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 NEW YORK (Press Release) — At some universities, anti-Israel encampments were cleared by police. At another, the university president was condemned by the faculty for doing so.Top StoriesMichigan. On April 22, anti-Israel protesters at the University of Michigan established an encampment on the Diag at the heart of campus. Despite the protesters blocking public places, vandalizing the campus, destroying property, disrupting classes and the Honors Convocation, and then threatening University Regents at their homes, nothing was done — until yesterday. After warning protesters repeatedly, UMich police removed the encampment; there are reports of some arrests. In an email to the University community, UMich President Santa Ono did not mention antisemitism or the harassment of Jewish students once, but did write: “To be clear, there is no place for violence or intimidation at the University of Michigan. Such behavior will not be tolerated, and individuals will be held accountable.” Harvard. The Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance (HJAA) released a comprehensive report exposing the deep-seated antisemitism within Harvard’s academic and social spheres, predating October 7, 2023. The report shares first-hand accounts describing how Jewish students were bullied and harassed by other students without protection from the Harvard administration. From the report: “Jewish and Israeli students face ostracism and harassment not only from peers but also from faculty and teaching staff.” [SDJW: See related news in comment section below this article] DEEPER: Read the full report. Dartmouth. In a disappointing move, the Dartmouth College Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted 183-163 to censure President Sian Leah Beilock for her decision to ask for police support in bringing a swift end to the growing anti-Israel encampment on May 1, a move that led to the arrest of 89 people. Religion professor Christopher MacEvitt introduced the motion, condemning Beilock’s decision to involve the police. The motion seems to hold no purpose, but to further divide faculty at the New Hampshire college, as an administrator present shared that the measure has no formal consequences. UC Santa Cruz. On Monday, 1,500 graduate student workers at University of California, Santa Cruz walked off the job in protest of the University of California system’s handling of anti-Israel protests. The strike, part of a rolling series organized by the United Auto Workers Local 4811, impacts 48,000 graduate student workers across all 10 University of California campuses, including teaching assistants and researchers. Student workers striking are not teaching, conducting research, or grading, and are withholding data and have no plans to return to work until the union reaches an agreement with the university. University officials have condemned the strike, calling it unlawful and in violation of the union’s labor contract. And while many universities have concluded for the semester, keep in mind that the Banana Slugs of Santa Cruz have class and finals until June 13. Wesleyan. Protestors at Wesleyan University in Connecticut cleared their encampment on Monday evening after the University gave in to many of their demands. Among Wesleyan’s capitulations are: offering SJP protesters a meeting with the trustee members of the Investment committee, re-examining study-abroad programs, career services, and other academic ties to Israel, and offering “amnesty” to these anti-Israel protesters. Adding insult to injury, Wesleyan’s statement failed to acknowledge or offer any support of Jewish students there. READ: ADL Connecticut’s statement. UIC. After 17 years, Professor Barbara J. Risman says she no longer recognizes her “beloved academic home,” the University of Illinois at Chicago where she was a distinguished professor of sociology and co-chaired the university-wide committee on faculty equity. She told the Times of Israel, “The demonstrations are never framed as being about ending the war, helping Gazans, or rebuilding Gaza; all things I could get behind. Instead, everything is framed as an assault on the right of Jews to have a homeland. That’s when I personally feel attacked. That’s when it becomes antisemitic.” She discussed how two departments of the University issued statements after 10/7 in solidarity with Hamas, and how she received confidential praise from other faculty for speaking out against antisemitism on the campus. |
| Campus Champions
Biden. On Monday, the White House celebrated Jewish American Heritage Month at a reception, and in an address there, President Biden took a firm stance against the nationwide rise of antisemitism on campuses: “In America we respect and protect fundamental rights of free speech to protest peacefully, that’s America, but there is no place on any campus in America, any place in America, for antisemitism, for hate speech that threatens violence of any kind against Jews or anyone else.” Biden also highlighted that the U.S. Department of Education has reminded colleges that antisemitism is prohibited discrimination under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and will be investigated aggressively. In other news from the event, according to reports, the White House served brisket-stuffed dates among other glatt kosher delicacies at the reception. Philly Pride. In other Delaware Valley news, this past weekend, ADL’s Philadelphia Regional Director Andrew Goretsky was honored with the Dean’s Outstanding Alumni Achievement Award from George Washington University. Before coming to ADL more than two years ago, Andrew had leadership roles at Arcadia University, GW, and Maryland. Mazel tov, Andrew!
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| Am Yisrael Chai 💪✡️
Little Women of Valor. Spotted on Capitol Hill and at the White House last week were 11 second-grade students who make up the Jewish Girls Rights Club at Bernard Zell Anshe Emet Day School in Chicago. Equipped with clipboards with their talking points, the pint-sized advocates met with Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, White House national security spokesperson John Kirby, and other public officials. As one of their mothers explained to Jewish Insider: “They just think that things should be fair for girls and for Jews. They notice that there’s never been a female president, and there’s never been a Jewish president.” In 24 years, these girls will be eligible to serve as Commander-in-Chief!
