The Brief

A group of Jewish parents and teachers are celebrating a recent court ruling that will allow them to refile a lawsuit against the United Teachers Los Angeles union and creators of the controversial “liberated” ethnic studies curriculum that some Los Angeles Unified teachers use.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed a lower court ruling that had dismissed the case, Concerned Jewish Parents and Teachers of Los Angeles v. Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium.

The panel also voided about $600,000 in legal fees that U.S. District Court Judge Fernando Olguin had awarded the defendants’ attorneys. The court issued an eight-page ruling on Sept. 4. Los Angeles Unified was a minor defendant in the suit.

While the appeals court agreed with Olguin that the plaintiffs had not shown they were personally harmed by the curriculum, the court preserved the plaintiffs’ right to resubmit an amended complaint for a future trial on the merits.

The ruling sets the stage for renewed litigation over content in those Los Angeles Unified courses that have continued to use elements of the contested “liberated” curriculum. The enactment this year of Assembly Bill 715, which extends protections from discrimination based on religion and national identity to cover textbooks, materials and teacher training programs, could benefit the plaintiffs’ case, according to their attorneys.

“The case took several years, but we stood firm because we knew the initial ruling was wrong; Jews are protected from a public trampling of their rights, just as every other category of Americans are,” said Lori Lowenthal Marcus, legal director of The Deborah Project. The public interest law firm filed the lawsuit on behalf of two Jewish Los Angeles Unified teachers and parents, who are part of Concerned Jewish Parents and Teachers of Los Angeles.

In a press release, the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium said the reversal will not thwart its “unwavering commitment to developing ethnic studies that is anti-racist and liberatory” for California classrooms.

“The ongoing litigation is part of a broad, coordinated attack on academic freedom that seeks to silence educators and censor what students can learn about the complexities of our shared history,” the consortium said. “Developing educational resources and advocating for marginalized voices are core expressions protected by the First Amendment.”

UTLA did not respond to a request for comment.

Roots of a long-standing conflict

In their lawsuit, filed in 2022, the Jewish Los Angeles Unified teachers and parents group alleged that the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium’s “overtly racist and antisemitic teaching material . . . discriminates against a segment of California residents on the basis of their religious beliefs.”

The authors of the “liberated” curriculum — mainly instructors and professors in ethnic studies departments at California State University and the University of California — included anti-Zionism and opposition to Israel as a key element of their American ethnic studies curriculum. The curriculum characterizes Israel as a modern prototype of 19th century European colonialism, which the plaintiffs say is inaccurate as well as prejudiced.

The lawsuit said United Teachers Los Angeles and then-president Cecily Myart-Cruz, along with two members of the LAUSD-UTLA Ethnic Studies Committee, promoted adopting the instructional materials in high school ethnic studies courses, even though the district had not adopted the curriculum. Gov. Gavin Newsom, and the Legislature, in approving a 2021 law mandating an as-yet unfunded ethnic studies mandate, disavowed it.

Advocates of the “liberated” ethnic studies approach had shaped the original version of the state’s Model Ethnic Studies Curriculum Framework. State leaders, including State Superintendent of Instruction Tony Thurmond and State Board of Education President Linda Darling-Hammond, rejected it and in 2019ordered that contested sections be largely rewritten.

The lawsuit alleged that the parent plaintiffs and their children are “imminently threatened” by the “liberated” curriculum and are “being forced . . . to choose between protecting the sincerely held religious beliefs of their children and availing themselves of their legal right to send their children to a California public school.”

In a November 2024 decision, Olguin dismissed the lawsuit, characterizing the complaint “as difficult to understand and contains a morass of largely irrelevant — and sometimes contradictory — allegations.” He said that plaintiffs failed to demonstrate specifically “with any degree of clarity precisely what plaintiffs believe defendants have done or, more importantly, how plaintiffs have been harmed.”

Olguin concluded that the plaintiffs’ complaint raised significant First Amendment concerns over prior restraint of speech.

