In the spring of 2024, a Jewish student at San Francisco University High School (UHS) told his parents that something alarming had happened in a ninth-grade class. Instead of a lesson about African colonialism, the teacher denounced Israel, Zionists, and what he called “colonizers,” according to parents.
The teacher was suspended for the rest of the spring, but some students staged a sit-in in his support. The following fall, at the first all-school assembly, he was reintroduced to the school with full privileges. UHS faculty rose in a standing ovation. “The Jewish kids looked at each other in horror,” said one parent whose child was in the room.
The incident was just one of many over the past three years that parents at the school say show how the antisemitism that erupted on American college campuses after Hamas attacked Israel also took hold inside one of the country’s most selective private schools, and a longtime feeder to the Ivy League.
In interviews, the school’s own emails and letters, a police report filed with the San Francisco Police Department, and formal inquiries conducted by Jewish civil-rights groups, families allege that UHS allowed its classrooms and hallways to turn hostile to Jewish students at the most charged moment in recent memory. Since October 2024, at least 10 Jewish families have withdrawn their children from UHS, or about 5 percent of the current enrollment of 543 students. At least one family left the state. According to some parents, enrollment by Jewish students has dropped to a trickle.
That all this took place at one of the most progressive high schools in San Francisco speaks to the tremors of antisemitism rippling through America’s political left. UHS belongs to a small, hypercompetitive tier of prep schools, and it is sometimes described as a Horace Mann School of the West Coast. UHS’s tuition and fees total $68,895, and more than a third of its graduates go on to the nation’s most elite colleges and universities, according to outside estimates. Stanford, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Yale, Princeton, Brown, and the University of California, Berkeley, appear on the matriculation list published by UHS.