Despite her Jewish-sounding last name, Pennsylvania teenager Brandi Levy, whose expletive-filled remarks on Snapchat are the center of a case soon to be decided by the Supreme Court, is not Jewish. Her father thinks the Levys are Pennsylvania Dutch. “I was going to do one of those DNA things you see online, on TV, but I never got around to it,” Lawrence Levy said. But civil rights and Jewish groups are following Levy’s case closely, worried that a ruling against her could curtail students’ speech — especially the speech of students from marginalized groups. The Anti-Defamation League has signed onto a brief supporting Levy. The case, B.L. vs Mahanoy Area School District, hinges on a public school’s ability to punish a student for online, off-campus speech. In Levy’s case, the speech is a selfie with a caption in which she expresses her dismay over failing to be chosen for the varsity cheerleading squad when she was a high school sophomore in 2017. The message, sent on a Saturday from a convenience store to about 250 people, included an image of Levy and a friend with their middle fingers raised, along with a string of words expressing the same sentiment. Using…
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Snapchat at the Supreme Court: Why the case of the cheerleader matters to Jewish students