“In effect, plaintiffs seek to litigate the propriety and legality of a potential curriculum with which they disagree,” he wrote. “It would be of great concern for the educational project and for academic freedom if every offended party could sue every time they did not like a curriculum or the way it was taught.”

Olguin cited California’s “anti-SLAPP law,” which awards damages to discourage meritless lawsuits intended to intimidate defendants from exercising their speech rights. It stands for Anti-Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation. After concluding it would be unlikely that the Jewish parents would win the case, he dismissed the lawsuit and granted the defendants lawyers fees of about $600,000.

At the time, defendants celebrated Olguin’s decision.

“This is a win for liberatory critical ethnic studies and academic freedom. It’s a testament to the power of solidarity and liberation, whether that be in South Los Angeles or in Gaza,” Theresa Montaño, a professor of Chicano and Chicana Studies at Cal State Northridge and a defendant in the case, said in 2022.

Mark Kleiman, an attorney for the defendants, told teachers on the press call at the time, “The moral of this story for people in the other school districts is, you don’t have to be afraid of these kinds of attacks. Given half a chance in a fair courtroom, you will be vindicated.”

The celebration proved premature. In their ruling, appeals court judges Kenneth K. Lee, Patrick J. Bumatay and Jennifer Sung agreed with Olguin’s decision that the plaintiffs had not shown harm. But they reversed Olguin by allowing the plaintiffs to file an amended complaint, and canceled the requirement that plaintiffs pay defendants’ legal fees.

Lowenthal Marcus confirmed that the Deborah Project will refile an amended lawsuit. “It has not been hard finding people who have been harmed in the past; getting people to come forward for fear of retribution has been more difficult,” she said.

Major settlement of Bay Area antisemitism lawsuit

The ruling was the second legal victory involving California education for the Deborah Project this summer. On May 26, the project attorneys and the Sequoia Union High School District in Redwood City reached a far-reaching settlement to end a 2024 lawsuit brought by Jewish families whose children attended Woodside and Atherton high schools. The families alleged that the district “has a long history of tolerating casual antisemitism on its campuses.”

“Students and faculty have openly joked about Nazis and the Holocaust, while certain teachers have peddled antisemitic falsehoods about Middle East history without facing consequences. District leadership has consistently turned a blind eye to such behavior,” the lawsuit alleged.

Marcus, the legal director for the Deborah Project, called the settlement “a model in litigation we and others are pursuing in antisemitic discrimination cases across the country.”

Among the settlement’s provisions:

• The “Israel-Palestine Conflict” will fall under the district’s “Controversial Issue” policy requiring teachers to discuss issues impartially, with adequate and appropriate factual information and without promoting any point of view.
• A neutral decision-maker selected by the plaintiffs and the district will resolve disputes about teaching materials and antisemitic incidents. That person will also review supplementary materials on the conflict before use in classrooms.
• Antisemitism training, also chosen jointly by plaintiffs and the district, will be mandatory and teach about all forms of antisemitism “from both the Left and the Right, both focused on individual Jews and on the Jewish state,” according to Marcus.

This story was originally published by EdSource. Sign up for their daily newsletter.

The legal tug-of-war centers on a two-panel work called “Adam” and “Eve.” The life-size paintings depicting the biblical characters were created around 1530 by German artist Lucas Cranach the Elder.

The Nazis stole the two paintings, and many others, from Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker in Holland in 1940. After the war, the Dutch government sold these two works to a Russian aristocrat, who sold them to the Norton Simon in Pasadena in 1971.

“By pursuing the recovery of the Cranachs, we are seeking to reverse a great injustice perpetrated by the Nazi theft of a Jewish family’s property,” Rabbi Noah Farkas, president and CEO of Jewish Federation Los Angeles, said in a written statement.

The Federation is plaintiff in a lawsuit filed on Monday in L.A. Superior Court that names the museum and two related foundations as defendants. Cranach the Elder’s work has sold for millions of dollars.

