Jewish legal groups filed a lawsuit on Thursday against the State of California over an alleged failure to address antisemitism — some of which is stemming from teachers’ unions — in K-12 public schools across the state. 

Filed by the Louis D. Brandeis Center For Human Rights Under Law and StandWithUs, with outside counsel from veteran California plaintiffs’ attorney Michael Sherman, the suit also names the California State Board of Education, the State Department of Education and Superintendent Tony Thurmond.  

It highlights several complaints from Jewish parents and children statewide, in school districts including Berkeley, Los Angeles, Santa Clara, San Francisco, Campbell Union, Fremont, Etiwanda and Oakland. 

In the Berkeley Unified School District, which has been a hotbed for antisemitic incidents since the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks, a ninth grader said his art teacher displayed a Star of David with a fist punching through it. The same teacher promoted a walkout filled with chants that included, “F*ck the Jews,” according to the complaint, which states that when the student’s mother reported the teacher’s conduct, the school’s solution was to separate the Jewish student from his class in the library and health center.

The lawsuit comes two months after the House Committee on Education and Workforce opened an investigation into three school districts around the country, including BUSD, which has 9,400 students and had already been placed under federal investigation for an alleged failure to address antisemitism since Oct. 7. 

The Brandeis Center also previously filed a Title VI complaint in 2024 with the Justice Department’s Office for Civil Rights that stated that Berkeley administrators had ignored parent reports, including a letter signed by 1,370 Berkeley community members to the district’s superintendent and Board of Education, while knowingly allowing its public schools to become hostile environments for Jewish and Israeli students. 

The Oakland Unified School District, meanwhile, saw at least 30 Jewish families move their children to neighboring school districts in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks because of “systemic” antisemitism, eJewishPhilanthropy reported in 2024. 

The lawsuit also spotlights multiple instances in which teachers or unions allegedly facilitated the spread of antisemitism into California classrooms. Members of the Oakland Education Association created an unapproved curriculum that recycles “antisemitic propaganda and age-old antisemitic tropes,” the suit states. 

The curriculum featured, among other things, a children’s book for Oakland’s transitional kindergarten through third grade students that proclaims, “I is for Intifada,” a word defined benignly as “rising up for what’s right.” Another one of the materials asks children to draw a picture of “The Zionist leaders of Israel receiv[ing] money and support to conduct” a “two-tiered (unfair) system where Palestinians are mistreated and attacked.”

Last October, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 715, a law aimed at combating antisemitism in K-12 schools by establishing state prevention coordinators, adding to anti-discrimination policies and addressing the surge in incidents. 

Local Jewish leaders expressed support for the lawsuit, claiming that existing laws have not been adequately enforced.  

“California has some of the strongest laws and policies aimed at protecting Jewish residents from antisemitism, yet enforcement remains sparse, inconsistent and lacks accountability,” Robert Trestan, vice president of Anti-Defamation League West, said in a statement. “Jewish students are increasingly targeted because of their identity and exposed to lesson plans containing antisemitism and anti-Israel narratives. It is time for California officials to deliver on their promise of schools and classrooms that are free of hate. Our children cannot afford to wait any longer.” 

More than half a million students attend LA public schools, including 50,000 Jewish children. Rabbi Noah Farkas, president and CEO of the Jewish Federation Los Angeles, said that “rising antisemitism in our classrooms is leaving some students unsafe and unprotected. California already has strong laws to prevent hate and discrimination — now they must be enforced consistently so every child can learn in safety with dignity. When any child experiences hate unchecked, it threatens the safety and moral integrity of our entire public education system.”

The state’s universities are similarly facing antisemitism allegations. 

On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a suit against the University of California system, alleging that its Los Angeles campus failed to protect Jewish and Israeli faculty and staff in accordance with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination. 

Building on a monthslong battle between the Trump administration and the University of California, the Department of Justice filed a suit on Tuesday against the university system, alleging that its Los Angeles campus failed to protect Jewish and Israeli faculty and staff in accordance with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination.  

The 81-page DOJ complaint, filed in California’s Central District, alleges that since the Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attacks in Israel, UCLA “has ignored, and continues to ignore, gross and repeated violations of viewpoint-neutral time, place, and manner restrictions. Jewish and Israeli faculty have been physically threatened, had their classrooms disrupted, and had their workplaces papered with disturbing images.”

“Numerous Jewish and Israeli employees have been forced to take leave, work from home, and even leave their jobs to avoid the hostile work environment,” the suit alleges. 

In a statement to Jewish Insider, Mary Osako, UCLA’s vice chancellor of strategic communications, said the university has “taken concrete and significant steps to strengthen campus safety, enforce policies, and combat antisemitism in a systemic and sustained manner.”

Osako said those efforts have included hiring a Title VI/Title VII officer “to ensure professionalized oversight and accountability” and strengthened time, place, and manner policies “to protect both free expression and campus operations.”  

The federal suit is a significant escalation of the government’s crackdown on what it alleges are failures across the University of California system to address antisemitism. Multiple civil rights investigations have been launched into the system and individual campuses.

The lawsuit comes seven months after UCLA settled a federal lawsuit with Jewish students who alleged that the university permitted antisemitic conduct during the spring 2024 anti-Israel encampments on the campus.

Yitzchok Frankel, then a second-year law student at UCLA, filed suit against the university in June 2024, claiming that he was “harassed and blocked from approaching the encampment by antisemitic activists, all with the assistance of UCLA security.” Two other Jewish UCLA students and a UCLA medical school professor later joined the suit. As part of the settlement, UCLA agreed to provide support to community organizations engaged in combating antisemitism.

