Exclusive | Jewish legal group urges Trump to investigate DEI programs in K-12 schools for promoting antisemitism

A Jewish legal advocacy group is urging the Trump administration to launch a sweeping investigation and to halt federal funding to K-12 schools that are using DEI — diversity, equity and inclusion programs — to promote antisemitism.

The Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law sent a bombshell 15-page letter to US Education Secretary Linda McMahon citing evidence of Jews being labeled as “inherently racist [and] oppressive” and claiming that Jewish students are being discriminated against to achieve DEI for other minority groups.

The group said DEI programs fomenting Jew hatred both violate the 1964 civil rights law and President Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order to ban such initiatives, which the commander in chief himself described as “illegal and immoral.”

“If President Trump is serious about ending radical indoctrination in K-12 schooling, he should start with some of the antisemitic educators whom we have found,” said Kenneth Marcus, chairman & CEO of the Brandeis Center and former US assistant secretary of education.

“Ironically, some of the worst antisemitism is coming from ‘progressive educators’ who purveying anti-Jewish hatred in the name of ‘liberated ethnic studies’ and social justice education,” Marcus told The Post.

The April 28 letter to McMahon cites blatant examples of school officials and teachers bashing Israel and Jews, particularly in California, including:

• A California district Office of Equity circulated a message to teachers and staff stating, “Hands off Sacred Land from Shellmo[u]nd to Jerusalem” and “Zionism is Racism.”
• A Berkeley second-grade teacher told her 7-year-old students to write messages on sticky notes condemning US support for Israel, stating, “Stop bombing babies.” The notes were then posted outside the classroom of the only Jewish teacher in the school, the complaint said.
• The Los Angeles Unified School District approved materials for a “Free Palestine” event and the teacher responsible for the event provided material to students that referred to Israel as “Occupied Palestine” and used antisemitic tropes to demonize Israelis and Jews.

The civil rights group also said teachers’ unions in California and Massachusetts promote DEI-
based, antisemitic teachings.

And an unapproved course of study called “Teach Palestine” is spreading across the US “thanks to the teachers’ union,” the Brandeis Center lawyers said.

The complaint claimed school districts are contracting with outside groups like the Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC) and allowing them to “indoctrinate” students with their own DEI-based, antisemitic agendas.

“We have evidence that California school districts in San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley have allowed AROC to come onto school grounds and gain access to schoolchildren, whom they engage outside of class, and ply with propaganda and hateful messages about Jews and Israel,” the letter said.

Brandeis Center lawyers told McMahon, “Anti-Semitic indoctrination is an increasingly pervasive and dangerous part of DEI programming that is being taught in K-12 schools across America. The anti-Semitic propaganda brought into schools by teachers, unions, and third-party contractors …. indoctrinate students with messages of anti-Jewish and anti-American hate and fosters a hostile environment for Jewish students in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

“Any plan for eliminating federal funding pursuant under Trump’s executive order should include provisions target educators who condone or enable anti-Semitic curricula, instruction, programs, or activities disguised as “DEI,” the group said.

The group asked McMahon to:

• Investigate and when substantiated, halt federal funding for school districts that refuse to address or “intentionally perpetrate” acts that are “harming Jewish and other children in their care.”
• Review anti-Semitic DEI materials promoted by teachers and their unions, third party contractors and so-called “liberated” ethnic studies curricula that are being installed in high schools.

“We at the Brandeis Center have seen DEI used as a tool by teachers, teachers’ unions, and third-party contractors to foment Jew-hatred in K-12 schools,” Rachel Lerman and Denise Katz-Prober of the Brandeis Center said in the letter.

“Jewish parents and children have suffered—and are suffering—directly from DEI-based lessons that teach students, inter alia, to regard Jews as evil `oppressors’ who should be marginalized, outcast, and justifiably subject to discrimination, harassment or worse.”

The DEI narrative categorizes Jews and Jewish children as “oppressors” who are “white” and “privileged” — regardless of skin color or family history, the center said.

Many DEI-proponents also praise and justify the October 7, 2023 Hamas terrorist attacks against Israel as legitimate “resistance” and “falsely teaching children that the State of Israel is a “settler colonial” and “apartheid’” regime that has no right to exist.

The US Education Department had no immediate comment.

McMahon’s agency did open a civil rights probe into the Chicago Public School System for launching a remedial program that only aided black students and not other students who are struggling academically.