How the California Ethnic Studies Curriculum Harms Israel and the Jewish People

Lori Lowenthal Marcus is a lawyer in private practice. She is also the Legal Director of The Deborah Project, a public interest law firm that represents people who are discriminated against in educational settings because they are Jewish and/or pro-Israel.

In the case filed by The Deborah Project on May 12, 2020 in federal court in Los Angeles, Concerned Jewish Parents and Teachers of Los Angeles, et al. v. Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium, et al., the firm seeks to stop a Consortium of ideologically-driven educators and its allies who are proselytizing and training LA school district teachers to use teaching materials that are virulently hostile to the Jewish state. The materials include descriptions, as if fact, of Israel as an illegitimate state, one founded on ethnic cleansing, committed to genocide, and maintained as an apartheid state.  All Israelis are smeared as “white colonial” oppressors who steal Palestinians land and homes. These materials are being directed at public school children from pre-kindergarten to high school seniors.

This is just one of many cases currently being handled by The Deborah Project; the law firm is fighting antisemitism in many different manifestations in many different kinds of academic settings.

Lori began her legal career in the late 1980’s as a litigator in a large national law firm. Her practice consisted primarily of representing media clients in First Amendment cases.  She graduated from Harvard Law School, has two masters’ from Bryn Mawr College, and received her B.A. from Brandeis University.

While raising her four children, Lori founded an international Zionist organization, Z STREET.  When the IRS pushed aside Z STREET’s application for tax-exempt status, she successfully sued the IRS for viewpoint discrimination. During and following the seven years of the Z STREET litigation, Lori spent nearly a dozen years as a journalist covering Israel, the Middle East, and the Jewish diaspora, particularly the rising tide of antisemitism on U.S. college campuses.

Read her latest piece in the Wall Street Journal: “California Parents Say No to Anti-Semitic Ethnic Studies“