A federal lawsuit by anti-Israel advocates seeking to block California’s recent law addressing Jew-hatred in K-12 schools before it goes into effect on Jan. 1 aims to thwart what is “badly needed” throughout the state, according to Seth Brysk, director of the Northern California regional director at American Jewish Committee.
The AJC is “very confident” that the law is constitutional and that “there is a compelling interest on the part of the state to prevent discrimination in its K-12 schools,” he told JNS. “It is a balanced approach toward confronting discrimination that will serve to benefit all students.”
Those suing claim that AB 715 (passed unanimously in September) and SB 48, which California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law in October, violate free speech. The AJC filed a friend-of-the-court brief in favor of the new law.
The brief, which the AJC filed on Dec. 1, cites multiple recent instances of alleged Jew-hatred in California schools. In one, a student is accused of taping a Nazi flag and an Adolf Hitler puppet to a Jewish student’s back. The Jewish student had no idea why his peers were laughing at him, the group said.
It added that second-graders wrote “stop bombing babies,” apparently a reference to the two-year war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza after the terror group’s invasion and attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and also delivered the messages to the school’s only Jewish teacher.
“We had difficulty choosing which incidents to cite, because we could have chosen any number of incidents that have occurred in the last year-plus, certainly since Oct. 7,” Brysk told JNS.
“That’s certainly what the legislature was getting at when they drafted and passed this law,” he said.
The new law will work to prevent schools from adopting “professional development, materials or services that subject students to unlawful discrimination,” with academic institutions being required to investigate and address discrimination claims appropriately if there is wrongdoing, according to Brysk.
The law also establishes a state office of civil rights and a Jew-hatred prevention coordinator to collect data to monitor antisemitism complaints and provide regular reports to the legislature about how schools are handling Jew-hatred on their campuses, he told JNS.
“This is a way to improve our schools, so students feel that it’s a nurturing place and a place where they can freely access the education they deserve in a public school environment,” he said.
The suit against the law alleges that it violates the rights of teachers to speak freely, including about the war in Gaza. Brysk told JNS that public school teachers are “agents of the state,” who speak for schools, not themselves.
“It is not controversial to say the state has a right to give direction to teachers as far as what it is they should be instructing their classrooms,” he said. “The state can regulate that speech.”
He added that California can ensure that instructional materials don’t discriminate and are factually accurate, saying, “I don’t think that having factually accurate instruction in our classrooms ought to be considered a controversial thing.”
