Berkeley public schools hit with complaint alleging 'severe and persistent' antisemitic bullying [View all]

[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