A Jewish student was removed from a San Francisco Bay Area public high school academic program in retaliation for reporting “severe” Jew-hatred that she experienced on campus, according to a lawsuit filed on Tuesday.
The Deborah Project and the law firm Ropes and Gray, filed the suit against the San Leandro Unified School District, which has about a dozen schools with some 9,000 students.
The suit alleges that Eden Horwitz, a senior at San Leandro High School, has faced “relentless” harassment at the school since Oct. 7 while enrolled in the school’s social justice academy program. (JNS sought comment from the district.)
The program begins in the 10th grade and has a selective application process, per the suit.
“The program promised intersectional education, solidarity, inclusion, and it really proved to be the opposite of that for Eden,” Elana Stern, an associate at the firm, told JNS.
Horwitz’s classmates “branded her a ‘Zionist’ as a slur, were accusing her of ‘genocide’” and the program taught students that it was “inherently wrong” to support Israel or Zionism, according to Stern.
The program did not provide instruction on the Holocaust, Stern told JNS. She added that Horwitz stopped wearing her Star of David necklace on campus out of safety concerns.
Complaints from Horwitz and her mother, Montana, about Jew-hatred in the school were dismissed, according to Stern, including a “particularly egregious” incident, she said, in which Erica Viray Santos, the academy’s lead teacher, asked Eden if her classmates didn’t like her because she’s “Jewish, or just unlikable?”
Viray Santos is listed as a defendant in the suit.
The complaint alleges that school-sponsored events had “from the river to the sea” chants, and the school “permitted these activities without offering countervailing perspectives or taking any measures to protect the security and well-being of Jewish students.”
Montana Horwitz tried to explain to the school that the slogan is antisemitic, since it calls for the destruction of Israel, but her complaints were dismissed. Eden Horwitz was “chastised for refusing to participate in such chants and such school-sanctioned activities,” Stern told JNS.
The suit alleges that in retaliation for Eden and Montana Horwitz’s complaints, Eden Horwitz was forced to sign an agreement that contradicted accommodations she was entitled to receive under federal law as a student with a disability.
The accommodations included more time to complete assignments and tests, as well as more breaks between classes.
Eden was told that signing the agreement was a requirement for her to stay in the program. She was removed from the academy for allegedly not abiding by the agreement, per the complaint.
“She was given a certain amount of time to comply,” Stern told JNS. “Before that time was up, and two days after there had been a conversation with the district administrator about the antisemitic harassment and discrimination, the social justice academy teachers and administrators just removed her from the program and said she wasn’t complying with the parameters of the agreement, even though the time to comply had not yet expired.”
Stern told JNS that Horwitz “was removed from this program and then the teachers announced to her peers that she had been removed.”
“It was incredibly humiliating on top of all the other discrimination and harassment she had suffered by her peers and her teachers for quite some time,” she said.
Prior to the antisemitism she experienced on campus, Horwitz was a B-average student and “a multi-sport athlete who had collegiate athletic hopes,” Stern said.
“As a result of this discrimination, that really affected her,” she said. “She experienced a severe downturn in her academic achievements. She became ineligible to participate in athletics and therefore couldn’t earn a college scholarship.”
Eden also developed “severe anxiety and depression” as a result of the harassment she experienced, and her mother suffered from a “cardiac episode” due to stress from the district’s inability to properly address the antisemitic incidents that Horwitz faced on campus, the complaint alleges.
Stern told JNS that she hopes the suit will bring “real and systemic change in this school district.”
“This is really about holding the district and its officials and teachers and administrators accountable for the violation of civil rights that has occurred here,” she said. “No student and no family should have to experience what Eden and Montana Horwitz have had to experience over the last several years.”
