Berkeley public schools hit with complaint alleging 'severe and persistent' antisemitic bullying

[Coventina]

The week after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, Ilana Pearlman asked her 14-year-old son, Ezra, a ninth-grader at Berkeley High School who is Black and Jewish, if he felt safe.

“Oh, yeah, I’ll be fine,” he told her. “I’m Black.”

Pearlman, a 38-year-old midwife, wanted to cry. She moved to Berkeley thinking it would be a space where her son would not be a token Jewish Black kid, that he could be celebrated for all the things that make him who he is.

Instead, she said, she watched Ezra erase his Jewish identity as the climate at his high school became more hostile to Israel and Jews. His art teacher, he told her, projected “resistance art” — including a fist punching through a Star of David on a map of Israel — on a large screen. Day by day, she said, his classroom wall filled with signs promoting a “walkout against genocide” and posting the daily death toll of Palestinians.

“He never tells me anything,” Pearlman said of her son, a typical video-game-loving teen. “The fact that he shared this was unusual.”

On Oct. 18, Pearlman said, Ezra’s classmates joined a walkout in which some students shouted, “Kill the Jews!”

In the months after the Hamas attack, administrators at Berkeley Unified School District failed to stop teachers and students engaging in “severe and persistent” harassment and discrimination against Jewish children, according to a federal civil rights complaint filed Wednesday with the U.S. Department of Education.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-02-29/federal-complaint-alleges-berkeley-public-schools-allowed-discrimination-against-jewish-children

[Sympthsical]

1. Maybe there's outside agitators in the high school?

Have we checked the cafeterias?

One of the things that always gets me about the denial of antisemitism is that part of that denial is refusing to acknowledge that Jew hatred is frequently taught in our own educational institutions without much push back. They're the teachers and the faculty who bring it into the classroom.

So then it appears - magically! - on campuses and it's suddenly, "Oh, must be outsiders. The students could never think these things!"

Like, how thick is this gaslighting going to go? They really think we cannot see it. Like a great dane with its head under the couch and its ass way up in the air. "You can't seeeee meeee!"

These are adults. That one always gets me. Students? Ok. They don't know much, they don't have context, they just know they have to stand for something. Whatever. But middle-aged adults peddling this stuff?

That's malice.

Edit: And might I just add, these people have boxed Jewish black people into passing. What a treat for everyone.

[Coventina]

2. In this case, it seems the art teacher was promoting Jew-hate.

Should be fired.

[Jedi Guy]

4. I won't lie, the outside agitators remark made me snerk.

Insofar as Black Jews are concerned, I'd be willing to bet that if you quizzed the kids at that school or the university kids protesting, a fair chunk of them, perhaps even a majority, would have no clue that such people exist. You'd just get blank stares. If you mentioned the Ethiopian Falasha, they'd think it was food. "Oh, I love Ethiopian Falasha, it's yummy!"

Also, seems like this thread is destined to sink like a rock, just like so many before it...

[Sympthsical]

6. I'm very familiar with this high school

Used to work down the street from it.

The students would walk out if chicken nuggets weren't on the menu. It's that sort of place.

Then we wonder where people get the idea that protest simply means, "I do whatever I want for any reason I want, and you can't say anything to me about it."

And this isn't the first time there's been racial issues there because the faculty are oppressor/oppressed obsessed.

[Jedi Guy]

7. "The students would walk out if chicken nuggets weren't on the menu. It's that sort of place."

And then they wonder why people have certain perceptions of Zoomers. Hilarious.

And this isn't the first time there's been racial issues there because the faculty are oppressor/oppressed obsessed.

It's almost as if reality is more nuanced than a simple black and white binary and the oppressor/oppressed narrative doesn't work well for that reason. Huh. Weird.

[Sympthsical]

8. It's the Bay Area

People wonder why I have such a strong reaction to the simplistic binary of oppressor/oppressed.

Then I tell them my in-laws are AAPI, including 9 nieces and nephews, and I watch how they are talked to and about in these spaces. They come home with their stories about what was said at school and college - by both students and faculty.

And then people don't ask me anymore why I have such a dim view of half-baked Marxism. Tell someone you have an Asian partner, friends, family, and they can just infer the galloping racism from the O/Opies. That Jews have been slotted in shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone at all.

The ideology requires it. An oppressed requires an oppressor, and the oppressor is anyone who is not the oppressed.

And once you slap the oppressor sticker on a group of people, you can be as shitty as you want to towards them consequence-free.

That is what is taught, and that is what we see.

[yagotme]

3. If the behavior is allowed, it's codified.

Schools need to wake up to this. Or lose funding/students.

[betsuni]

5. K&R

[LexVegas]

9. There is an alarming rise in antisemitism in many, many places. Some surprising, some not. nt