Last year, the Trump administration sought more than $1 billion and a range of concessions from the university in order to restore funding frozen over alleged antisemitism, which was never paid — even after some research money was restored. 

A federal judge in San Francisco ruled in November in a preliminary injunction that the Trump administration could not fine the University of California or cut the school system’s federal funding over claims it allows antisemitism or other types of discrimination.  

The government did not offer a specific financial demand of UCLA in Tuesday’s lawsuit, but it suggested “awarding damages” to “aggrieved Jewish and Israeli UCLA employees.”

As part of a settlement reached on Wednesday, the University of California, Berkeley acknowledged it discriminated against an Israeli former professor, and offered remedies for the situation, two years after the school disinvited her from teaching a course on Israeli dance, Jewish Insider has learned. 

Dance professor Yael Nativ filed a lawsuit against the UC Board of Regents in August, claiming that she was the victim of discrimination under California law. Nativ, a visiting professor who taught a course on contemporary Israeli dance in 2022 and reapplied for the 2024-25 school year, alleged that her application to return was denied due to her Israeli nationality and the climate on campus following the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks in Israel and ensuing war between Israel and Hamas. Nativ was represented in the suit by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law. 

Under the agreement, UC Berkeley Chancellor Rich Lyons issued a personal apology to Nativ. She was also granted $60,000 in monetary damages and was invited by the university to teach the course she “successfully” taught during a previous semester at UC Berkeley — during a semester of her choosing. According to a joint statement from UC Berkeley and the Brandeis Center, “UC Berkeley publicly acknowledges the violation of [its] policy against discrimination with regard to Dr. Nativ and commits to rigorously enforce this policy to prevent recurrence.”

The UC Berkeley Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination opened an investigation into Nativ’s case last year following her complaint. After a probe that lasted several months, OPHD concluded that she had faced discrimination based on national origin. The recent settlement, however, is the first time the university offered steps to address the mistreatment. 

The lawsuit alleges that months after Nativ sent in her application, she received a WhatsApp message from the chair of the department of theater, dance and performance studies, SanSan Kwan, saying she was under pressure from faculty not to bring anybody from Israel or hold courses related to Israel. 

“[M]y dept cannot host you for a class next fall. … Things are very hot here right now and many of our grad students are angry. I would be putting the dept and you in a terrible position if you taught here,” Kwan wrote, according to the lawsuit.  

“It’s a shame that this [incident] required us to file a lawsuit, because it was a pretty straightforward case of discrimination,” Paul Eckles, senior litigation counsel at the Brandeis Center, told JI. Even though OPHD already ruled in Nativ’s favor, Eckles said there was still a need to “get [the university] to take some action.”  

A separate lawsuit against UC Berkeley, also filed by the Brandeis Center on behalf of Jewish groups in November 2023, remains under litigation. That lawsuit alleges that the university violated its own policies and federal civil rights laws by allowing discrimination, harassment and physical violence against Jewish students and faculty. Incidents cited include an attack against a Jewish student draped in an Israeli flag by protesters who struck him with a metal water bottle and the distribution of e-mails to Jewish students calling for their gassing and murder. The complaint, filed in San Francisco federal court, was among the first against a major university after the Oct. 7 attacks and ensuing Israel-Hamas war, with similar discrimination lawsuits following at universities nationwide. 

A new federal lawsuit filed on behalf of families of victims of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks accuses the crypto giant Binance of knowingly facilitating the transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars to U.S.-designated foreign terror organizations on an “industrial scale,” helping contribute to the deadly incursion in Israel that killed around 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostages.

According to the complaint, Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, “deliberately” failed “to monitor inbound funds” to such terror groups as Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, ensuring “that terrorists and other criminals could deposit and shuffle enormous sums on the exchange with impunity.”

“Moreover, when specific customers were designated or particular accounts were subject to seizure orders, Binance allowed those customers and accounts to shift the assets into other Binance accounts, thus negating the effect of any ‘blocking’ or ‘seizing’ of the account,” the complaint states.

Such a policy “demonstrates Binance’s deliberate and conscious effort to enable users to operate on the Binance platform and clearly helps facilitate financial crime on an industrial scale,” the filing adds. 

Among the 306 American plaintiffs are the families of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an Israeli-American hostage murdered by Hamas in Gaza; Itay Chen, an Israeli-American IDF soldier whose body was returned to Israel this month; Eyal Waldman, an Israeli philanthropist whose U.S.-born daughter, Danielle, was killed at the Nova music festival during the Oct. 7 attacks; and Yechiel Leiter, the Israeli ambassador to the U.S.

“The lawsuit details how Binance knowingly facilitated the transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars between 2021 and 2023 that helped enable the terrorist organizations responsible for the Oct. 7 attacks,” Gary Osen, an attorney representing the plaintiffs who specializes in civil terror cases, said in a statement to Jewish Insider. “One of our goals is to cast a public spotlight on specific ways in which the Binance platform has been used by Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas to finance terrorism.”

The 284-page complaint, filed Monday in U.S. District Court for the District of North Dakota under the Anti-Terrorism Act, targets Binance as well as its founder and former CEO, Changpeng Zhao, and Guangying Chen, a close associate of Zhao whom the lawsuit identifies as the crypto exchange’s “de facto chief financial officer.”

Zhao and Chen could not be reached for comment regarding the lawsuit.

A Binance spokesperson said the company “cannot comment on any ongoing litigation.” 

“However, as a global crypto exchange, we comply fully with internationally recognized sanctions laws, consistent with other financial institutions. For context, the heads of the U.S.Treasury’s FinCEN and OFAC have confirmed that cryptocurrency is not widely used by Hamas terrorists,” the spokesperson told JI in a statement, referring to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and Office of Foreign Assets Control. “Most importantly, we hope for lasting peace in the region.”