Goudstikker’s only living heir, Marei von Saher, gave the Federation the authority to file the lawsuit. If the lawsuit is successful, the Federation pledges to use the majority of the net proceeds to care for impoverished Holocaust survivors living in the L.A. area.

Adam and Eve, painted around 1530 by German artist Lucas Cranach the Elder.

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Courtesy Norton Simon Art Foundation

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Von Saher has spent years trying, unsuccessfully, to get these paintings back. But this lawsuit is different. It’s filed under a 2024 California law that gives people the ability to petition to recover cultural property “that was taken or otherwise lost as a result of political persecution,” according to the law.

Stolen painting

Responding to the lawsuit, the Norton Simon Museum did not challenge that the painting was looted by the Nazis.

“After decades of litigation, court after court including the United States Supreme Court has confirmed that the Norton Simon Art Foundation has proper title to 'Adam' and 'Eve,'" the museum said in a written statement.

The museum is referring to a 2018 ruling by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which said that since a foreign government sold the artwork, the court could not declare that sale illegal. The U.S. Supreme Court let that decision stand without reviewing it.

The Norton Simon has been pressured to negotiate with the heirs to return the work, even from the founder’s grandson.

“In my opinion, it's immoral and unethical because they don't have good title,” said Joel Greenberg, founder of the nonprofit Art Ashes, which helps families of Holocaust survivors recover art looted from their ancestors.

It’s not the only high-profile case of Nazi-looted art in the region. The late Los Angeles resident Maria Altman recovered a work by Gustav Klimt that was looted from her family by the Nazis in Austria.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A motorist was arrested on murder charges after authorities say she slammed her SUV into a city bus in Los Angeles, killing at least two people and injuring six others in a prelude to a second deadly tragedy: the fiery crash of a TV news helicopter that was covering the collision.

Bailee Lynn Rios, 36, of Simi Valley, was arrested Tuesday night and is being held at a Los Angeles jail with bail set at $4 million, police said Wednesday. The case is being forwarded to the district attorney’s office, which will decide whether to file the charges in court or pursue different ones. Information on a lawyer who could speak on her behalf was not immediately available.

The helicopter, which was used by NBC and Telemundo, crashed about two hours after police say Rios drove her 2004 Ford Expedition the wrong way down a busy avenue, ran a red light and struck a vehicle before hitting the bus. One passenger was fully ejected from the bus and another was partially ejected, police said.

Rios’ mother, Cindy Rios, said she was shocked and saddened by the string of events. She said she had not spoken to Bailee Lynn since her arrest and had not been contacted by law enforcement.

“It’s just horrible,” Cindy Rios told The Associated Press in a phone interview Wednesday. “The fact that my daughter was involved and was the cause of it is just extremely disturbing.”

“If anything, I’m sorry for the other families,” she added. “My daughter’s alive. People lost their lives.”

Chopper crash killed a reporter, a pilot and a man on the ground

NBC4 Los Angeles reported that two people aboard the helicopter — reporter Eliana Moreno and pilot George Marciniw — were killed when the chopper went down Tuesday in the Chatsworth neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley north of downtown.

A person on the ground, identified as 29-year-old Edy Gutierrez Mejia, died in a parking lot, the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s Office said. He was from Guatemala, the country’s consulate confirmed.

The crash happened as news crews were reporting on the collision involving the SUV that slammed into the bus.

There were no immediate details on what caused the helicopter crash, but an alarm could be heard sounding inside the helicopter’s cockpit as it lost altitude in the final seconds of video the crew broadcast before the crash.

Just after the beeping noise starts, a woman’s voice says “uh oh.” The helicopter moves quickly away from the bus crash site and starts losing altitude. The woman says “You can’t pull up?” before the video stops as the chopper nears the ground.

“That video is probably the most important evidence that we have discovered so far,” National Transportation Safety Board investigator Fabian Salazar said Wednesday at a news briefing.

Salazar said the sounds were consistent with the helicopter’s engine changing speed, as well as what he said were likely advisory tones for the pilot. The NTSB said it is also investigating the bus collision.

