Federal court revives antisemitism lawsuit involving Los Angeles Unified ethnic studies

A group of Jewish parents and teachers are celebrating a recent court ruling that will allow them to refile a lawsuit against the United Teachers Los Angeles union and creators of the controversial “liberated” ethnic studies curriculum that some Los Angeles Unified teachers use. 

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed a lower court ruling that had dismissed the case, Concerned Jewish Parents and Teachers of Los Angeles v. Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium. 

The panel also voided about $600,000 in legal fees that U.S. District Court Judge Fernando Olguin had awarded the defendants’ attorneys. The court issued an eight-page ruling on Sept. 4. Los Angeles Unified was a minor defendant in the suit.

While the appeals court agreed with Olguin that the plaintiffs had not shown they were personally harmed by the curriculum, the court preserved the plaintiffs’ right to resubmit an amended complaint for a future trial on the merits. 

The ruling sets the stage for renewed litigation over content in those Los Angeles Unified courses that have continued to use elements of the contested “liberated” curriculum. The enactment this year of Assembly Bill 715, which extends protections from discrimination based on religion and national identity to cover textbooks, materials and teacher training programs, could benefit the plaintiffs’ case, according to their attorneys.

“The case took several years, but we stood firm because we knew the initial ruling was wrong; Jews are protected from a public trampling of their rights, just as every other category of Americans are,” said Lori Lowenthal Marcus, legal director of The Deborah Project. The public interest law firm filed the lawsuit on behalf of two Jewish Los Angeles Unified teachers and parents, who are part of Concerned Jewish Parents and Teachers of Los Angeles.

In a press release, the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium said the reversal will not thwart its “unwavering commitment to developing ethnic studies that is anti-racist and liberatory” for California classrooms.

“The ongoing litigation is part of a broad, coordinated attack on academic freedom that seeks to silence educators and censor what students can learn about the complexities of our shared history,” the consortium said. “Developing educational resources and advocating for marginalized voices are core expressions protected by the First Amendment.” 

UTLA did not respond to a request for comment.

Roots of a long-standing conflict

In their lawsuit, filed in 2022, the Jewish Los Angeles Unified teachers and parents group alleged that the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium’s “overtly racist and antisemitic teaching material . . . discriminates against a segment of California residents on the basis of their religious beliefs.” 
The authors of the “liberated” curriculum — mainly instructors and professors in ethnic studies departments at California State University and the University of California — included anti-Zionism and opposition to Israel as a key element of their American ethnic studies curriculum. The curriculum characterizes Israel as a modern prototype of 19th century European colonialism, which the plaintiffs say is inaccurate as well as prejudiced. 

The lawsuit said United Teachers Los Angeles and then-president Cecily Myart-Cruz, along with two members of the LAUSD-UTLA Ethnic Studies Committee, promoted adopting the instructional materials in high school ethnic studies courses, even though the district had not adopted the curriculum. Gov. Gavin Newsom, and the Legislature, in approving a 2021 law mandating an as-yet unfunded ethnic studies mandate, disavowed it.

Advocates of the “liberated” ethnic studies approach had shaped the original version of the state’s Model Ethnic Studies Curriculum Framework. State leaders, including State Superintendent of Instruction Tony Thurmond and State Board of Education President Linda Darling-Hammond, rejected it and in 2019 ordered that contested sections be largely rewritten.

The lawsuit alleged that the parent plaintiffs and their children are “imminently threatened” by the “liberated” curriculum and are “being forced . . . to choose between protecting the sincerely held religious beliefs of their children and availing themselves of their legal right to send their children to a California public school.”

In a November 2024 decision, Olguin dismissed the lawsuit, characterizing the complaint “as difficult to understand and contains a morass of largely irrelevant — and sometimes contradictory — allegations.” He said that plaintiffs failed to demonstrate specifically “with any degree of clarity precisely what plaintiffs believe defendants have done or, more importantly, how plaintiffs have been harmed.”

Olguin concluded that the plaintiffs’ complaint raised significant First Amendment concerns over prior restraint of speech.

“In effect, plaintiffs seek to litigate the propriety and legality of a potential curriculum with which they disagree,” he wrote. “It would be of great concern for the educational project and for academic freedom if every offended party could sue every time they did not like a curriculum or the way it was taught.”

Olguin cited California’s “anti-SLAPP law,” which awards damages to discourage meritless lawsuits intended to intimidate defendants from exercising their speech rights. It stands for Anti-Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation. After concluding it would be unlikely that the Jewish parents would win the case, he dismissed the lawsuit and granted the defendants lawyers fees of about $600,000.

At the time, defendants celebrated Olguin’s decision.

“This is a win for liberatory critical ethnic studies and academic freedom. It’s a testament to the power of solidarity and liberation, whether that be in South Los Angeles or in Gaza,” Theresa Montaño, a professor of Chicano and Chicana Studies at Cal State Northridge and a defendant in the case, said in 2022.

Mark Kleiman, an attorney for the defendants, told teachers on the press call at the time, “The moral of this story for people in the other school districts is, you don’t have to be afraid of these kinds of attacks. Given half a chance in a fair courtroom, you will be vindicated.” 

The celebration proved premature. In their ruling, appeals court judges Kenneth K. Lee, Patrick J. Bumatay and Jennifer Sung agreed with Olguin’s decision that the plaintiffs had not shown harm. But they reversed Olguin by allowing the plaintiffs to file an amended complaint, and canceled the requirement that plaintiffs pay defendants’ legal fees. 

Lowenthal Marcus confirmed that the Deborah Project will refile an amended lawsuit. “It has not been hard finding people who have been harmed in the past; getting people to come forward for fear of retribution has been more difficult,” she said.

Major settlement of Bay Area antisemitism lawsuit

The ruling was the second legal victory involving California education for the Deborah Project this summer. On May 26, the project attorneys and the Sequoia Union High School District in Redwood City reached a far-reaching settlement to end a 2024 lawsuit brought by Jewish families whose children attended Woodside and Atherton high schools. The families alleged that the district “has a long history of tolerating casual antisemitism on its campuses.”

“Students and faculty have openly joked about Nazis and the Holocaust, while certain teachers have peddled antisemitic falsehoods about Middle East history without facing consequences. District leadership has consistently turned a blind eye to such behavior,” the lawsuit alleged. 

Marcus, the legal director for the Deborah Project, called the settlement “a model in litigation we and others are pursuing in antisemitic discrimination cases across the country.” 

Among the settlement’s provisions:

• The “Israel-Palestine Conflict” will fall under the district’s “Controversial Issue” policy requiring teachers to discuss issues impartially, with adequate and appropriate factual information and without promoting any point of view.
• A neutral decision-maker selected by the plaintiffs and the district will resolve disputes about teaching materials and antisemitic incidents. That person will also review supplementary materials on the conflict before use in classrooms.
• Antisemitism training, also chosen jointly by plaintiffs and the district, will be mandatory and teach about all forms of antisemitism “from both the Left and the Right, both focused on individual Jews and on the Jewish state,” according to Marcus.

This story was originally published by EdSource.