Jewish student’s anti-Semitic joke gets him kicked off robotics team, Texas suit says

A Texas high school student who is Jewish was kicked off the robotics team after making an anti-Semitic joke, a lawsuit says.

The student at Anderson High School in Austin, who was a star member of the robotics program, says he’s being “blackballed” from future competitions and scholarship opportunities because the coach is upset about the joke, according to the federal lawsuit filed Monday.

In November 2018, the student was in the robotics lab when he found a few coins on the floor, the lawsuit says.

“Guess I’ll pick them up since I’m the Jew,” the student recalls saying, according to the lawsuit.

A volunteer leader of the team told the coach about the comment, but the student wasn’t kicked off the team until months later when it had qualified for the world championship competition, according to the lawsuit.

In a meeting, the student told his teacher and administrators that “people made Jewish jokes all the time and he hated it,” and “I do it first so that others won’t do it,” the lawsuit says.

The student eventually left the robotics team after it was disassociated from the high school and the coach refused to mentor him, according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit claims that the robotics teams was disassociated from the school district to “prevent the appearance of any improper treatment” of the student.

“No one wanted to have anything to do with him,” the lawsuit says. “He was forced to abandon high school robotics for his senior year of high school. And that is a tragedy.”

Additionally, the coach refused to provide a letter of recommendation for an engineering program or robotics scholarship, instead writing a letter to the national robotics organization “attempting to blackball (the student) from robotics competitions forever.”

The school district declined to comment on the lawsuit because it’s pending litigation. The teacher has not responded to an email from McClatchy News.

The lawsuit claims the school’s policies are unconstitutional and discriminatory to the student.

“(The student) was singled out for making a self-deprecating joke about Jewish culture, while other students using offensive language about race, or sexual orientation or disability are not,” the lawsuit says.

This story was originally published February 25, 2020 at 5:29 PM with the headline "Jewish student’s anti-Semitic joke gets him kicked off robotics team, Texas suit says."