The Settlement That Admits Antisemitism Is Real

The ideology still remains in the classroom and in the minds of many.

Hi all,

When I screened Killing America at the Guild Theatre in Menlo Park two years ago, parent Diana Blum and others invited Menlo‑Atherton High School principal Karl Losekoot and the Sequoia Union High School District Board. Nobody came.

Instead, Principal Losekoot blasted out a school‑wide email denouncing the film as “sensational propaganda at its worst” and “completely ridiculous,” a verdict he reached from the trailer alone.

The Menlo‑Atherton High School newspaper then filed multiple copyright claims to kill the trailer’s distribution. YouTube and Vimeo pulled it down. I responded by releasing the film in full, and the same student journalists, who clearly had not been taught about the Fair Use doctrine, filed more bogus claims, shutting the film down.

The forces protecting the ideology I was documenting mobilized faster against a 38‑minute film than they ever had against the antisemitism happening in their own hallways. That tells you almost everything you need to know about the moment we are in.

Now that same district has quietly admitted that something was deeply wrong. When discrimination is inflicted on a particular group, it creates a deficit: all groups are no longer being treated equally. The beauty of the American judicial system is that there are recourses to erase that deficit and restore equal treatment under the law.

Yesterday’s settlement agreement between the Sequoia Union High School District and a group of parents is more than a local school dispute quietly resolved. Led by the law firm, Ropes & Gray, and The Deborah Project, this settlement is one of the clearest acknowledgments yet that antisemitism in our public schools is real, systemic, and can no longer be brushed aside with slogans about “equity” and “inclusion.”

This is a vindication of sorts, especially for the parents. It was beyond unethical how folks like Principal Losekoot and the Board dismissed allegations of antisemitism so casually. If it had been a racially motivated attack against a black or latino student, would the parents of those students been gaslit?

Under the agreement, Sequoia must, for the first time, explicitly name antisemitism as a prohibited form of discrimination in its policies. Those policies must adopt a definition that finally admits what too many educators have pretended not to see: that attacks on the Jewish people, including denying their right to self‑determination or holding Israel to standards demanded of no other nation, can constitute antisemitism.

The settlement goes further. The “Israel‑Palestine Conflict” is now formally designated as a “controversial issue,” meaning that any teacher discussing it must present it impartially, provide adequate factual information, and refrain from turning personal politics into classroom doctrine. Teachers must warn students against drawing conclusions from too little information and are explicitly barred from advocating their own opinions in these discussions.

In plain terms, the burden is put back on students to decide what they think, and the teacher‑activist model is pushed out.

As I documented in Killing America, much of the teaching material on the Israel‑Palestine conflict was inaccurate at best. The settlement seeks to prevent this by requiring all such materials to be submitted for pre‑clearance to a neutral decision‑maker jointly chosen by parents and the district. This same person will resolve disputes over whether a lesson or incident crosses the line into antisemitism.

It is not a perfect solution, but the district made this necessary by dismissing and ignoring antisemitism claims for years. I have seen the documentation of those incidents myself. It was so extensive that I never reached the end.

You can read the full settlement document here for all the details.

This settlement was, in a sense, a forced confession. The families who fought for this deserve their victory. Whether the district means it is another question entirely.

When I first heard the news last night, my first thought was, What about the elephant in the room, ethnic studies?

I am black, jewish, and deaf. By the rules of the diversity industry, I should be the perfect symbol of what their ideology celebrates. (Ironically, it was a nearly all-black crew that made the film.) Instead, my work was treated as a scandal, because it documented something the ideology could not admit: an educational environment in which Jewish students were reduced to their white skin and told that their “whiteness” placed them on the wrong side of history.

This is what happens when you build a school system not around the individual dignity of every student, but around a hierarchy of oppressors and oppressed. Once you decide that one’s moral standing comes from the group identity rather than the individual character, you do not eliminate injustice, you merely state that justice is tribal.

Ethnic studies, as implemented across California, pushes variations of this oppressor-oppressed model grounded in liberation ideology, and it has given antisemitism its intellectual and moral cover. Within that framework, Jewish students are placed in the “white” box. Their history as a persecuted people is erased. Their ancestral identity is flattened into a racial category of convenience.

But Jews are far from the only ones harmed by this. The American, the individual, is most harmed. Anytime you see the word “studies” — black studies, chicano studies, ethnic studies — you are looking at the institutionalized study of victimization. I have never opposed teaching history more honestly and completely. My work never shies away from the horrors of the past. But I will always oppose any curriculum whose organizing principle is grievance, because the only thing the study of victimization produces is tribalism. And tribalism is the worst lesson to teach young people who live in greater freedom and material comfort than any generation in human history.

The worthy victory of the settlement fixes the district. The parents who brought this case did what the system refused to do on its own. But the ideology still remains in the classroom and in the minds of many. That is the next fight, and it is on us to follow the example of these parents.

Best,

Eli