The company’s “conduct was far more serious and pervasive than what the U.S. government disclosed during its 2023 criminal enforcement actions,” the complaint says, claiming that Binance “knowingly sent and received the equivalent of more than $1 billion to and from accounts and wallets controlled by the FTOs responsible for the Oct. 7 attacks.”

That figure, the filing states, vastly outnumbers a previous amount of more than $2,000 in known transactions for Hamas disclosed by the federal government in 2023.

In November 2023, Zhao pleaded guilty to money laundering charges and agreed to step down from his executive role. He served four months in federal prison and was pardoned last month by President Donald Trump. Binance itself also pleaded guilty to federal charges and paid over $4 billion in fines.

Last May, Binance participated in a $2 billion business deal with World Liberty Financial, a new crypto company founded by the families of Trump and Steve Witkoff, the president’s special envoy.

“To this day,” the complaint states, “there is no indication that Binance has meaningfully altered its core business model.”

Citing a complex forensic money laundering analysis, the lawsuit identifies a wide range of Binance accounts with alleged terror links and spanning multiple locales, including Venezuela, Gaza, Lebanon and even North Dakota, where an account connected to Hamas was accessed several times from a small city outside Fargo.

The suit refers to Gaza money exchanges, a gold smuggling operation in South America with ties to Hezbollah and a purported Venezuelan livestock entrepreneur allegedly moving millions of dollars for known terror organizations in the Middle East, among other illicit transactions.

“Every tunnel, every missile, every bullet, every attack is paid for by someone,” Izhar Shay, a plaintiff whose son Yaron died defending Kibbutz Kerem Shalom in Israel on Oct. 7, said in a statement shared with JI. “Companies like Binance cannot keep profiting if they enable terrorists to operate in the shadows. This case is about making sure that those who enabled Hamas’ evil are held to account.”

A new lawsuit filed by the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Chicago branch last week alleges that Northwestern University violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by adopting time, place and manner restrictions on student protest and requiring students to watch an antisemitism training video.

The plaintiffs include Northwestern Graduate Workers for Palestine, a doctoral student who “is not Arab, Jewish, or Muslim, but publicly associates with these students” and a doctoral candidate of Syrian and Palestinian descent. 

Title VI prohibits institutions that receive federal funding from discriminating based on a person’s race, color and national origin — understood to include both Arabs and Jews — though the lawsuit claims that “Antizionist Jews are also a cognizable ethnic group” under the statute. The suit also accuses the Chicago-area school of violating Title VI by discriminating against those who “associate with” Jewish and Arab students “who oppose or criticize Zionism.”

The suit, filed in federal court in Illinois, claims Northwestern violated students’ rights by requiring them to agree to the school’s code of conduct, which now incorporates the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism, as well as mandatory bias training that includes a video on antisemitism created in collaboration with the Jewish United Fund, the city’s Jewish federation. 

The training is required to be completed by Monday, or students will be prohibited from registering for classes for the winter term.

The plaintiffs claim that the mandate to watch the JUF video, which includes information on the ties between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, has “caused Arab individuals and those who support them injury in the form of emotional distress.” The two doctoral students, who are considered student employees of the university, also claim the training, which is required for their employment, violates the Illinois Worker Freedom of Speech Act.

A spokesperson for Northwestern declined to comment on the ongoing litigation. The university responded to the allegation in court filings that students must attest that they “have reviewed and agreed to abide by” the student code of conduct but “notably, the attestation does not require students to agree or enforce the substance or viewpoints expressed in the training. It merely confirms that they will comply with the university’s uniformly applicable policies — just as all students must typically do to maintain good standing.”

The suit further alleges that Northwestern implemented an “Intimidation Policy” in response to the disruptive anti-Israel encampment that overtook the university’s campus in May 2024 by now requiring “a reservation, advance notice, and a permit from the University’s administration” in order to table on university property and a permit to use devices that amplify sound, as well as limiting flyers posted outdoors to university bulletin boards. 

Students participating in the encampment engaged in several instances of harassment and intimidation of Jewish students, which were detailed by the House Committee on Education and Workforce when it called then-President Michael Schill to appear before the committee. Schill negotiated with the encampment and acceded to several of the student leaders’ demands, including allowing students to weigh in on university investments, which earned the praise of the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and drew condemnation from Jewish leaders.

The requested remedies of the suit include finding Northwestern’s use of the IHRA definition, which labels some criticism of Israel as antisemitic, to be illegal and prohibiting the school from using it and for emotional distress damages for the plaintiffs. 

The Department of Justice filed a civil suit on Monday against several protesters and anti-Israel groups for their involvement in a demonstration at a New Jersey synagogue, Congregation Ohr Torah, last November.

The DOJ complaint alleges that the Party for Socialism and Liberation-New Jersey, American Muslims for Palestine-New Jersey and six individuals engaged in physical assaults and antisemitic and threatening chants, as well as defying police orders.

The complaint alleges that the defendants broke through a police line, marched onto synagogue property and attempted to physically block Jewish worshippers from entering the synagogue.

Two are accused of using vuvuzelas — large plastic horns typically used at sporting events —  as a “weapon reasonably known to lead to permanent noise-induced hearing loss,” blowing them inches from one attendee’s ear with the intention of causing “serious bodily harm.” One of the same defendants allegedly physically tackled another attendee, grabbed his throat and put him in a chokehold. Another also reportedly “deployed a stink bomb” to obstruct access to the synagogue.

