BHUSD Board Triggers Antisemitism Crisis to End Pride Flag Support
Introduction
On August 29, 2025, a “special” (read: crisis) meeting of the Beverly Hills United School District’s five-member Governing Board (the “Board”) was called to address a single burning issue: how to undo the damage caused by the Board’s three-member conservative majority, which had just voted to require that every school in the district display Israeli flags for the entire month of May in the name of “combating antisemitism.” That vote, taken at a regularly-scheduled Board meeting three days earlier, triggered an outpouring of criticism and threats against BHUSD on a scale so frightening that the District Superintendant, Dr. Alex Cherniss, was forced to quickly overrule the Board in the name of student and staff safety.
While the vitriol aimed at the Board’s decision was unprecedented in both severity and scope, it was eminently foreseeable. From its very inception, the Board’s resolution dangerously conflated semitism with Zionism and created the appearance that BHUSD was mandating unwavering support for the state of Israel. While the Board members who passed the measure (Judith Manouchehri, Sigalie Sabag, and Russell Stuart) claimed that was not their intent, they were expressly warned ahead of time by the objecting Board members (Rachelle Marcus and Dr. Amanda Stern), as well as numerous community members, that their flag mandate was all but guaranteed to be received with hostility.
Having paid these warnings no apparent mind, the Board majority was ill-prepared for what came next.
Plunging Beverly Hills into controversy is unfortunately nothing new for these three Board members, none of whom have any background in education. Indeed, it has become so common and foreseeable that they were forced to hire a dedicated crisis communications firm earlier this year. Still, for their bungling to tarnish Beverly Hills’ reputation on a national scale, as has occurred in this case, is an extraordinary and almost impressive feat of self-harm.
Equally impressive is the fact that, at the special session to address the consequences of their actions, the culpable Board members offered no apology and took no responsibility for the harm they had caused. What they took away from this debacle was not that implied fealty to a politically sensitive foreign nation-state is something to be avoided. No, the real problem, in the Board’s estimation, was the concept of flags – they’re just too dangerous!
So the Board voted to ban the flying of any cause-related flags by the school district going forward.
To be clear, the only flag of significance in rotation at BHUSD affected by this new ban was the Pride flag.
And so, by recklessly manufacturing an antisemitism crisis, endangering the Jewish community of Beverly Hills, and forcing an overbroad rapid response, the Board’s MAGA contingent covertly accomplished its independent goal of stripping away the most visible school-sanctioned support for LGBTQ students.
If this sounds cartoonishly evil, that’s because it is.
The real question is, how on Earth did we get here?
Who We Are
Welcome to the hard launch of BHUSD Watch.
We did not intend for this website to go live so soon after it was conceived. Rather, we had hoped to build out a comprehensive directory of information educating the public about what has happened to the Board over the past year, which we could then offer for perusal all at once. Unfortunately, history waits for no one, and the historic nature of the Board’s most recent missteps demands an immediate warning to the community and call to action.
We hope that, after reading our summary of this past week, you will feel the same.
What Went Wrong
On August 26, 2025, the Board passed Resolution #2025-26-02, “Combating Anti-Semitism through Education, Awareness, Remembrance and Support.”
Normally, at this point, we would link you to a copy of what the Board passed so you could see its language for yourself.
One problem: nobody but the Board has the final resolution. At time of writing, it still has not been made available to the public, which (a) violates the Board’s own bylaws, as well as the California Government Code, and (b) significantly undermines the Board’s ongoing complaints about inaccurate media coverage, since one can hardly be blamed for misapprehending a final document that the Board shoves into a desk drawer after passage instead of publishing.
What we do have is the version that was introduced at the start of the August 26th meeting, before the Board’s mark-up session. That version was itself a substantial revision of the resolution’s first draft, which was put forth by Ms. Sabag three weeks earlier and sharply criticized for its problematic language, with particular focus on its mandate to both celebrate the state of Israel and “display the Jewish Israeli flag at each school and facility within Beverly Hills Unified School District throughout the month of May every year[.]” The Board consequently agreed to table the resolution and develop a superseding draft.
Unfortunately, when the next iteration was introduced, it inexplicably retained the mandatory Israeli flag displays, and the Board’s moderate members rightly questioned why an otherwise-uncontroversial prescription for combating antisemitism was being insistently saddled with an unnecessary poison pill.
Nearly an hour into the discussion, recognizing the flag component of their resolution was on life support, the conservative contingent of the Board changed tactics. Specifically, Ms. Manouchehri invoked the district’s embrace of the Pride flag as a purported roadblock to any divergent treatment of the Israeli flag. While Ms. Manouchehri’s reasoning changed repeatedly over the course of the discussion, she ultimately made clear that she would only support removal of the flag mandate after it was already put into effect, and only if part of a broader proposal that would strike down the district’s prior embrace of the Pride flag.
The cynical nature of this gambit (as well as the well-observed absurdity of passing something just to unpass it) cannot be overstated. Despite Ms. Manouchehri’s attempt to couch her tortured proposal in facially neutral language, three practical realities remained inescapable upon reflection:
No other flags of note but Pride were in rotation to be affected by this ban.
The Pride flag had never jeopardized the safety of BHUSD students or staff in any of the years it had been flown.
There is no legal or moral equivalence between a flag representing a foreign nation and a flag representing equal rights under the law, notwithstanding Ms. Sabag’s insistence to the contrary.
Nevertheless, the Board had found its fig leaf for ramming the matter through to a vote.
The resolution, as expected, was passed along purely partisan lines and over the express warnings of many in attendance, including the objecting Board members, that the flag mandate stood to unnecessarily inflame tensions and stoke antisemitism in direct opposition to the resolution’s stated goal.
And stoke antisemitism it did.
