A congressional committee will investigate whether Berkeley Unified School District has adequately addressed reports of antisemitic discrimination over the past two years.
A letter sent Monday to BUSD Superintendent Enikia Ford Morthel from the House Committee on Education and Workforce called on the district to provide anonymized documentation of all complaints related to potential antisemitic incidents it has received since Oct. 7, 2023. The committee also requested copies of district communication regarding demonstrations, workshops and course curricula related to Israel and the Palestinian territories from the past two years.
The committee is launching similar investigations into Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia and the School District of Philadelphia, stating in a press release that it had received “disturbing reports of Jewish students being harassed and subjected to open antisemitism in their classrooms and hallways.”
All three districts have until Dec. 8 to turn over the requested materials.
“The committee is deeply concerned that BUSD is failing to uphold its obligations” under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, the letter said. It was signed by Reps. Tim Walberg (R-Michigan), the committee chair, and Kevin Kiley (R-California). “Since the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks against Israel, Jewish and Israeli students have allegedly been regularly bullied and harassed. Some teachers and administrators across BUSD allegedly facilitate and encourage this hostility.”
The BUSD’s public information office, responding to J.’s request for comment on the investigation, replied via email that the House committee letter “concerns allegations raised almost 18 months ago, which our Superintendent addressed when she appeared before Congress in May of 2024.”
Nonetheless, the email said, the district will “respond appropriately” to the committee’s letter.
At the 2024 committee hearing, J. reported, Morthel disagreed with the charge that antisemitism was rampant at Berkeley schools, though she confirmed at the time that the district had received nine formal complaints of alleged antisemitic incidents.
The committee’s letter on Monday informing BUSD of the investigation cited several incidents from a complaint filed in February 2024 by the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR).
The Brandeis complaint argued that BUSD had “knowingly allowed its K-12 campuses to become viciously hostile environments for Jewish and Israeli students.”
The complaint mentioned a number of incidents in Berkeley schools reported on by J.:
- At Malcolm X Elementary School, sometime after Oct. 7, 2023, a second-grade teacher allegedly instructed her students to write “stop bombing babies” on sticky notes and posted them outside a classroom occupied by the only Jewish teacher at the school.
- On Oct. 18, 2023, when students at several Bay Area schools participated in a “Walkout for Gaza,” a group from Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School reportedly was heard shouting “Kill the Jews,” “F*** the Jews,” “F*** Israel,” among other chants.
- The following day, a photo taken inside an art class at Berkeley High School circulated on social media showing an image projected onto a whiteboard of a fist punching through a Star of David. (J. reported in March 2024 that the classroom’s teacher had faced repercussions, but BUSD did not respond to J.’s request for an update on Tuesday.)
“Considering the repeated allegations of antisemitic discrimination in BUSD,” the House committee’s Monday letter stated, its investigation into the Berkeley school district will “determine whether legislation to specifically address antisemitic discrimination is needed.”
Other U.S. government inquiries of antisemitism in Bay Area schools were launched in January 2024, when the OCR opened investigations of the San Francisco Unified School District and Oakland Unified School District. Their status is unknown; the U.S. Department of Education closed its San Francisco office in late March with 1,500 cases still pending, the Los Angeles Times reported.