According to the complaint, the event was originally set to take place in a private home, but was relocated to the synagogue “due to credible threats of violence from certain Defendants.” One of the defendants was recorded on camera delivering a threatening letter to that private home, and the home address was posted online.

The complaint alleges that these actions were intended to intimidate Jewish worshipers and prevent their participation in religious observance, in violation of federal law, and that comments captured on video indicate they were motivated by antisemitic animus.

The complaint states that the vuvuzela sounds overpowered the memorial service and Torah sermon.

The suit was brought under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, traditionally used against those who block access to abortion clinics, but which also includes provisions barring the use of force, threats, intimidation or physical obstruction to interfere with the right to worship.

The event in question was an Israel real estate fair and spiritual event, which the complaint describes as “a religious event centered on the Jewish obligation to live in the Land of Israel, a tenet of Jewish faith.” 

According to the complaint, it “was to include prayer, a religious memorial service for the late Rabbi Avi Goldberg, a Torah sermon, religious songs with biblical verses, prayerful dancing, educational activities about the religious obligation to live in Israel, a real estate fair, and a festive barbecue in the synagogue’s parking lot — all part of the religious observance.”

“This Justice Department will vigorously enforce the right of every American to worship in peace and without fear,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, who leads the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, said in a statement. “Those who target houses of worship and violate our federal laws protecting people of faith are on notice that they will face the consequences.”

Nathan Diament, the executive director of public policy for the Orthodox Union, praised the DOJ for filing the lawsuit, and said that he had pressed the Biden administration to file similar cases, but was rebuffed.

“We applaud Attorney General Bondi and Assistant Attorney General Dhillon for bringing this suit to protect the Jewish community and all  people of faith who have the constitutional right to worship without fear of harassment,” Diament told Jewish Insider. “OU Advocacy urged the Biden administration to bring FACE Act lawsuits to no avail. Hopefully, violent protestors will now be held accountable, and this lawsuit will send a strong message to anyone who targets houses of worship.”

The complaint further notes that PSL and AMP have histories of organizing violent protests and other incidents targeting Jewish institutions and pro-Israel events, and that “unless restrained, Defendants are likely to continue violating the FACE Act, given their history of targeting Jewish religious events with violence and intimidation.”

The lawsuit requests a permanent injunction against such activity by the defendants, an order that they be banned from coming within 50 feet of the private home or synagogue and that they pay compensatory damages to victims and a fine to the government.

The Anti-Defamation League filed a new lawsuit on Thursday on behalf of more than 140 U.S. victims of the Oct. 7 attacks alleging that several different terrorist groups carried out the attacks with material support from U.S.-designated state sponsors of terror: Iran, Syria and North Korea. 

The suit comes a year after a similar suit by the ADL targeting Iran, Syria and North Korea, but it relies on an additional statute to seek compensation for the American victims of the attacks, which left 1,200 people dead. The suit also includes more plaintiffs than the original case. 

The new case names the terror groups — Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, the Palestinian Mujahideen Movement, Hezbollah and the Popular Resistance Committees — and invokes two American laws that provide civil remedies to victims of international terrorism. 

“The victims of the October 7 massacre deserve justice, accountability and redress,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. “This lawsuit seeks to do that by holding those responsible for the carnage accountable, from the state sponsors who provided the funding, weapons and training to the terrorist organizations who carried out these unspeakable atrocities.”

ADL brought the lawsuit with Crowell & Moring, a law firm that has helped victims in terrorism cases including the bombings of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in the 1980s and the bombing of UTA flight 772 in 1989. The firm obtained billions of dollars in judgments in those cases.  

“State sponsors of terrorism should not be able to avoid the consequences of their heinous acts by hiding behind the proxies they materially support,” Crowell partner Aryeh Portnoy, the lead counsel on the case, said in a statement. 

The parents of Yona Brief, an IDF soldier who was severely injured on Oct. 7 and died as a result of his wounds more than a year later, said they hope the lawsuit will help deter future attacks. 

“We believe it is critical that those responsible for the horrific terror inflicted that day are held accountable in a court of law, to ensure the record is clear as to who helped support, plan and carry out the violence that day,” David and Hazel Brief said in a statement. “We are hopeful that this type of litigation will help prevent attacks like these in the future, so that no other families have to go through losing a loved one as a result of such violence.”

The University of California, Los Angeles settled a federal lawsuit this week with Jewish students who alleged that the university permitted antisemitic conduct during the spring 2024 anti-Israel encampments on the campus, according to a settlement agreement shared by the university on Tuesday.

Yitzchok Frankel, then a second-year law student at UCLA, filed suit against the university in June 2024, claiming that he was “harassed and blocked from approaching the encampment by antisemitic activists, all with the assistance of UCLA security.” Two other Jewish UCLA students and a UCLA medical school professor later joined the suit. 

According to the settlement agreement, the university will be prohibited from “knowingly allowing or facilitating the exclusion of Jewish students, faculty and/or staff” from any UCLA programs or campus areas. Notably, the judgment stated that the prohibition also applies to the exclusion of Jewish UCLA affiliates “based on religious beliefs concerning the Jewish state of Israel.” 

The agreement will remain in effect for 15 years. It follows a preliminary ruling last August stating that the university must allow Jewish students equal access to campus spaces and events.

“Today’s settlement reflects a critically important goal that we share with the plaintiffs: to foster a safe, secure and inclusive environment for all members of our community and ensure that there is no room for antisemitism anywhere on campus,” University of California Board of Regents Chair Janet Reilly said in a statement.

UCLA also agreed to pay each of the plaintiffs $50,000, and will cover $3.6 million of their legal fees. 

