Social Justice Academy in California Tormented Jewish Student After Oct. 7 Attack, New Lawsuit Says

Another California public school district has been accused of allowing antisemitic discrimination and harassment in a disturbing new civil lawsuit filed by The Deborah Project, a legal advocacy group that has contested a slew of similar cases across the state.

The victim in the case is Eden Horowitz, a female Jewish student from Alameda County who says the San Leandro Unified School District (SLUSD) stood down while students and instructors at the Social Justice Academy of San Leandro High School tormented her for nearly three years.

“This case exemplifies a disturbing trend: schools that champion social justice while turning a blind eye to antisemitism,” Jerome Marcus of The Deborah Project said in a statement announcing the action. “We are holding these institutions accountable to their own shared values.”

The complaint that says that, on paper, Horowitz should have fit in at the Social Justice Academy, which says that its mission is to uplift minority students by teaching them to oppose “power oppression, capitalism, white supremacy, imperialism, colonialism, racism, sexism, homophobia … and transphobia.” In addition to being Jewish, she is a multiracial American of Brazilian, African American, Native American, and Eastern European heritage — an archetype of the kind of student sought by progressive institutions across the US.

However, the complaint alleges that Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel caused students and faculty to cancel out everything that once merited Horowitz’s being embraced by the SJA community. Overnight, her “intersectional” racial identity became second to the fact that she is Jewish, and her lawyers say that attending the Social Justice Academy became a daily tribulation.

One teacher, Erica Viray Santos, led the movement against her, the complaint charges. In class, Santos made a show of accusing Israel of “genocide” and proclaimed that she would not teach key units on the Holocaust. Allegedly, Santos also publicly paraded her contempt for Horowitz, denouncing her in arguments with the school’s principal that she initiated within earshot of the class. Meanwhile, her classmates began calling her a “Zionist” and a “racist,” according to the lawsuit.

The profusion of anti-Jewish sentiment fused with near manic obsession over the Middle East conflict to inspire criminality, the complaint continues. As the SJA community fulminated over Horowitz’s refusal to accept their views, someone allegedly graffitied antisemitic messages alluding to the Holocaust and other classic antisemitic tropes in a school bathroom. Having already refused to acknowledge the situation’s rising severity despite receiving a stack of complaints related to it, SLUSD officials responded to the hate crime with more indifference, according to the suit. District officials saw to the graffiti’s erasure, delayed condemning it, and later dropped its search for the culprit.

Ultimately, the district allegedly found cause to punish the Jewish victim. While her bullies walked free, the Social Justice Academy “expelled” her from every initiative she had joined to foster the better world envisioned in the school’s mission statement. It then, according to the complaint, refused to perform services related to disability accommodations for the student to sabotage her academic performance and “isolated” her from everyone else. Topping off what her lawyers describe as “retaliation,” SJA placed her in a probationary program under the threat that she would be expelled from the school if she did not fulfill its cumbersome requirements.

By that point, a doctor had clinically diagnosed Horowitz with depressive and anxiety orders, and she was suffering panic attacks. Her parents’ last recourse for remedying the situation, filing a lawsuit, ultimately prompted SJA to act on its threat to expel her, which it did after an attorney notified a district official of the coming action.

SJA staff allegedly announced the news to the student body as a way of “further humiliating” Horowitz, who then received failing grades in every course.

On Friday, SLUSD declined to comment on the troubling allegations, telling The Algemeiner it “is aware of the lawsuit, and because it is an active legal matter, cannot comment at this time.”

In the meantime, Horowitz’s attorneys say that SLUSD has to be held accountable for “state-sponsored exclusion” and for corrupting progressive values to use them as instruments of racial hatred.

“Faculty didn’t just ignore the antisemitic abuse — they fueled it,” said Ryan Weinstein, counsel for The Deborah Project’s partner in the case, Ropes & Gray LLC. “When confronted with the truth, the district didn’t investigate it; it retaliated. We are seeking systemic change to ensure that ‘social justice’ is never again used as a shield for discrimination against a Jewish student — or any student.”

All of California is under scrutiny over K-12 antisemitism, as The Algemeiner has previously reported.

In February, a consortium of Jewish advocacy groups — the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and StandWithUs — sued the state, alleging that Jews have been called “k—kes,” threatened with gang assaults, and subjected to chants proclaiming “F—k the Jews” at anti-Israel demonstrations promoted by faculty.

In one highly disturbing incident described in the legal complaint, fifth graders from the Oakland Unified School District were filmed telling their teacher, “Another major thing that I’ve learned is that the Jews, the people who took over, basically just stole the Palestinians’ land” and “one thing that’s really surprising to me, and that appeals to me is that the US is helping the Jews.” In another incident, the Oakland Education Association created a curriculum in which the intifada — two prolonged periods of terrorism in which Palestinians murdered Israeli civilians — was taught to third graders as a nursery rhyme.

“Jews consistently are being targeted with hostility because of who they are, including in California and particularly in K-12 public schools. This lawsuit seeks to remedy that,” StandWithUs chief executive officer Roz Rothstein said in February. “It is imperative that California K-12 schools not be co-opted by those seeking to indoctrinate students into antisemitic hate. However, Jewish students and parents indicate that this is precisely what is happening in California. Shockingly, those tasked with enforcing non-discrimination laws in our schools have failed to intervene effectively to put a stop to this growing problem.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.