‘COURTING’ ANTISEMITISM – THE ROEDEAN HIGH SCHOOL AND KING DAVID SAGA

A tennis match that did not take place between two girls’ schools in Johannesburg exposes attitudes and antipathy towards Jews.

By Marika Sboros

(First appeared in Biznews)

Roedean was once one of South Africa’s premier private girls schools. It was even considered a “finishing school” for the country’s future leaders.

Some of its pupils have become strong, principled, polished young women, academically formidable, able to negotiate the frays of prejudice and party politics, no matter how petty.

The gloss on that reputation has been dimming for years. Roedean now remains mired in accusations of antisemitism for failing to honour a scheduled tennis match against King David Linksfield girls on February 3, 2026.

That’s even after offering what many consider a “sincere” apology in writing.

Roedean probably hopes the apology will put an end to the scandal. That’s unlikely, despite the school acknowledging that its actions “were deeply hurtful to the Jewish community.”

Roedean also conceded that its earlier public justifications of “communication challenges” for the failure to hold the match were “incorrect.”

It was not just incorrect. It was false.

Roedean admits in its apology that these “challenges” were not the cause of the cancellation of the match. It does not admit to antisemitism.

Leaked recordings of phone calls between King David principal Lorraine Srage and Roedean senior school head Phuti Mogale, who has since resigned “with immediate effect,” are revelatory.

Anti-Israel lobbyists either don’t or don’t want to know that in South Africa, it is not illegal (though not generally recommended) for people to record a conversation in which they are a participant for their record even if they haven’t told the other person(s).

Legal implications depend on what happens to the recordings thereafter. That’s according to RICA, (the Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication-Related Information Act 70 of 2002). 

Lobbyists also ignore the fact that Srage tells Mogale upfront that she is recording and has recorded previous conversations. Mogale offers no objection whatsoever.

Who leaked the conversations and why is currently unknown. Perhaps, if Roedean had not lied publicly in statements from the outset about why it failed to honour the tennis fixture, the recordings may not have been leaked. 

In one, Mogale says clearly that the failed fixture began with pressure from Roedean parents who did not want their daughters playing against King David girls because this did not align with the ANC government’s anti-Israel stance.

When a startled Srage asks whether the parental objection is because the King David girls are Jewish, Mogale confirms it. To her credit, Mogale also says she told the parents that Roedean is “apolitical.” That clearly didn’t wash with the parents.

The mere fact that some supposedly well‑educated, influential Roedean parents would treat the ANC’s foreign‑policy posturing as a moral compass is a plot twist even Kafka might have rejected as implausible.

The same ANC refuses to condemn its close ally, Iran, for slaughtering more than 30,000 of its own people, many of them teenagers in the streets during the ongoing uprising.

Roedean has turned to PR spin doctors to handle the fallout from the failed tennis match. They’ve wasted their money.

The school first claimed in writing that the tennis match was cancelled due to “prior school commitments” and “compulsory academic workshops” and that this was “miscommunicated” to King David. Its first apology was on that basis alone.

That was disingenuous, as phone conversations showed.

EMPTY COURT

Roedean communicated clearly to King David the day before the match that all contentious issues were resolved and the match was going ahead. On that basis, King David girls turned up to play tennis against Roedean. On arrival, they were greeted by an empty court.

Mogale didn’t help herself or Roedean by claiming in conversation that the girls themselves didn’t want to play the match as they were still suffering “distress” and “trauma” after visiting King David’s campus last year to play tennis.

That raised the question: what on earth happened on King David campus to distress and traumatise them?

Mogale is heard saying (to a presumably gobsmacked Srage) that the sight of armed guards outside at King David’s school entrance had “disturbed” the girls. She’d have been wise to stop there.

Instead, she said the girls were also “traumatised” by seeing posters on King David campus. Poster of hostages, including children, babies and the elderly, still in captivity in Gaza after the horrific terrorist attack by Hamas against mostly civilian targets in southern Israel on October 7, 2023.

The problem for Roedean is that there was nothing distressing or traumatising whatsoever about the posters.

They were not images of bloodied young women dragged by their hair after being raped by terrorists, of children and babies in their pyjamas, tortured, mutilated, torn from their parents’ arms and homes.

The posters were of happy, smiling people before their savage kidnapping on October 7. Families supplied the photographs to raise awareness of the hostages’ ongoing plight in Gaza.

One might reasonably have expected Roedean’s tennis coach to have easily soothed the girls’ ruffled, sensitive feathers with non-distressing facts.

Facts, such as, that King David schools don’t post guards at their gates because they like the optics; armed guards outside Jewish schools as a sign that South Africa is a dangerous place for Jews; and antisemitic attacks are a real threat to Jews worldwide.

One would also reasonably expect Mogale not to have been so absurdly theatrical and hyperbolic in describing the feelings the posters evoked in Roedean girls as a “trauma”.

The only real trauma behind those posters was that suffered by hostages and their families and friends. Not the Roedean girls. Such moral inversion is as mystifying as it is a common driver of antisemitism.

National director of the South African Jewish Board of deputies Wendy Kahn is clear that the incident on Roedean campus on February 3 was blatant antisemitism.

On a Facebook post, Kahn defines antisemitism as:

 “prejudice, hatred or  discrimination directed against Jewish people, identity or institutions.”

She says that phone conversations make clear that the tennis fixture was a “Jewish day school issue” and that King David’s identity, like that of other faith-based schools, is based on the religious, cultural and historical life of the community it serves.

