CDE Files Lawsuit Against OUSD (Oakland Unified School District)

Over the last two years, Piedmont Unified School District has seen an influx of Jewish students transferring from Oakland Unified School District citing anti-semitism, with over 30 families transferring to PUSD after the first semester of the 2023-24 school year. The California Department of Education ruled Oct. 20, 2025 that OUSD had created a discriminatory environment for Jewish students and staff.

A Bay Area attorney Marleen Sacks submitted the complaint on May 6, 2024, according to the CDE’s decision. Sacks is also suing OUSD for anti-semitism. The complaint to the CDE focuses on district material for Arab-American History Month which had maps that did not include Israel. 

The lawsuit, filed by the Oakland Jewish Alliance (OJA) and Sacks, focuses on OUSD not fully investigating anti-semitic incidents in the 60 days after they were reported, as mandated by California law.

“[Sacks] is a lawyer who’s been stepping up to kind of aggregate all of the different complaints and put it into one larger document. It shows the extent of what’s happening with this discrimination,” said an anonymous OUSD employee and mother of two OUSD students.

OJA is an organization founded after Oct. 7, 2023, a time when there was an increase in Jewish hate in Oakland, and around the country, according to OJA member JT Mates-Muchin, who works on issues of anti-semitism within schools.

“There were two main incidents that are large factors in the lawsuit,” Mates-Muchin said. “One was that they were flying a Palestinian flag at Fremont High School and another one was in Nov. or Dec. of 2023, when the union called a teach-in, which is essentially taking class time to divert the lesson to teach about Palestine, in a way that is completely one-sided and did not consider Israel at all.”

OJA originally started at the Beth-Jacob Congregation in Oakland, but has grown to include members from various local synagogues and members of the Jewish community to advocate for Israel’s right to exist and to fight against anti-semitism.

“[The flag and the teach-in] are the big pieces of the lawsuit. The school district should have been investigating and finding out who did this and why they did this, and then doing things to make sure that that kind of thing does not continue to happen in the school,” Mates-Muchin said.

Some families felt that these incidents were not being treated seriously by the district, and submitted inter-district transfer (IDT) forms to be released from OUSD, including PHS freshman Naomi Levy’s family.

“I left Edna Brewer at the end of my seventh grade year because the school district had been making a lot of claims and putting out a lot of things that were pretty anti-semitic,” Levy said. “Say one of the teachers at your school is somebody who has their own biases around Jewish people or is anti-semitic, agrees with the things that the district is saying, and teaches that in their lesson. It can be scary.”

Levy left at the end of the 2023-2024 school year. Approximately 30 families left OUSD earlier, in Jan. 2024, because of anti-semitism in the district, according to Mates-Muchin. Families are still considering leaving OUSD because of anti-semitism.

“I think [people leaving OUSD] has to do with teachers wearing keffiyehs to showcase their support for the Palestinians, and taking it so far that it becomes anti-Israel and anti-Jewish. There is a way to be pro-Palestinian people and pro-Israeli people and pro peace, instead of pro the destruction of Israel,” said PMS math teacher and OJA member Karen Bloom. 

“The destruction of Israel, which is the only homeland for the Jewish people, means the destruction of the Jewish people.”

PHS alumnus Dahlia Saffouri said that wearing keffiyehs had become a symbol of solidarity for Palestine, which is where her grandfather immigrated from.

“I think there needs to be a distinction: someone being pro-Palestine does not mean they’re being antisemitic or anti-Israel,” Saffouri said. “I think that being Palestinian does not make you antisemitic.”

Bloom said that a significant number of students are experiencing anti-semitism in ethnic studies courses in OUSD schools.

“Students are experiencing anti-zionism in Liberated Ethnic Studies specifically, where they’re talking about a bunch of different libels or false statements about Israel, and turning it into a worldview,” Bloom said. “That anti-zionism turns into anti-semitism because it delegitimizes Israel and it delegitimizes every Jew who is connected to Israel.”

PHS does not use the Liberated Ethnic Studies curriculum, or Constructive Ethnic Studies, which is another curriculum that Bloom said does not follow an anti-semitic and anti-zionist narrative.

“I left Montera because of an [English] teacher who put up anti-semitic posters,” said freshman Aodhan Brubaker, who transferred after seventh grade into PUSD schools. “It took forever for the school to actually do anything about it, and I had to be in the office during my English period. I didn’t feel welcomed.”

The teacher Brubaker mentioned was no longer working at Montera Middle School as of Dec. 6, 2023. The posters put up by that teacher was the type of action that the OEA would have protected, according to their Nov. 6, 2023 resolution, which said that OEA leadership will support teachers that are “reprimanded for teaching about Palestinian liberation in their classrooms.” It also resolved to publicize educational materials for teachers, like the resource Teach Palestine.

“Major incidents such as the “teach in” and hard-copy materials that were shared with teachers, were done by the Oakland Education Association without authorization by the District, and in fact, they were expressly disallowed by the District,” OUSD Director of Communications John Sasaki said.

According to its website, the mission of Teach Palestine is to support educators bringing in curriculum about Palestine into the classroom.

The OEA (teacher’s union) continues to promote an anti-Israel narrative, which trickles down to the classroom. Teachers and administrators are resistant to really unpack their role in cultivating an environment that’s leading to Jewish families feeling unwelcome and unsafe,” said

Pamela Schwartz, a mother of two OUSD students.

The anonymous employee said both she and her children feel unsafe in OUSD.

“I think there’s been a lot of systemic anti-semitism in OUSD. It’s been blatantly obvious since Hamas’s attack on Israel how a lot of teachers feel about Israel, and then how that translates to how they feel about Jewish students,” the anonymous employee said. “I felt like it was so unfair to have to go to work somewhere where your identity was put on trial every single day.”

Both Levy and Schwartz said that they were concerned about OUSD teachers that were a part of OEA promoting their own bias.

“I think a lot of people in the teachers union just had their own biases against people,” Levy said. “At the time, and even now, I feel like it was trending to kind of say that you supported Free Palestine, but nobody knows what that means. A lot of people that were uneducated think that means Jewish people are bad because they think Israel’s bad, even though there’s no correlation.”

Both Levy and Brubaker said that their transfer to PUSD was positive.

“We’re really happy that we’re considered a district that our Jewish families feel safe to bring their students to, and we want to continue to hold that,” said PUSD Director of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging Jean Takazawa. “The families and the students [that have transferred] that I talk to have been having positive experiences.

Saffouri said that supporting Palestine and not the Israeli government does not have to be anti-semitic.

“We need to remember that Hamas and the Israeli government are separate from the people, and the people are not in charge of what the governments do,” Saffouri said. “There are definitely people that support those political organizations, but that is not the whole of people who are Jewish, or people who are Arab or Palestinian.”

According to Mates-Muchin, anti-semitism in OUSD has often gone unnoticed by people who are not connected with Israel or Palestine. “For the non Jewish people and people who don’t understand or don’t have a relationship to either Israel or Palestine, I feel like they can go through without being affected [by anti-semitism] at all,” Mates-Muchin said.

Despite the CDE complaint and lawsuit, parents of students in OUSD are not optimistic about change happening in OUSD.

“I have been deeply questioning whether OUSD is a place where we belong and the rise of antisemitism is just one part of it,” Schwartz said. In a statement shared by Sasaki, OUSD has said it will begin training in Dec. to respond to anti-semitism.