Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Anti-Semitism Makes a Comeback in Sutter Creek

In Sutter Creek, California, an really unfortuanate circumstance happened to Justin Zysman, a high school student at Amador High School. Zysman had filed legal papers against his high school district after it took over a year for the school officials to erase "Burn Jew, Burn" from Zysman's locker.

Zysman, the great-grandson of Holocaust survivors thought that some sick pranksters were just messing with him, but apparently they took the joke even further when his gym uniform was urinated on and some of his classmates were making Nazi salutes at him.

I am utterly shocked that it took Zysman's school district this long to erase the painful words on Zysman's locker. Obviously the Holocaust is a very sensitive issue for many people, especially Jewish people. Evidently, after a whole year, investigation is still going on and not much more information can be released, like the names of possible suspects.

Even after Zysman's parents filed legal documents, the school district's officials still said that they cannot act because of the ongoing investigation. I don't know much more than what was said in this article, but it seems like it is ridiculous that it took a year for those words to be removed. It seems to be that the school district is kind of indifferent to this hateful action.

I guess I was naive to think that at least in California, hate crimes/ actions were a thing of the past. Maybe we're lucky that at least our school district is somewhat sheltered.

-Henry Zhang

7 comments:

Amos Yan said...

Yeah it still sucks to have people in world who still hate on others, but well...there are some who are still idiots.
In my opinion the holocaust is not something you would mess with, even if its just a joke. Its like laughing at he wounded veteran because he lost his arm in battle.

Georgia Thomas said...

Wow thats really sad that happened. I think living in the bay area, we somtimes forget that the rest of the country of even the rest of the state isnt as open/diverse/accepting as we are.

William C said...

It is suprising that it is actually our dear California that has the most registered hate groups in the nation!

http://www.splcenter.org/intel/map/hate.jsp

William C said...

I was actually looking for stats to show the opposite!?

Sam Kennedy said...

Is California really the state with the highest number of registered state groups? That's frightening. I suppose no matter where you go, there will always be group to hate everyone; California, being diverse, simply has more people to hate.

The school couldn't remove the offensive text from the locker for over a year? That is remarkable. To be frank, using an "ongoing investigation" as a reason not to erase the discriminatory words is a cop-out; first, would the investigation really take that long, and second, could they not have gathered all available evidence from the locker in under a year? Were teachers refusing to stop the Nazi salutes aimed at Zysman due to an "ongoing investigation" as well? The school can and should be sued for emotional damages. The superintendent should be fired.

That school is a disgrace. Obviously, it is run by incompetents.

Hen to the Ry said...

I agree completely with you Sam. It's sorry to think that our own state, which I thought was pretty open-minded, would even have a school like that.

-Henry Zhang

Omid Dastgheib said...

I also agree with Sam. In middle school, I went up to the office and told the people there that there was a wasp nest in my locker. They had it removed the very next day. This school took a year to remove words from a locker. It really must be run by incompetents.