The media are filled with news about anti-Israel and antisemitic activism, including violence, on American college campuses. However, according to Lori Lowenthal Marcus, legal director of The Deborah Project, “what’s at least as important is the indoctrination of pre-kindergarten through grade 12, starting before they’re 5 years old.”
The Deborah Project (TDP) is a public interest law firm dedicated since 2016 to protecting Jewish civil rights in the American educational system.
Interviewed by JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin at the inaugural JNS International Policy Conference at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in Jerusalem on April 28, Lowenthal Marcus called “woke and leftist ideology” a “huge factor” in antisemitism on U.S. university campuses and in schools, starting at a very young age.
Preschoolers are “learning with coloring books with ABCs that include ‘P’ is for Palestine and ‘J’ is for Jihad,” she said. “This is what very young children are learning from the person in front of the room. When you’re that age, the person in front of the room is the authority, and you learn that the Jews and Jewish state are equal.”
Several factors have allowed the situation to continue and even worsen. “American Jews, for the most part, really lack information about Jewish history and the Jewish state, so they don’t have the support system that they should have,” Lowenthal Marcus explained. “The kids go to school and learn about a country called ‘Palestine’ that’s bordered by Egypt and Jordan and Syria and Lebanon. That’s what they’re told, and that’s an experience that I had with one of our clients.
“They’re told that in the quiz, that’s how you have to fill it in. If you get it wrong by the teacher’s standards, then you get marked down. It’s forced speech about the erasure of the Jewish state.”
The firebrand lawyer shared shocking examples of cases that The Deborah Project has taken on to defend traumatized Jewish families whose children have suffered extreme antisemitic abuse at American public schools.
“The worst example I have experienced thus far—and I’m a very tough person, but this moved me to tears—was an Israeli American student who started middle school in 2023, and kids started picking on him right away. I don’t know why, maybe because of his accent. After Oct. 7, he was bullied, and it became physical aggression against this 12-year-old boy. Kids would stand up in the auditorium and say, ‘Everyone hates the Jews,’ ‘The Jews of baby killers,’ and nothing was done. There were lots of meetings, but meetings are meaningless if there is no action, if there is no enforcement.”
“And don’t tell me, you school administrators, that you have done so much for the Jewish families when you met with them at least four times in the last month. No, you must take action,” she asserted. “Finally, this boy was surrounded and told to get on his knees and apologize for being a Jew. This is 2024—it was last spring—in America, and the school district did nothing.”
The school is in a prosperous Philadelphia suburb. “The Jewish Federation of Philadelphia was called in to help,” Lowenthal Marcus recalled. “Finally, a person from Federation called me and said, ‘I can’t help this family. We need someone like you.’”
The Deborah Project then sent a strong letter to the school, making it clear that it would share the story with the media.
“We ended up with a very good result for this family, which was in deep crisis. The family was traumatized. The result was that the district public school—in other words, taxpayer money—is being used to pay for this boy’s 7th-12th grade high school years and for his two older sisters at a Jewish day school.”
Tuition at a Jewish day school is expensive, “but they wouldn’t change their policies,” Lowenthal Marcus said, adding that the school administrators said she should be pleased about getting the money. “I told them, ‘You failed. You didn’t do the right thing . … I’ll be back next year for the next Jewish family that you fail.’”
The court is the only solution
“We have to go to court,” Lowenthal Marcus stated, insisting that there is no other solution for now. “The Deborah Project only goes to court. We must have judicial orders with enforcement mechanisms, but we will lose some of those cases, and we have to keep going. The NAACP lost for years before they were able to construct a legal system that recognizes the civil rights of minorities, and Jews have to do the same thing.”
In a separate interview with JNS, Lowenthal Marcus noted the different backgrounds related to the causes of antisemitism in places like Philadelphia versus California. In the former, she said, “It isn’t really Islam. It’s the attraction to a powerful, strong, hateful ideology. In California, it’s very woke white folks, for the most part.”
She added, “The teachers’ unions are bringing this stuff into the schools, and by this stuff I mean the curriculum, the additional instructional materials. So, it’s not in the actual standard curriculum, which must be approved by the school district. It’s what the teacher views and brings into the classroom without having anyone else vet it.”
“One client told me the teachers spoke about the Gaza war, but not one of them spoke about Oct. 7. They all began with when Israel invaded Gaza.”
‘Don’t make a bigger deal out of it!’
