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As I recently noted, UC Davis—a research university with 40,000 students—has a well-documented anti-Jewish problem. In April last year, the StandWithUs Center For Legal Justice filed a formal complaint with the Department of Education, claiming “a pervasively hostile, antisemitic campus climate, with incidents of unlawful discrimination and harassment, for students.” Not surprisingly, in November, Davis was ranked as one of the most anti-Jewish universities in the country by the advocacy group StopAntisemitism, which gave Davis a grade of “F.”
Davis is hardly an isolated case. A federal probe of the University of California, Los Angeles found that the school acted with “deliberate indifference” to threats against Jews and violations of their rights during an antisemitic encampment in the spring of 2024.
In a letter to UCLA leaders, Justice Department officials stated that Jewish and Israeli students at the school “were subjected to severe, pervasive and objectively offensive harassment that created a hostile environment by members of the encampment,” including being “assaulted, verbally harassed and physically prevented from accessing parts of the UCLA campus.”
DOJ officials explained that UCLA received complaints from Jewish students that the school took no meaningful action to eliminate the hostile environment for Jewish and Israeli students caused by the encampment until it was disbanded. The DOJ also alleged that they violated the Equal Protection Clause and Title VI due to antisemitism and race-based discrimination. As a result, in July, the university settled a lawsuit with Jewish students for $6.45 million.
University presidents at other California institutions face growing pressure to explain discrimination against Jewish students and faculty.
Nationally, 83% of Jewish college students have experienced or witnessed some form of antisemitism since the October 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel, according to a recent poll.
Anti-Jewish bigotry also exists in K-12 schools. In late 2024, the Sequoia Union High School District in California’s Silicon Valley faced a lawsuit over widespread antisemitism experienced by students, with administrators standing by and allowing it to worsen. When SUHSD parents and students raised concerns—through emails, petitions, and formal complaints—the District responded with “bureaucratic obfuscation and outright denial, demonstrating a deliberate indifference to SUHSD’s Jewish students. Emails were ignored, and meetings were canceled without explanation,” the lawsuit states.
“The District’s administrators and trustees have consistently and deliberately refused to take concrete action to stem the scourge of antisemitism on their campuses, to the detriment of Jewish SUHSD students who, subjected to harassment and ridicule from both peers and teachers, have been forced to endure an increasingly hostile learning environment.”
Also, in the Santa Clara Unified School District, antisemitism is rampant in San Jose, Sunnyvale, and Cupertino.
The Bay Area Jewish Coalition and StandwithUs filed a complaint against the district, citing pervasive discrimination and bias against Jewish students, including anti-Semitic slurs directed at them, demonization of Jewish and Israeli students, and anti-Semitic content and programming by teachers and guest speakers. One high school teacher showed students a propaganda video comparing Israel’s actions in its conflict with Hamas to the Holocaust.
According to the report, the teacher told her tenth-grade class that Israel is an “oppressive apartheid state” guilty of “genocide” against the Palestinians. Students who objected were subject to bullying, such as “all Jews should have burned in Auschwitz,” etc.
In New York City schools, there are myriad examples of antisemitism. One concerns the outraged mother of a Manhattan public school student. “On Monday, Oct. 9, (2023), my child came to school and found their teacher chanting, ‘Palestine all the way!’ Israel is going to get what they (sic) deserve!”
In Florida, the Broward County School Board has welcomed individuals with histories of antisemitism and radical Islamic ties.
For example, school board member Dr. Jeff Holness appointed Muslim activist Naima Khan-Ghany to two key committees. After public outrage over her anti-Semitic social media activity, Holness removed her—only to replace her with Corey Shearer (also known as Kareem Salaam), who has ties to an Islamist political network connected to pro-Hamas advocacy.
Additionally, the teachers’ unions also support antisemitism.
The United Teachers of Los Angeles is particularly egregious. UTLA leadership is pro-Palestinian, and the union is being sued by teachers who don’t want to be represented by them because it supports calls for the destruction of the plaintiff’s religious homeland and “promotes animosity and violence towards people of Jewish descent.”
On the state level, the Jewish Public Affairs Committee of California (JPAC) and leading Jewish organizations across California are condemning the California Teachers Association’s opposition to Assembly Bill 715, a bill aimed at combating antisemitism in our schools.
JPAC asserts, “After years of dialogue, it is clear that CTA is either unwilling or unable to support meaningful protections for Jewish students, despite backing similar efforts to protect other communities. We urge CTA to reverse course, and we call on the Legislature to stand firmly with California’s Jewish students and advance this bill without delay.”
In its latest handbook, the National Education Association, which has nearly three million members, states, “12 million victims of the Holocaust from different faiths, ethnicities, races, political beliefs, genders, and gender identification, abilities/disabilities, and other targeted characteristics.”
The union never quite got around to mentioning the Nazi’s attempted extermination of the Jewish people. But at the same time, the NEA handbook states it would teach students about the Nakba, which is described as the “forced, violent displacement and dispossession of at least 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland in 1948 during the establishment of the state of Israel.”
The other national teachers’ union, the American Federation of Teachers, is raising funds for a Gaza aid organization that has been accused of collaborating with Hamas-linked groups.
In a letter sent in July, AFT president Randi Weingarten asked its members to donate to its “partner organization,” American Near East Refugee Aid (ANERA), which claims to “provide humanitarian assistance and sustainable development to advance the well-being of refugees and other vulnerable communities in Palestine.”
Left unsaid is that the group has also worked with Hamas-run agencies like the Ministry of Social Development, which is led by Hamas leader and “U.S.-designated terrorist Ghazi Hamad.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born writer intimately familiar with Islamist and anti-Israel extremism, recently posited that a global “purge of the Jews” is underway. It’s an ideological insurgency with a clear goal: “Erase not just Israel ‘from the river to the sea,’ but the Jewish people from the moral map.”
Many involved in public education are diligently striving to achieve exactly that.
Larry Sand, a retired 28-year classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the general public with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues.
