Updated April 23 at 5:30 p.m.
A Jewish senior at San Leandro High School is suing the school and the San Leandro Unified School District, alleging she endured a “pervasive pattern of antisemitic harassment and illegal retaliation” throughout her sophomore and junior years.
The lawsuit alleges the discrimination occurred in the school’s Social Justice Academy, a series of electives geared toward creating “positive change” in their communities.
The Deborah Project, a Jewish civil rights law firm based in suburban Philadelphia, filed the initial complaint Tuesday in Alameda County Superior Court. The Deborah Project specializes in representing Jewish students in anti-discrimination cases; it collaborated with global law firm Ropes & Gray.
Attorneys for the student told J. Wednesday that while the harassment stemmed from student bullying, the school’s teachers and administrators failed to mitigate and at times exacerbated it.
“The teachers not only failed to do anything” about the antisemitic abuse alleged in the lawsuit, said attorney Ryan Weinstein, but “joined in and fueled it. And then, when it was raised to administrators, principals, and district officials, rather than addressing it, they retaliated.”
After the appeals were either ignored or failed to stop the harassment, Weinstein said, Horwitz and her mother sought legal help, though initially not with the intent to sue.
Over the past year, attorneys from the Deborah Project and Ropes & Gray attempted to reach a resolution with the district but were ignored, according to Weinstein.
“At that point, we just decided there was no choice but to proceed with litigation,” Weinstein said.
The complaint alleges that shortly after the Hamas attack in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Jewish student Eden Horwitz, then a sophomore new to the school’s Social Justice Academy, began facing isolation from students and teachers that quickly escalated to harassment.
The academy “provides 10th- to 12th-grade students with a forum to become the catalysts of social, political, and environmental change,” the school district website says. According to the complaint, teachers frequently led classroom discussions about the war in Gaza “in which students expressed support for Hamas while disparaging the State of Israel and the Jewish people.”
These discussions led students to single out Horwitz as a target for bullying and harassment, the lawsuit alleges.
“Her classmates reduced her to [the academy’s] token Jewish student, demanded she answer for her entire people, wielded ‘Zionist’ as a slur, and held her personally responsible for ‘genocide,’” the complaint read.
The harassment persisted throughout the school year, despite Horwitz’s attempts to report it to the social justice academy’s coordinator and administrators at the high school, the lawsuit alleges.
When in January 2024 Horwitz brought her complaints to the academy, its coordinator “dismissed the report, suggesting the absence of proof of physical threats or harassment rendered the complaints meritless” and questioned Horwitz’s suitability for the academy, “implying that her Jewish identity and beliefs were incompatible with the cohort,” the complaint read.
By spring, the harassment moved online, the lawsuit claims.
Horwitz received anonymous messages on social media in April 2024 calling her a racist and accusing her of “funding genocide,” repeating similar taunts she had been facing in the classroom, according to the complaint.
As a result, Horwitz suffered from severe anxiety and depression, according to the lawsuit, and sought an “intensive outpatient program.” She also asked for academic and other accommodations, but the request was ignored, according to the complaint.
“This included failing to provide mandated academic extensions, omitting required counseling services, and persistently failing to implement the staff-awareness measures designed to mitigate the ongoing harassment,” the complaint read.
The lawsuit claims the academy’s anti-Israel bent extended outside of the classroom in the form of school assemblies, walk-outs and protests.
These demonstrations often included chanting of the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” including at a December 2023 assembly. The complaint said the slogan is a “call for the elimination of the State of Israel and the displacement or eradication of its Jewish population.”
When Horwitz’s mother expressed her concerns about the slogan and an upcoming protest to the school’s administrators, the associate principal suggested that Horwitz stay home, a decision that later compromised her position within the academy, the complaint alleges.
“When Eden didn’t participate, she was chastised for her lack of participation and showing a lack of ‘solidarity’ with her peers. This led to a chain of events in which Eden was pressured and eventually expelled from the program,” attorney Weinstein said. “She was clearly in a situation where she was damned if she did, damned if she didn’t.”
The associate principal officially removed Hurwitz from the program in March 2025, according to the complaint.
The lawsuit asks the court to recognize that San Leandro High School administrators and the teachers in its Social Justice Academy violated Horwitz’s constitutional rights.
Plaintiffs are also making significant demands, including that the district adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Association definition of antisemitism when investigating allegations of harassment against Jewish students, appoint an independent investigator to monitor those cases and hold antisemitism trainings with all of its students, faculty and staff.
In an email to J. Thursday, San Leandro Unified School District Spokesperson Keziah Moss acknowledged the lawsuit but declined to provide comment “because it is an active legal matter.”
Updated: This story was updated to include a response from the San Leandro Unified School District.