Yoav graduated, he told his mother that “I don’t feel like California is a safe place for Jewish people anymore. I don’t want to be here,” Kibel told JNS.
He left a week after graduation to study at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Kibel believes that her son has experienced post-traumatic stress symptoms.
“Every time we talk about it, he just gets irritated. He gets annoyed,” Kibel told JNS. “It’s painful for him to talk about it.”
“I feel that I lost my son,” she said. “I don’t know when he’s going to come back here and live here in California.”
Tali Klima, spokeswoman for the Bay Area Jewish Coalition, told JNS that “when students engage in hate-motivated speech or behavior, educators have a responsibility to respond with clarity, compassion and accountability.”
“In this case, not only did the teacher fail to do so, but the school’s lack of meaningful action compounded the harm,” she said.
“The student showed remarkable courage by trying to resolve the situation collaboratively, but was dismissed by the very adults who were supposed to protect him,” she said.
“No student should have to fight to be taken seriously after being victimized at school,” Klima said.
Jada Chiu, communications and community engagement coordinator for the district, told JNS that “the district addresses instructional matters individually through established policies and processes.”
“Our official finding serves as the district’s complete response on this matter, and we have no further details to add,” she said.