UCLA will contribute $2.33 million to several organizations fighting antisemitism on college campuses. Recipients include Hillel at UCLA, the Academic Engagement Network, the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles’ Campus Impact Network, Chabad of UCLA, the Jewish Graduate Organization, the Orthodox Union’s Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus and The Film Collaborative, Inc., which will produce a short film about a former UCLA employee who is a Holocaust survivor.

The university also pledged to give $320,000 to UCLA’s Initiative to Combat Antisemitism, which was created by UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk in March. 

“It seems like it will be a signal to everyone, to not just the Jewish community but to everyone, that what happened and was allowed to happen to Jewish students was wrong, and the university understands it was wrong, and is acknowledging that it wants to fix what was wrong,” UCLA Hillel Executive Director Dan Gold said about the settlement. 

In March, the Justice Department filed a statement of interest in the case supporting Frankel, the other Jewish students and a Jewish professor who joined him in the suit. 

“The president, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and the Task Force know that every student must be free to attend school without being discriminated against on the basis of their race, religion or national origin,” DOJ senior counsel Leo Terrell, the chair of the federal antisemitism task force, said in March. 

The agreement comes as Frenk, who started at the university in January, has stated that countering antisemitism will be a priority of his tenure. 

“My position has been that, with all transparency and humility, we need to acknowledge that we have an antisemitism problem in universities. Denying it would be dishonest,” Frenk told Jewish Insider in May. 

An Israeli chemist who resigned from Stanford University is suing the school after he claims it was complicit in antisemitism that he faced at the school — including the alleged tampering with his lab results, Jewish Insider has learned. 

The Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and Los Angeles-based law firm Cohen Williams LLP filed a federal lawsuit on Thursday on behalf of Shay Laps, a Jewish Israeli postdoctoral researcher who was hired by Stanford in April 2024 after being recommended by a Nobel laureate. Laps’ research focused on synthetic and “smart” insulin, aiming to revolutionize diabetes treatment. 

According to the lawsuit, after arriving in professor Danny Chou’s Stanford lab, Laps was targeted by a lab staffer who knew that he was a Jewish scientist from Israel. At their first meeting, the suit alleges, the staffer told Laps, the only Israeli in the building, never to speak to her, and later excluded Laps from sitting with her and other staffers during lunch. Laps expressed that the staffer treated other colleagues kindly. 

The complaint also names Chou, an associate professor of pediatrics and the lab’s leader and mentor, as a defendant. 

The discrimination escalated when, according to Laps, the lab staffer tampered with his research, producing fraudulent results without his knowledge. Laps said that upon the discovery of the alleged sabotage of his experiments, Chou refused to address the issue — and eventually pressured Laps to leave the country by falsely claiming that Stanford’s Title IX Office had alerted Chou to a complaint and formal investigation against Laps and that his immigration status was on the line. Stanford’s Title IX Office later confirmed that there was no complaint or investigation against Laps, according to the suit. 

Stanford President Jonathan Levin and the School of Medicine Dean Lloyd Minor disregarded Laps’ attempts for help, the lawsuit alleges. Ultimately, Laps felt he had no choice but to resign.

Talia Nissimyan, a lawyer at Cohen Williams who is representing Laps, said that as Laps “suffered discrimination and retaliation based on his religion, national origin, and ethnicity, the university preferred not to look.”

“Instead, they attempted to bury Dr. Laps’ career, and when that didn’t work, to bully him into rescinding his complaints,” Nissimyan said in a statement. “Stanford succumbed to the rising tide of campus antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias, costing Dr. Laps critical years of his career, and costing the world the potential fruits of his talents.” 

Barnard College reached a settlement on Monday in a lawsuit brought by Jewish students which claimed that the school violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by failing to address antisemitism. 

Under the agreement reached, Barnard will adopt an anti-masking policy at demonstrations; refuse to meet with anti-Israel campus groups, including Columbia University Apartheid Divest; “consider” adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism; require students, faculty and staff to complete antisemitism training; and expand its discipline policy to include harassment that occurs off campus or online. 

Barnard will also hire a coordinator to review new allegations of Title VI violations and agreed not to divest from companies that have ties to Israel. 

The complaint, Students Against Antisemitism, Inc. et al v. The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York, filed in district court in New York in February 2024 against Columbia University and Barnard, detailed several instances of antisemitism, including physical assaults of Jewish students. The complaint alleges that faculty members and students routinely referred to Hamas’ Oct.7, 2023 attacks as “awesome” and a “great feat.” 

Barnard also recently expanded its partnership with the Jewish Theological Seminary. Jewish studies courses at JTS — located near Barnard’s Morningside Heights campus — will now count toward Barnard degree requirements, with students able to participate with no additional tuition costs.

Laura Ann Rosenbury, president of Barnard, said in a statement that the settlement “reflects our ongoing commitment to maintaining a campus that is safe, welcoming, and inclusive for all members of our community.” 

Monday’s settlement comes as Barnard — which is closely affiliated with Columbia but has independent administration and affiliation — remains under investigation by the Trump administration for violating Title VI.

Barnard faced several major incidents of antisemitism on its campus during the last academic year. A staff member was assaulted and sent to the hospital in February by anti-Israel demonstrators who stormed the college’s main administrative building and remained there for several hours, chanting “resistance is justified when people are occupied” and “intifada revolution.” 

The demonstration was a response to the school’s decision just days earlier — in its most forceful response to anti-Israel activity on campus to date — to expel two second-semester seniors who disrupted a “History of Modern Israel” class on Columbia’s campus by storming in, banging on drums and distributing posters to students that read “CRUSH ZIONISM.” 

