“Hopefully, the Cherry Hill school district will now think more carefully about how it responds to antisemitism,” the Zionist Organization of America told JNS.
By Aaron Bandler
(January 23, 2026 / JNS) The Zionist Organization of America said earlier this week that it reached a settlement with Cherry Hill Public Schools, a New Jersey district in the Philadelphia area with a large Jewish population, over the latter’s handling of antisemitism.
“Hopefully, the Cherry Hill school district will now think more carefully about how it responds to antisemitism,” Susan Tuchman, director of ZOA’s Center for Law and Justice, told JNS. “Hopefully it’ll more effectively live up to its legal and moral obligation to protect Jewish students from threats and intimidation.”
The parties signed the agreement, which JNS viewed, in May 2025. But a dispute followed about “how the settlement terms should be interpreted,” Tuchman told JNS.
The district, which operates 18 schools and says that it has 10,715 students, allegedly discriminated against a Cherry Hill High School East student identified in the June 2024 suit as L.B. The suit was filed in U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey.
The student told the school that he faced threats and was “nearly physically assaulted” after posting on social media about anti-Israel statements that fellow students had made.
The school and the district responded “harshly” and “undeservedly,” and “outrageously punished him in violation of their own rules and policies, while ignoring and downplaying the conduct of his attackers,” according to ZOA.
A term of the agreement requires the district to remove the disciplinary action against the Jewish student from his record, including the “harassment, intimidation and bullying conviction” and a related suspension.
Tuchman told JNS that “the district had to remove not only the disciplinary measures but also everything in the record that was related to them” as part of the agreement.
The agreement does not require monetary compensation and notes that the district continues to “deny any and all liability.”
It requires the district to commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Day annually and for district libraries to provide “a table of books commemorating Jewish history and survival through the centuries during the week of April 21, 2025,” the week of Holocaust Remembrance Day last year.
The agreement also required the district to issue a statement addressing antisemitism as part of its commemoration of Holocaust Remembrance Day.
A page on the website of Cherry Hill Public Schools titled “Every story belongs” links to a statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day. Tuchman told JNS that the district posted the statement in April 2025.
The attached PDF file notes that “Jews continue to be victims of hate and bigotry today” and that “antisemitism has reached alarming levels in New Jersey as reflected by data from the Anti-Defamation League, revealing a 103% increase in antisemitic incidents in 2023, totaling 830 reported incidents.”
“This was the highest number ever recorded by the ADL in the state and the third-highest number recorded in any state across the country in 2023,” the page states.
It also shares a text that is very similar to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of Jew-hatred. One difference is that the IHRA definition notes that “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” amounts to “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination,” while the district’s definition omits the example of saying Israel is fundamentally racist.
Tuchman told JNS that ZOA complained to the district about “where and how it posted the statement, as well as about the district’s failure to also issue the statement to the community.” She referred, in an op-ed that she coauthored, to the district having “buried” the statement in “an obscure section of the district’s website.”
“It would have been easy for the district to send it out in an email blast to students and families, as it’s done on a variety of other issues,” she told JNS. “Simply posting it on the district’s website wouldn’t give meaning to all the words in the agreement we reached.” (JNS sought comment from the district.)
ZOA brought the matter to court in June. On Jan. 9, Sharon King, the magistrate judge, wrote that the district’s decision to post the statement on its website fits “with a fair reading of the settlement agreement.”
Tuchman said that “it’s troubling that the district would balk at giving a much-needed statement about antisemitism as much exposure in the community as possible.”
Still, “we’re so pleased to have gotten our clients the relief they were looking for,” she told JNS.
This article was originally published in JNS and can be viewed here.