(JEWISH GROUP) Citing safety, dozens of Jewish families are leaving Oakland public schools
Lindsay and Simon Ferber’s kindergartener was very excited about pajama day in November at Montclair Elementary School in Oakland. He planned to wear his new blue-and-white Hanukkah pajamas decorated with menorahs.
But his parents had reservations. “I was like no, absolutely not,” his mother thought to herself.
She and her husband told J. they worried that their son’s innocent clothing choice might inadvertently make him a target for antisemitic comments from students, parents and teachers amid the spike in hatred toward Israel and Jews since the Oct. 7 massacre that started the Israel-Hamas war.
His dad talked him into picking different pajamas.
Since Oct. 27, when the Oakland Educators Association teachers union issued a harshly anti-Israel statement that condemned the “75 year long illegal military occupation of Palestine” and called Israel an “apartheid state” with a government that uses “genocidal rhetoric and policies” against Palestinians, many Jewish parents within the Oakland Unified School District have seriously questioned the safety of their children at school.
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Although as one living in SoCal, what happens in the Bay area is never a surprise to me.
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A demonstrator wearing an Oakland teachers union sweatshirt protests outside the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces Gala in San Carlos on Nov. 5, 2023.
(another parent) added that one of his son’s teachers displayed a “Free Palestine” poster in the classroom with the words “from the river to the sea” in full view.
“A poster calling for, essentially, the eradication of Israel,” he said. His wife submitted a complaint to the school, pressuring the teacher to take down the poster. The teacher responded by putting up new posters with “more inflammatory language,” he said.
The more things change, the more they stay the same 