A coalition of Jewish parents and civil rights organizations have filed the first antisemitism lawsuit against a U.S. state, accusing the California government of failing to protect Jewish students from a surge of antisemitic harassment, violence, and propaganda in the state’s public schools. The filing accuses the state of offering only “toothless remedies” to the scourge of antisemitism through a “glacial and opaque administrative process.”
The suit was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and the Israel-advocacy group StandWithUs on behalf of several Jewish families. Defendants include a number of state agencies, among them the California Department of Education.
The lawsuit comes more than two years after the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel, which the Brandeis Center alleges triggered an unprecedented wave of antisemitic incidents in California’s schools that has never been adequately addressed. In 2024, the most recent year for which data is available, antisemitic incidents reached their highest-ever recorded levels in the United States, with violent assaults on Jewish people increasing 21 percent compared to the previous year.
California is one of the few states with a constitutional provision explicitly guaranteeing free exercise of religion, according to Marci Lerner Miller, the director of legal investigations with the Brandeis Center. The lawsuit explicitly cites this provision in arguing that persuasive antisemitism in California’s public schools has “deprived [Jewish students] of equal access to educational benefits and opportunities.”