Roedean’s refusal to honour a sporting fixture based on the players’ Jewish identity, therefore, “constitutes an antisemitic act and is discrimination based on religion,” Kahn says.

It clearly violates South Africa’s constitution.

Section 9 of the constitution, as Kahn notes, provides that:

 “No person may be unfairly discriminated against, directly or indirectly, on the grounds of religion, belief or culture.”

Roedean’s leaders should have known that.

Anti-Israel lobbyists have been predictably quick to support the Roedean pupils’ refusal to play against Jews. One lobbyist said that students who raised “principled concerns about war, state violence or ideology” should not be made to feel that these were “illegitimate or hateful.”

That’s true but that’s not what King David was making Roedean pupils feel.

After all, Roedean had not expressed any “principled concerns” that the Roedean pupils had. Just intimations of miasmic “distress and trauma” at seeing armed guards and posters of happy faces.

Roedean’s tennis-match debacle does not exist in religious, political isolation.

In 2020, Roedean was one of several schools hit by waves of social media testimonials from alumni detailing experiences of institutional racism. Activists and ANC-aligned commentators criticised Roedean for being “too slow” to change and for maintaining a “colonial” culture that excluded Black students. White students also felt under pressure.

In 2023, Roedean invited the Ummah Al-Rahma madrasah to provide religious, spiritual programming – Ummah Heart – on its campus for Muslim pupils. It spun the initiative as a gesture of inclusivity.

It signalled something darker: a willingness to outsource moral judgment to the loudest ideological faction in the room.

The madrasah’s public record and associations had already drawn significant criticism and concern. It was accused of expressing sympathy and support for Hamas, including sharing or endorsing material aligned with Hamas and other jihadist causes.

That represented “school capture” as South African attorney and essayist Richard Wilkinson has argued. Roedean was not just accommodating Muslim pupils within a pluralist, school‑controlled framework. It was outsourcing part of its religious curriculum to a “fundamentalist Islamic provider.”

Critics have warned of the perils of combining ‘woke’, diversity rhetoric with a hard‑line madrasah. It allows reactionary, radical and religious politics to shelter under the language of “true inclusivity and belonging,” while narrowing the space for dissenting or minority views – particularly Zionist or even just openly Jewish ones.

Appeasing a particular worldview, including one openly sympathetic to a terrorist organisation, is not a smart move and not just for schools. Bringing a Hamas-aligned group onto any campus normalises rather than challenges a climate in which Jewish pupils are already vulnerable – and in which ANC‑style, anti‑Israel agitation quickly slides into open antisemitism.

To its credit, Roedean allowed the partnership to peter out. However, failing to honour a simple tennis fixture with Jewish schoolgirls has put its credibility and moral scruples again under a microscope that may linger.

It signals more school “capture”. It doesn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to work out where that can lead. It’s where ringing calls to “globalise the intifada” bring us.

Roedean statements, prepared and distributed by its PR company, Flow Communications, have been a study in obfuscation, euphemism and sophistry, beginning with the opening line of its February 10 offering: “We will place the best interests of young people first.”

Roedean demonstrably did not place the interests of its own “young people” first in this incident. It trampled over the interests of King David’s young people.

The only interests it did place first were those of the (hopefully) minority of staff, unnamed parents and students who don’t want to play sport against Jews.

Roedean has “engaged an independent party to review allegations.” It has also engaged “an independent facilitator to work with our students to resolve their concerns fairly and respectfully.” 

If there really was no antisemitism involved, then why the need for an “independent facilitator” to resolve students’ “concerns”?

And if concerns mean some Roedean girls don’t want to play tennis against Jews, they will have a problem in future. There are Jews in private schools other than King David. Presumably, Roedean girls won’t be asking every schoolgirl they face on sports fields whether or not she is Jewish?

Roedean’s apology on February 12 was a good move but did not go far enough. It does speak of intentions to learn from mistakes made. However, repairing the damage will require more than facilitated dialogues and public-relations-spun messaging.

It requires ensuring unequivocal future action to ensure that prejudice, discrimination and antisemitism, whether dressed up as politics, “distress”, “trauma” or scheduling confusion, will never again decide who is allowed onto Roedean’s sports fields.

Sport should be a crucible where differences are put aside. Women’s tennis, in particular, has a rich history of breaking barriers and fostering respect across lines of class, race, religion and nationality.

To see that ideal undermined by a narrative that says “we won’t play against you because of who you are, your religion, what you think” is to witness the descent of sport into the tribalism it should transcend.

Tennis is a simple game. Serve, rally, score. It requires focus, the ability to reset after a lost point and, crucially, respect for your opponent.

In contrast, Roedean’s handling of its tennis fixture with King David was all fault and no reset – a series of clumsy, unforced errors in strategy, empathy and communication.

It leaves Roedean with scrambled linguistic egg on its face. It has spawned a satirical, informal verb in the urban dictionary: Erodean.

It is defined as “stripping credibility from an institution by knowingly recasting antisemitic exclusion or hostility as a neutral, administrative error, while shifting responsibility onto the Jewish person affected, despite clear, contrary evidence”.

Here’s an example of common usage:

“Watching institutions attempt to erodean their way out of accountability has become a disturbingly familiar pattern.”

About the writer:

Marika Sboros is a South African freelance investigative journalist with decades of experience writing fulltime for the country’s top media titles on a wide range of topics. She started her career as a hard-news reporter in the newsroom of the now defunct Rand Daily Mail, a campaigning anti-government newspaper during the worst excesses of the apartheid era. She commutes between South Africa and the UK.

While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).