The helicopter, a Eurocopter AS350, went down near a large storage facility. At least four cars and two storage containers burned after the helicopter caught fire. NBC4 reporter Robert Kovacik was at the bus scene and saw black smoke and rushed to the helicopter crash site.

Anchor and reporters pay tearful tributes to deceased colleagues

Moreno was a familiar voice for NBC4 and Telemundo 52 during the station’s aerial coverage. She and Marciniw were both were employees of Angel City Air, which operated the chopper for the station.

Moreno, born in Orange County, joined Angel City Air in 2010, the same year she earned a broadcast journalism and political science degree from Chapman University. She reported for several news outlets and began flying with Marciniw in 2023, the NBC4 website said.

Marciniw grew up in Southern California and graduated from Burbank High School in 1974.

“I think a lot of us are still trying to process what happened, this terrible loss,” NBC4 reporter Lauren Coronado told viewers early Wednesday as she stood near the crash site. A hazmat crew was cleaning up jet fuel, she said.

In a tribute to Moreno and Marciniw, the newscast referred to them as “the team in the sky,” saying Moreno would often post videos from her job and was in awe of the view. Anchor Lynette Romero held a colleague’s hand and wiped away tears after hearing Moreno’s voice when one of her posts was played.

In an interview with the station, Esteban Jimenez, a pilot, said he had known Marciniw since the 1990s. He said Marciniw had been his instructor.

“I just talked to him on Sunday. We were talking about the aviation business and retiring,” he said.

Expert talks about what may have caused the crash

Aviation safety expert Jeff Guzzetti said the alarm sounding in the helicopter’s final video sounds like the low rotor RPM warning horn that signals the main rotor is no longer spinning enough to keep the helicopter in the air.

“It just has all the earmarks of a potential loss of engine power and a dangerous decrease in the main rotor speed,” said Guzzetti who used to investigate crashes for both the NTSB and FAA.

Guzzetti said the pilot appeared to be trying to perform an emergency maneuver to use the wind to force the rotor to spin again much like a breeze turns a windmill. Doing that can create a bit of lift that could help cushion the impact, but Guzzetti said there would have been little opportunity to do that because the helicopter had been hovering at a low altitude beforehand.

There are risks to news helicopters particularly in a major city like Los Angeles where multiple helicopters respond to an incident, but the pilots all coordinate closely over the radio to ensure they maintain a safe distance from each other. The industry also shares best practices to help keep these news flights safe.

“It’s a very unique form of flying. And the community is very good about lessons learned,” Guzzetti said. “And so because of that, you don’t hear about too many of those accidents. So they’re rare, but they do occur, just because the mission is a risky one.”

Other crashes involving news helicopters

The station said this is the second aviation tragedy in its history.

In 1977, a KNBC news helicopter crashed when it ran out of fuel while returning to the station after covering a wildfire in Santa Barbara, killing the pilot and camera operator. The pilot, former U.S. Air Force officer Francis Gary Powers, had been in the news years earlier when he was shot down and captured while flying a U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union for the CIA, an ordeal portrayed in the movie “Bridge of Spies.”

There have been at least eight fatal crashes involving news helicopters in the U.S. since 2000, killing 16 people, according to a review of federal accident records and news accounts.

They include a 2023 crash in a New Jersey forest that killed the pilot and a photographer aboard a helicopter used by Philadelphia station WPVI and a 2022 crash beside a Charlotte, North Carolina, interstate that killed a pilot and meteorologist during a training flight for WBTV.

A 2007 midair collision in Phoenix of two TV news helicopters that were covering a police chase led the NTSB to recommend that news helicopters have at least two people in the cockpit so the pilot can focus on flying while the reporter focuses on the story.

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Golden reported from Seattle, and Collins from Hartford, Connecticut. Associated Press writers Josh Funk in Omaha, Nebraska; Olga Rodriguez in San Francisco; Kathy McCormack in Concord, New Hampshire; and Allen Breed in Raleigh, North Carolina, contributed.