The Price We’re Paying
Once the media picked up the Board’s vote, public reaction — not only from the BHUSD community, but the wider world — was immediate and incendiary.
Recriminations were swift, as well as the predictable threats. Beverly Hills was placed under a microscope, with large swaths of the online commentariat holding up the Board‘s conduct as confirmation of every heinous belief held about Jewish control over American civic life – just as the Board had been warned.
Less than 48 hours after the resolution was passed, 61 separate discussions about the issue were raging across Reddit, including posts on r/news, r/politics, and r/nottheonion (a forum for news deemed so ridiculous, it must be satire, but somehow isn’t). Those posts generated over 3,500 comments, all but a tiny handful of which were negative. A distressing amount were blatantly antisemitic, especially those on forums like r/israelexposed and r/conspiracy.
One representative Redditor reacts to the news of BHUSD’s Israeli flag mandate by quipping that “[a]t some point we’re going to have to talk about the 800-pound merchant in the room” – an obvious reference to the antisemitic “happy merchant” caricature used by Nazis worldwide.
The posts on X were even more numerous and ten times as virulent, driven by prominent white nationalists like Owen Shroyer and Stew Peters. Most alarming is the fact that X users have repeatedly queried Elon Musk’s AI bot “Grok” (previously self-anointed as “MechaHitler”) to obtain the names and contact information for BHUSD Board members, including the Board’s brand new student member, whose first meeting was this past Tuesday.
Because of the irresponsible actions of three adults, a child looking to them for leadership now has her name plastered across the worst corners of the internet.
How It Got Worse
Faced with this deluge of threats to district safety, Dr. Cherniss was forced to step in and invoke Board Policy 2210 to override not just the Board’s Israeli flag mandate, but all flag displays (other than the American and California State flags) “until further notice.” The Board then scheduled its special session for that Friday, August 29th at 2:00pm (when teachers were teaching and most parents were either working or picking up their children at school) to discuss and pass a new resolution that would make the temporary “emergency” flag ban permanent, with only a small handful of exceptions initially contemplated.
During the meeting, the Board struggled to justify why the controversy caused by flying one particular flag necessitated the wholesale banning of virtually all other flags. Was there something particularly dangerous about the expressive medium of flapping cloth? Why did such a sweeping edict need to be rushed through committee when simply rescinding the prior resolution would have sufficed? Why did the Board insist on using a shotgun instead of a scalpel?
“After all this, you think flags as a general concept are the problem, and that banning them writ large is the only way to fix the mess that was made? That’s like stabbing yourself with scissors and then banning arts and crafts.”
The answer was already given at the Board’s August 26th meeting, when the Board majority made clear that disparate treatment between the Pride and Israeli flags would not be tolerated. The new resolution was simply the Board following through on its threat, but now able to frame it as a prophylactic measure against stumbling into future controversies of their own making. Without this “emergency,” the Board would have needed to put forth and justified a targeted anti-Pride policy during a regular meeting, whereby it would be subject to the usual levels of community scrutiny, press coverage, and sunlight.
This is not to say that the anti-flag resolution made it through committee unscathed. As before, the Board’s underbaked initial proposal (which was hastily updated within hours of being unveiled) faced waves of criticisms, with speaker after speaker after speaker pointing out all the myriad school activities that would be stifled by an undifferentiated flag ban. As before, the Board was forced to undertake a lengthy redlining session, adding exception after exception in order to rehabilitate the proposal into something remotely palatable, entirely ignoring the much easier fix available to them the entire time.
All the while, those in the audience wondered aloud why any of this was necessary and what had happened to our district.
Where We Go From Here
At time of writing, the Board’s main accomplishments for the month of August 2025 are that (a) BHUSD has been identified as a Zionist-occupied territory by white nationalists; and (b) Pride flags can no longer be flown in any of our schools because the Board majority is, at best, indifferent to LGBTQ rights.
Is this the promise of BHUSD(OGE)? Have we Made Beverly Hills Great Again?
The Board majority can try as they might to distract the public from their routine incompetence. They can claim all they want that giving BHHS students branded gym shorts is changing their lives. We’re simply not buying it.
No amount of “fresh ideas” from populist contrarians can offset the fact that they have made our schools less safe, our civic reputation is in tatters, and the Board’s crisis communicator is presumably about to get a refreshed retainer.
We need Board members who can be trusted to see danger coming and steer clear. What do we make of those who not only dismiss shouts that they are heading directly for jagged rocks, but take it as an invitation to hit the accelerator?
The facts could not be more clear. The Board majority was told expressly and repeatedly that they were prioritizing political messaging over protecting students. They were warned it would cause harm. They made no effort to adequately explain why a flag mandate was necessary or even desirable in a resolution whose sole stated purpose was to combat antisemitism. And now they are making the Shocked Pikachu face in response to the backlash.
Judith Manouchehri, Sigalie Sabag, and Russell Stuart simply do not know how and cannot be trusted to responsibly govern BHUSD. The enormity of their unforced errors, the frivolity with which they were undertaken, and the disregard they have shown for those who question their orthodoxies are categorically disqualifying. Never before has the Beverly Hills community been so grievously harmed by misplaced faith in those who swore to lead the district with sober, rational minds. No change can restore confidence in leadership that displays such flawed judgment and unwillingness to learn.
Our district deserves better.
BHUSD Watch has been launched with the goal to hold accountable and, as necessary, oust the MAGA-aligned Board members who are failing our district. There is power in community, and while feeling outraged is understandable, feeling hopeless is unnecessary. We call upon all concerned Beverly Hills citizens to join our cause, sign up for our e-mail dispatches, spread understanding and awareness regarding these Board members’ manifest unfitness to represent us, and bring sanity back to BHUSD. Keep your eyes peeled — our fight is just beginning.