How Segregation Is Returning To NYC And Why The Mayor Doesn’t Want Anyone To Fix It

New York City is running a segregated school system. That is the charge the National Jewish Advocacy Center, which I lead, has asked the Justice Department to investigate: antisemitic hostility is driving Jewish children out of the public schools, officials are failing to protect their right to remain, and Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has a name for a system that sorts children that way. It defines desegregation as “the assignment of students to public schools and within such schools without regard to their race, color, religion, sex or national origin.”

Consider Deborah Uri, who told the New York Post that she withdrew her son from Townsend Harris High School after his friends “would no longer touch or talk to Jews.” Her description of the school’s response: “Administration just kind of went silent.”

She is not alone. The Post reported this month that “thousands of families in New York have opted for the friendlier confines of yeshivas and day schools since the 2023 terror attack on the Jewish state, a review by The Post found,” and several of those parents told the paper why. Natalya Murakhver, for example, withdrew two children from a Manhattan elementary school and described “the caliber of the venom.”

Now apply the substitution test. Imagine classmates refusing to touch or speak to black children because they are black. Imagine parents reporting the treatment, administrators failing to stop it, and families withdrawing their children to escape. Calling those departures a parental choice would not answer the charge of exclusion. Neither would pointing out that the school had never formally ordered the children to leave. We would demand to know whether public officials were allowing discrimination to drive those families out, and Jewish children are owed the same inquiry.

Title IV lets the Attorney General act on a complaint that a school board is depriving children of the equal protection of the laws, investigate, give the board notice and time to correct the conditions, and then sue in the name of the United States. Antisemitism targets Jews’ ancestry and ethnic identity as well as their faith, so the statute reaches it twice over. Our allegation is the chain the law requires: Jewish students were targeted, officials knew, and the response — silence or a transfer of the victim — denied those students equal protection. The record already supplies ample reason to begin the investigation.

On April 23, the federal Education Department opened a Title VI investigation into New York City’s Department of Education. The announcement described allegations that employees organizing under the name NYC Educators for Palestine taught children as young as five that Zionists are “genocidal white supremacists” and encouraged support for Hamas and its “martyrs.” The Department’s spokesperson responded that the group is not affiliated with the district. Yet the group is made up of the district’s own teachers, whom the district employs and may discipline under its Chancellor’s Regulations. A statement that one’s self-identified school employees are unaffiliated with one’s schools is a decision not to use that authority.

In August, by published accounts, Jewish teachers inside the system sent Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Chancellor Kamar Samuels a report cataloging 250 antisemitic and anti-Israel incidents since October 7, 2023 — nearly two-thirds of them direct acts against people or property: harassment, threats, assaults, vandalism, hate symbols. In October, when asked by the Post about a Brooklyn teacher who had written “Long live Yahya Al-Sinwar” in a group chat in 2024, the district said the allegation had been “reported and referred for investigation, in accordance with Chancellor’s Regulations.” Sinwar planned October 7. The message was two years old.

Mamdani’s September strategy, “Tackling Hate,” describes school reporting channels, a new K-12 Title VI coordinator, educational programs, and cooperation among agencies, and it promises to “address complaints of discrimination against any of our public school students, including Jewish students.” Those commitments give his administration something concrete to answer for. A coordinator must coordinate an effective response, and the strategy sets no deadline and describes no consequences for anyone. The mayor should be able to show what happened after families complained: which allegations were substantiated, what corrective measures followed, whether harassment recurred, and whether students could remain safely in their schools. A parent deciding whether to send a child back on Monday needs those answers.

So we have asked the DOJ to investigate, to coordinate with the Education Department, to hear from affected families in confidence, and to give the district notice and a short, real opportunity to correct the conditions. If the evidence establishes violations, the United States should bring the case.

When a family leaves because officials failed to stop antisemitic harassment, the child bears the disruption, and the parents bear the cost. Congress named that arrangement in 1964 and gave the Attorney General the power to end it. Deborah Uri’s school went silent. The United States should not.

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Dr. Mark Goldfeder, Esq., is Director of the National Jewish Advocacy Center.

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