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A lawsuit filed this summer in the state of Washington paints a devastating picture of one Jewish teenager’s unfolding nightmare of anti-Semitic torment and abuse at the hands of her classmates.
The girl—a freshman during the 2023-2024 school year at Nathan Hale High School, a public school in the Seattle area—was ostracized, spat upon, targeted with anti-Semitic slurs and swastikas and beset by threats of physical violence. Instead of protecting her—and discipling the Jew haters who had her in their sights—school administrators stood by and let it happen.
“The Nathan Hale High School curriculum offers students a balanced educational experience focusing upon developing critical thinking and communication skills so that our students become members of a responsible, democratic citizenry,” states the school’s website, which also claims that “Trust, respect, decency, and equity throughout the school community are hallmarks of our building culture.”
But for one Jewish student at Nathan Hale, the experience of school was anything but decent.
“I never, ever thought in my worst nightmares could I have imagined (my daughter) would be dealing with this sort of thing,” said the student’s mother, who along with her daughter, is identified only by initials in the complaint.
According to the lawsuit, filed against Seattle Public Schools by her parents, the student, identified as MKL, began experiencing severe harassment following Hamas’s October 7, 2023 unprovoked attack on Israel.
It began with verbal threats and abuse from classmates of the girl who urged her to “kill herself” because she is Jewish. Swastikas started appearing around the school.
“She was hearing things like, ‘Hitler’s plan should have worked,’ and ‘I hate the Jews,’ ‘you should kill yourself,’” the mother recounted to a local news station.
MKL continued to face anti-Semitic harassment and threats throughout the school year and reported these to Nathan Hale Principal Dr. William Jackson and Vice Principal Makela Steward-Monroe, but the administrators trusted with her care did virtually nothing to stop the attacks which only escalated due to their inaction.
When students at the school organized a walkout protest in support of Palestine, MKL was surrounded by her classmates and spat upon.
“A student threatened to jump her if she wore Hanukkah pajamas to school one day… There was a group of students surrounding her and ganging up on her, and while they were talking to her, spit in her face,” her mother recounted.
MKL was a member of the school softball team and one of only a handful of visibly Jewish students on campus. Swastikas began appearing in school bathrooms and on school property, often accompanied by the slogan “Free Palestine.” It was clear to MKL that she was being specifically targeted—she discovered a swastika on the bench in the softball dugout of her school’s stadium where she was known to keep her things during games.
When she brought the hate symbol to the attention of an assistant coach, he claimed that it “didn’t look like a swastika.”
When her class read the Holocaust memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, MKL found a swastika drawn on her folder. Students laughed at the book’s descriptions of the horrors visited on the Jews. One student commented, “the bad thing about this book is that Hitler didn’t finish.”
Even outside of school, MKL couldn’t escape the harassment. The Nathan Hale Muslim Student Association’s Instagram account targeted her with derogatory messages and students created a TikTok video falsely labeling her a racist.
The freshman’s family repeatedly asked school administrators to intervene and stop the abuse but their pleas fell on deaf ears.
“He [the school’s principal] didn’t do anything to make it different despite how many times my daughter was in there crying about the numerous times that she was being harassed, told to shut up, called names,” the mother described.
School administrators “never attempted to mitigate this hostile environment for (the student) and other Jewish students, including not taking the cursory step of emailing the student body to address the swastikas appearing all over campus,” states the complaint.
The administration’s failure to discipline the anti-Semitic persecutors only made them bolder in tormenting their victim.
On May 22, 2024, the lawsuit alleges, MKL’s tormentors repeatedly tried to get her to leave her classes and lure her into the hallway. When one of her teachers grew concerned enough to lock the door to keep the freshman safe, a group of approximately 20 students gathered outside and banged on the door while screaming anti-Semitic slurs and threatening her with violence. Unable to get through the locked door, the attackers continued to bombard MKL with texts threatening physical assault as she cowered in the classroom.
In terror she texted her mother, “Mom. I rlly rlly rlly need you,” and also attempted to call her father, as students continued to pound on the door and threaten her with violence. The mob only dispersed when school security appeared to escort her to the administrative office.
Even after this horrifying incident, school administrators refused to protect MKL, claiming that they could not afford a security guard to accompany her to her classes. Faced with the administration’s total abnegation of responsibility for ensuring her safety, MKL did not finish out the remainder of the school year at Nathan Hale and has since transferred to another school.
Unsurprisingly after her months-long ordeal, MKL continues to experience “emotional distress” as well as “nightmares, flashbacks and sleep disturbances, fear of going into public and severe anxiety.”
“This was a horribly traumatic and devastating year for my child, and I don’t want anyone else to have to go through the same thing,” the mother said.
The facts of this case highlight the absurdity of the Left’s narrative that society can be neatly divided between oppressors and the oppressed. And they point to their inevitable and inexcusable consequences. In Seattle, an ultra-blue city in a blue state, the idea that a student of any other race or ethnicity could face even one tenth of the abuse suffered by MKL because she is Jewish without immediate consequences to the perpetrators is inconceivable.
Imagine a black teenager who was repeatedly attacked with racial slurs? Who found drawings of nooses scrawled in the bathrooms, in the hallways, on his personal property? Who was forced to listen as classmates laughed at barbaric depictions of slavery? Whose classmates expressed regret that the Confederacy lost the Civil War? Who had to barricade himself inside a classroom while white students screamed out the N word and called for his blood?
Would that student be disbelieved? Would the school administration throw up their hands and tell his parents, sorry, we just don’t have the resources to protect him?
Absolutely no sane person thinks this would be the case. A black student who faced merely one instance of racial abuse at a school like Nathan Hale would immediately have the DEI cavalry come to his defense. School administrators would hold mandatory assemblies, send mass emails, suspend or expel the perpetrators of racial hate. Local media would write stories with a quote from the school principal stating that Nathan Hale has zero tolerance for racial prejudice.
MKL’s story is possible only because she is Jewish. Because the same leftist idealogues who defend Hamas’s rape, kidnapping, and murder of innocent Israelis as an excusable excess in service of Palestinian liberation believe that Jews are part of the oppressor class who deserve what’s coming to them. Even a teenage girl in her school softball uniform.
Seattle Public Schools deserve to be skewered as hypocrites, Jew-haters, and zealots who put their adherence to Marxist ideology over their duty to protect an innocent student. And MKL and her family deserve their day in court.