​​Marc Kasowitz of Kasowitz LLP, counsel for the plaintiffs, praised Barnard’s “commitment to take meaningful actions to combat antisemitism demonstrates its leadership in the fight against antisemitism and upholding the rights of Jewish and Israeli students.”

Kasowitz continued, “These commitments are not only the right thing to do, but are essential to creating a welcome and inclusive campus for all members of the Barnard community. I encourage other colleges and universities to do the right thing and follow Barnard’s lead.”

One November afternoon last year, Jackie Junger and Jacqueline Katz, both therapists at a private practice in Dallas, sat down with their colleagues for their weekly team meeting. This one-hour gathering was a lifeline for the therapists, where they could discuss challenges their clients were facing and receive advice from their fellow practitioners. 

When a non-Jewish therapist asked for help better understanding a Jewish client who was “experiencing trauma with everything going on,” Junger and Katz — both Jewish — were eager to offer insight about the surge in antisemitism in the United States, in the hopes of helping their colleague better serve her client. But before Junger, 29, and Katz, 61, could speak, their supervisor, Dr. Dina Hijazi, shut down the conversation. 

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, because you’ll get a one-sided response,” Hijazi told the therapists, according to legal filings. 

The next day, Hijazi emailed the team and asked them to avoid discussing the “Palestine Israel topic” because she has “great pain” around the issue. But no one had mentioned the events in the Middle East at that meeting. Junger and Katz each responded to Hijazi’s note: Why, they wondered, would it be considered “one-sided” for Jewish therapists to speak about their understanding of antisemitism and Jewish trauma?  

Over the next five days, Junger and Katz would see their lives upended after they chose to raise concerns about antisemitism and double standards against Jewish practitioners and clients. 

That’s the key allegation at the heart of a federal lawsuit that Junger and Katz filed last month against D2 Counseling and its co-owners, Hijazi and Rev. Daniel Gowan. The two Jewish therapists claim they were discriminated against for objecting to their supervisors’ handling of antisemitism — and that, ultimately, they faced unlawful retaliation when they were fired days later. On the Monday before Thanksgiving, both received identical voicemails letting them know they had been terminated, saying they were no longer a “good fit” for D2. (An attorney representing Hijazi and Gowan declined to respond to detailed questions, citing the ongoing legal proceedings. The account in this article is based on an interview with Katz and Junger, allegations in their lawsuit and information shared by their lawyer.)

The incident was jarring for both Katz and Junger, they told Jewish Insider this week. But the biggest travesty, they said, is not that they lost their jobs: It’s that Jewish clients at their old practice should no longer expect to receive the highest level of care — because of their religion.

“This Jewish client — I don’t know who it is, obviously, I just know that it’s a Jewish client who is genuinely seeking support for something that they’re having trouble with in their life. It’s real trauma. I think most Jews can appreciate that it’s really traumatic, what’s happening,” Junger told JI. “And they’re not allowed to get competent health care. They have no clue.” 

*****

This case is only a single incident experienced by just two of the nation’s more than 100,000 licensed therapists. But it comes amid what Jewish mental health professionals in the United States have described as an increasingly hostile professional environment, where denunciations of Israel are expected and outright antisemitism is no longer a taboo, particularly after the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attacks in Israel. 

Earlier this year, the state of Illinois formally reprimanded a social worker who had created a blacklist publicly naming “Zionist” therapists. (The clinicians included on the list said it was just a pretext for targeting Jews.) 

In May, Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) warned of a “persistent and pernicious pattern of antisemitism” at the American Psychological Association, the preeminent professional organization for psychologists in the U.S. 

Empathy is supposed to be the central tenet of the mental health field, but compassion and understanding are not always extended to Jewish therapists — or worse, their clients.

“Our role is really to facilitate the discussion, to honor their feelings, and to create a safe space — to create a space that [clients] can communicate what they’re experiencing internally, without any sort of feeling that, ‘I’m going to be shut down or marginalized or not taken seriously,’” Katz explained.  

It was clear to Junger and Katz soon after the Oct. 7 attacks that team conversations about what was happening in the Middle East would be different from other issues they’d been discussing for years. 

“We talk about current events a lot because these things affect our clients,” said Katz. The D2 team had talked about the war in Ukraine soon after it started; abortion access following the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022; and gun control after a mass shooting at a Texas mall in 2023. 

A therapist helping a client work through issues with their sexuality might seek advice from a gay co-worker. Past meetings also included discussions of Mormonism and Islam, according to the complaint filed by Katz and Junger. Hijazi led a conversation about how to help clients who were having an emotional reaction to President Donald Trump’s reelection shortly after it occurred, according to the lawsuit.

“It’s very common to seek peer consultation, supervision from someone who has expertise, whether it’s lived experience or clinical experience,” Junger told JI. “If someone, let’s say, had cancer, and I had a client who’s going through cancer, I might reach out and say, ‘Hey, what would be helpful for me to know?’” 

Three days after the Oct. 7 attacks, when the D2 team gathered as they do each Tuesday, Hijazi and Gowan did not address the recent terror attacks. 

“We were all very shocked that we weren’t going to address the elephant in the room, as it were, and it quickly fell apart because one of my coworkers brought it up. ‘Aren’t we going to talk about what happened? We’re all very upset and suffering here,’” said Katz. “And it was shut down.” 

Lesson learned, according to Katz and Junger: Don’t bring up Israel or Gaza again. It wasn’t an overt order, but the palpable discomfort from Hijazi and Gowan kept a lid on future conversations.

Still, Hijazi’s strong reaction to the conversation about antisemitism a year later, in November 2024, surprised Junger and Katz. No one had mentioned Israel or Gaza. But Hijazi followed up with an email requesting that the “Palestine Israel topic” not be discussed. 