As for colleges, this reporter recalls covering the campus scene extensively in Toronto in the years between 2007 and 2011. Indeed, Israel Apartheid Week was launched in 2005 at the University of Toronto, and in 2007, a group called High Schools Against Israeli Apartheid was formed; minors were attending closed-door sessions. The situation was already extremely disturbing, although the Jewish establishment organizations were claiming that they had the situation under control.
“In my experience, for a long time, the major Jewish organizations’ position was: Don’t pay attention. Don’t make a bigger deal out of it! You’ll give them what they want if you protest or confront them or write something about it. Just leave it alone. We’ll do our thing,” Lowenthal Marcus told JNS.
“I can understand why people would think that would work, but I don’t understand decades of thinking that will work. The mainstream Jewish organizations aren’t dealing so much directly with universities. They like to have good relationships with the municipalities. It was a horror show last year.”
Since the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023, she said, “they’re talking about it, but they’re not doing anything about it. They don’t know what to do. I am not a diplomat, but I do not understand trying to make nice to people, no matter what they do.”
As for public schools, Lowenthal Marcus acknowledged that “it’s a tough situation. Not everything is a legal violation, even if it feels terrible,” such as when a child makes rude remarks on the school bus.
“Discipline has gone out the window. There’s restorative justice. They sit in a circle and share their feelings,” she said, citing another outrageous case in California, where a teacher saw a girl standing outside the door and asked if she was Jewish.
She answered in the affirmative, and the teacher said he could tell because of her nose. He then asked what she was doing there, and she said she was waiting for her friends, to which he responded, “I’m so glad you have friends because you’re Jewish.”
The student complained to the administration, but no disciplinary action was taken against the teacher. Instead, “they had a restorative justice session,” Lowenthal Marcus said. “The teacher and the student, with the principal and another person present, had a discussion about it, and she ended up saying it was OK. What else is the student going to say, with the principal and teacher present?”
This wasn’t an isolated incident, she argued. “It’s very common.”
Lori Lowenthal Marcus talks to JNS Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Tobin on April 30, 2025.
‘I certainly have hope’
Regarding the boy who was bullied in Philadelphia, the Jewish Federation “tried to push the school to do the right thing. They did what they could, and they recognized that they were limited and came to me.”
Besides The Deborah Project, several other organizations are helping Jewish students who face discrimination, such as The Lawfare Project, the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and StandWithUs.
“One thing I will say that has been very positive is that there are hundreds and maybe thousands of parent-teacher WhatsApp chat groups that have popped up all over the country,” Lowenthal Marcus said. Until now, “Jews have not been united before in this way.”
Lowenthal Marcus is hopeful about the future of America, despite all the problems. She referred to the antisemitism in the United States in the first half of the 20th century, when there were quotas for Jews wishing to enroll at universities, and Jews fleeing Nazi Europe were denied entry. However, the tide turned, and Jews thrived in America.
“So, I’m hopeful that there will be a course correction. Things have gone too far with this identity politics,” she said.
“I’ll tell you another reason I’m hopeful: The DEI stuff is terrible. It’s an excuse for laziness; it really is, and it hurts everybody. It doesn’t help anyone. And the fact that all these huge corporations embraced it, they’re out of their minds. Now, a lot of companies are scaling back on the DEI stuff. Am I positive? No. But I certainly have hope.
“It’s counterintuitive for people to see Jews as needing civil rights protection,” she continued. “They don’t understand it, and the questions they ask, like what kind of harm did they suffer? They don’t ask those questions when it’s about homophobia, racism, etc., etc. There’s a lot of hypocrisy, but we’re trying to create a new area of civil rights litigation that protects the Jews. The blacks had to do it; it wasn’t given to them. They lost and lost, and they figured it out. We’ll do the same for the Jews, and at some point, I hope we won’t need it as much.”
She added, “One thing that I know is that no one is going to make it easier for us. They’re not going to change the rules to make it easier for us. So, we Jews will have to continue to accomplish, succeed, do well in school. We’ve always had to be tougher.”
Lowenthal Marcus believes that the action taken by U.S. President Donald Trump to fight antisemitism, especially on campuses, such as deportations and the removal of grants to universities, will improve the situation, although she acknowledged many, including Jews, are furious about it.
“They’re afraid they’re going to hate us more. I think if [former President Joe] Biden had done it, they would be cheering, so it’s also political,” she said.