“I have great pain around this as I know some of you do as well,” Hijazi wrote in the email, which was shared with JI. “In order for me to work and be present with my clients I have asked that this be kept out of the noon meeting.” (What Hijazi did not share is that her family is Palestinian — a fact her daughter discussed in an online blog post viewed by JI, but one Hijazi didn’t mention to colleagues.) 

Katz and Junger did not see how a question about the trauma of a Jewish patient in Texas could be extrapolated to extend to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, nor did they understand why Hijazi chose to shut down future discussions of Jewish trauma. Separately, they each responded with lengthy emails, screenshots of which were included in the lawsuit.

“I believe every single one of us has Jewish clients, and the more we understand, the better we can service our clients,” Junger wrote in her email.

Katz took issue with Hijazi letting her own emotions guide the discussion, a therapist no-no. 

“As a managing partner in this practice I think it was essential for you to be able to manage the inquiry without adopting the victim role and personalizing it to your pain,” Katz wrote in another email. “I understand that you were protecting yourself by leaving the room, however the impact was that some of us felt shut down and unheard.” 

The matter only escalated from there, playing out like most modern office dramas: over email, leaving a lengthy digital record. 

Hijazi banned the expression of “political or religious opinions” in the group meetings, under the rationale of “safety in the workplace.” “Emotional safety for the group,” she wrote, “will always come before personal agendas.” 

But Katz and Junger were still unsure what was political about their earlier meeting and decided to press the point about their concern for Jewish clients. “I think your failure to see that this was not a political conversation is a huge blind spot for you,” wrote Katz. Gowan responded by telling her she was “way over the line,” a sentiment Hijazi echoed. 

Over that weekend, on Sunday night, Junger chimed in, too. “I would love some clarification, as I am feeling lots of confusion,” she wrote. “Would wanting more clarity on a Black client experiencing racism violate that policy as well? How about talking about a client who is part of the LGBTQ community and experiencing trauma and discrimination? Are we allowed to talk about their lived experience? Or does this rule only apply to Jewish clients?” 

That was Junger’s final message to her bosses about the matter. Katz chimed in after, saying she had the same questions. 

A day later, they were both fired. 

“It was just outrageous behavior on their part, I think, and so punishing, really. You open your mouth here, and this is what happens to you,” said Katz. “If we weren’t Jewish, [the other therapist] wouldn’t have asked us for supervision. If we weren’t Jewish, we wouldn’t have spoken up. If we weren’t Jewish, we wouldn’t have been let go.”

Their contract required D2 to give them 30 days to finish seeing clients. But they were forced to move to a different office, and asked to pay tens of thousands of dollars stemming from a part of the contract with buyout options and a non-compete clause. (They have refused to pay.)

“I knew antisemitism was on the rise, but to have it so blatant in my face in this way was really shocking. It was honestly a little scary,” said Junger.

*****

Winning an employment discrimination suit is not an easy task. But the lawyers at the Lawfare Project and Winston & Strawn representing Katz and Junger are confident that they have a strong case. 

“It’s very rare to see a case like this, a discrimination retaliation case like this, where the employer’s actions are so brazen,” said Jaclyn Clark, the Lawfare Project attorney who brought the case. “I strongly suspect that the employer in this instance just thought that they could get away with it … So from my standpoint, beyond just shining a light on the issue of antisemitism in the mental health field, the politicization of Jewish trauma and all of those things, is also to put these smaller employers on warning.”

Orly Lobel, an employment law expert at the University of San Diego who looked over the complaint, described it as “a strong case, since it is all documented with email exchanges and there is no pretextual reason for the termination,” she told JI. 

Junger and Katz’s attorneys allege that they faced discrimination as members of a racial minority, leaning on a 1987 Supreme Court ruling as precedent. L. Camille Hébert, a professor at The Ohio State University’s law school, said the race-based argument could be a tougher bar to clear than if the therapists made an argument about religious discrimination. But she noted that the facts laid out in the complaint paint a picture of discrimination.

“If the facts are as alleged, that all subjects were allowed to be addressed in the meetings other than antisemitism, then there might be a cognizable claim of discrimination based on religion.  The defense of ‘workplace safety’ seems not to be a particularly strong one,” Hébert said after reviewing the complaint. 

*****

Jewish therapists aren’t the only ones worried about antisemitism in the field. People seeking mental health care are, too, and Junger and Katz say they are right to be concerned. 

After she was fired by D2, Junger created a list of Jewish therapists in the Dallas area to share with the people in the Jewish community who come to her asking for a referral. Since Oct. 7, she has seen more people seeking out a therapist who understands Jewish issues — and she understands why. 

“Maybe a while ago I would have been like, ‘No, it’s a therapist job to [listen]. They’re not political. It’s OK,’” said Junger. “Now I’m like, ‘I get that.’ It makes sense to want to have safety and know that you have a real safe space to be able to process things that are directly impacting us.”

The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law filed suit in federal court in Massachusetts on Wednesday on behalf of two Jewish students, alleging that the university and a tenured professor violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, including harassment on social media and in mass emails. 

“This is a textbook example of neglect and indifference,” Kenneth Marcus, founder and chairman of the Brandeis Center, said of the lawsuit, shared exclusively with Jewish Insider. “Not only were several antisemitic incidents conducted at the hands of a professor, but MIT’s administration refused to take action on every single occasion,” said Marcus, who served as U.S. assistant secretary of education in the Bush and Trump administrations. 

While the lawsuit, Sussman v. MIT, addresses several antisemitic incidents caused by students, a large portion of the 71-page complaint focuses on alleged antisemitic actions from Michel DeGraff, a tenured linguistics professor. 

The complaint states that through the spring and fall of 2024, DeGraff publicly harassed Lior Alon, an Israeli postdoctoral student, for serving in the Israel Defense Forces — posting Alon’s name and image on social media, and tagging Al Jazeera. The professor then published an article in European newspaper Le Monde in which he singled out the Alon by name, writing that the Israeli, “like many other Zionist counter-protesters, participate in well-rehearsed propaganda that erases the anti-Zionist Jewish students and misrepresents them.” 

As a result, Alon said he was confronted by strangers in various locations, including his child’s daycare and at the grocery store. Alon emailed MIT President Sally Kornbluth expressing fears for his safety and the safety of his family, and requested that the posts be taken down.

Kornbluth — who is the only one of the three college presidents who testified in a now-infamous December 2023 congressional hearing on campus antisemitism who remains in her position — never responded to Alon’s concerns, according to the lawsuit, and no action was taken.

In November 2024, the complaint states that DeGraff harassed another Jewish student by sending a series of mass emails to his entire department, copying Kornbluth and other administrators, accusing the student of having a Jewish “mind infection” and threatening to use him as a “real-life case study” in a class the professor was teaching. 

That same day, flyers were slipped under doors in a dormitory where this student previously lived, targeting him specifically in white lettering on a green band, styled after Hamas headbands, advocating for violence against Jews. 

As a result of the harassment, the student left MIT before completing his Ph.D. program.  

Other instances of antisemitic harassment detailed in the lawsuit include students occupying buildings and disrupting classes with antisemitic chants, students distributing “terror maps” promoting violence at campus locations deemed Jewish and an individual urinating on the Hillel building.

The Massachusetts school was among the 45 universities against which the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights opened Title VI investigations in March. 

Wednesday’s lawsuit comes at a time when many elite universities are acquiescing to the Trump administration’s demands to crack down on the rise of antisemitic activity on campus that began in the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks. MIT, however, joined a lawsuit last month challenging the federal government’s attempt to cut research funding from schools that the administration says have not adequately addressed antisemitism. 

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of the victims of Palestinian terrorist groups on Friday in a case regarding the constitutionality of a U.S. law allowing lawsuits against the Palestinian Authority and Palestine Liberation Organization in American courts over payments to terrorists and their families through the “pay-for-slay” program.

The Supreme Court victory in Fuld v. Palestine Liberation Organization is a hard-fought win for the families, and comes following a decades-long series of efforts by American terror victims and their families to sue the Palestinian groups.

Previously, the Second Circuit had repeatedly ruled that legislation passed by Congress to assert U.S. jurisdiction over the PLO and PA, designed to allow victims to sue the groups, was unconstitutional.

Those rulings prompted a back-and-forth between the courts and Congress, which has repeatedly passed legislation designed to address the issues raised by the courts and re-establish a path for terror victims to use the PLO and PA.

The Supreme Court on Friday ruled that the most recent of those bills, the Promoting Security and Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act (PSJVTA), which stated that the PLO and PA would be subject to U.S. jurisdiction if they continued the terror payments or carried out activities in the United States, was constitutional, reversing the Second Circuit’s decision.

In an opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court ruled that the PSJVTA was reasonable, tying jurisdiction to PLO and PA activities involving the U.S. and sensitive foreign policy matters in which Congress and the executive branch should enjoy broad discretion.

He wrote that the Constitution allows the federal government authority inside and outside the United States, particularly in cases involving U.S. nationals attacked outside U.S. borders.

The case was named for Ari Fuld, who in 2018 was stabbed to death by a Palestinian terrorist whose family subsequently received payments from the PA. Fuld’s wife was one of several family members of terror victims who were party to the suit.

“This is a big deal indeed,” Hillel Fuld, an American Israeli columnist and Ari’s brother, said on X. “Now any American citizen affected by Palestinian terror can sue the Palestinian authority in American courts.  Pretty unprecedented! Wow.”

“Ari continues to change the world even after his death,” Fuld continued.

The Supreme Court’s decision should also allow a previous $650 million judgement in the case Sokolow v. Palestine Liberation Organization, which was struck down by the Second Circuit, to move ahead.

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in a concurring opinion that the court should have gone further in its decision, saying that he is “skeptical” that groups such as the PLO and PA are entitled to “any constitutional rights at all, let alone qualify as ‘person[s]’ for purposes of the Fifth Amendment.” Thomas also cast doubt on the idea that the Fifth Amendment restrains in any way Congress’ authority to expand U.S. jurisdiction beyond U.S. borders.

Justice Neil Gorsuch joined Thomas’s concurrence in part.

“It’s a big win for the plaintiffs,” Mark Pinkert, an attorney for Holtzman Vogel who filed an amicus brief on behalf of a slew of Jewish organizations, told Jewish Insider. “It’s a very big win for victims of terrorism. It’s a really good day.”

He said the case should bring to an end the long-running battle over whether U.S. courts have jurisdiction in these cases.

“For the Sokolow plaintiffs, who already got a jury award, that should be it, and that should allow them to have that jury award reinstated,” Pinkert continued. “Now there’s questions about how they collect on it, but as far as having a judgment in hand that says, ‘You owe me $600 million,’ it should be the nail in the coffin.”

The Fuld case will still need to proceed to trial, but he said it’s “not a stretch to say the Fuld plaintiffs” will be able to successfully argue their case, given the results in Sokolow.

Pinkert explained that in their decision, the justices largely declined to address broader constitutional questions about the boundaries of the Fifth Amendment raised during oral arguments, only declaring that this case did not violate it.