At Duke, Tents Mean Basketball Season. For weeks earlier this year, the Duke University campus in Durham, North Carolina was dotted with ramshackle tents and occupants who refused to budge…that is, until they got their season tickets for Duke basketball! While other elite universities have had vocal and often violent anti-Israel protests, Duke has not. It has not had an encampment like other elite universities. Jewish students have felt significantly less threatened and intimidated than at other schools. Duke students have covered the center of campus with 1,200 Israeli flags to represent those killed on Oct. 7, they’ve placed empty Shabbat tables outside of the student center for the hostages being held in Gaza, and they’ve covered a bridge on campus with posters of those still missing. As the Forward reported: “On admitted students day, a mom walked over to the club’s table and asked Schwenk, another leader, whether she was scared to be Jewish at Duke. Schwenk was blasting Omer Adam, an Israeli pop star. The club was flying a huge Israeli flag and students stopped to wrap tefillin. ‘Look at us,’ she told the mom. ‘Do we look scared?’”
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The following e-mailed comments were received by San Diego Jewish World which I as editor pass along in the interest of presenting a range of Jewish opinion:
RELATED NEWS:
Washington, D.C., May 22, 2024: The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law is suing
for leaving “cruel anti-Semitic bullying, harassment, and discrimination” unaddressed for years, pre- and post-10/7. According to the complaint, “when Harvard is presented with incontrovertible evidence of anti-Semitic conduct, it ignores and tolerates it. Harvard’s permissive posture towards anti-Semitism is the opposite of its aggressive enforcement of the same anti-bullying and anti-discrimination policies to protect other minorities.”
The waffling this week and last when it came to enforcing consequences for protestors who violated numerous university rules and harassed, threatened and intimidated Jewish students is another example of what is described in this lawsuit.
The complaint was filed today in the U. S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. The legal team includes Holtzman Vogel Baran Torchinsky & Josefiak PLLC, as well as Vogel Law Firm PLLC, Libby Hoopes Brooks & Mulvey PC, Weil Gotshal & Manges LLP, and the Brandeis Center.
According to the complaint, daily since 10/7, Harvard students and faculty have called for violence against Jews and celebrated Hamas’ terrorism. Student protestors have occupied and vandalized buildings, interrupted classes, and exams, and made the campus unbearable for their Jewish and Israeli classmates. Professors, too, have explicitly supported anti-Jewish and anti-Israel terrorism, and spread anti-Semitic propaganda in their classes. Jewish students are bullied and spat on, intimidated, and threatened, and subject to verbal and physical harassment.
Harvard’s student message board provides a window into the toxic environment for Jewish students. It is filled with vile anti-Semitic slurs, threats and conspiracy theories, including calls for Jews to “cook” and the Harvard Hillel to “burn[ ] in hell,” and an anti-Semitic cartoon resembling Nazi-era propaganda that depicts a hand etched with a Star of David and a dollar sign holding a noose around the necks of what appear to be a black man and an Arab man. The cartoon was posted not only by student groups but also by faculty.
Jewish students report self-censoring, both in and out of the classroom, and avoid taking certain classes, attending certain events, or traversing certain areas on campus out of fear that they will be physically or verbally abused. Jewish and Israeli students report feeling isolated, unwelcomed, and unable to enjoy the educational rights and benefits to which they are legally entitled. One of the students mentioned in the complaint describes how she literally hides in her room and avoids public spaces, including her research lab, for fear of being harassed and attacked.
Detailed in the complaint are numerous examples documenting how Harvard, pre- and post-10/7, has deliberately ignored anti-Semitic incidents and threats to Jewish students, while supporting and protecting students and faculty perpetrators, allowing anti-Semitism to grow and flourish. According to the complaint, “Harvard’s message was clear: discrimination, harassment, or violence is acceptable so long as it is directed at Israelis and Jews.”
For example, when right after 10/7 a thousand protestors showed up at Harvard calling for genocide against Jews and began harassing, intimidating, and threatening Jewish students, Harvard’s first action was to form a task force to protect the individuals spewing the vile anti-Semitic hatred. In fact, according to the complaint, Harvard held itself out as a resource for helping perpetrators erase their digital footprint and hide their actions.
Another example involves the physical assault of a Jewish student. When protestors realized a student was Jewish and/or Israeli, from a blue bracelet he was wearing in solidarity with Israel, a mob swarmed and surrounded him, and began physically accosting him and yelling in his face. The student pleaded with them to stop but, assailants violently grabbed him, pushed him, and he was physically attacked until he was ultimately able to escape the mob. The assault was captured on video, yet Harvard took no action to redress the physical assault. And even now that the perpetrators have been charged with criminal assault and battery, Harvard has yet to discipline, suspend, or expel the attackers, or remove them from their leadership positions. In fact, it is believed that Harvard staff have assisted some of the perpetrators in their criminal hearing.
A further example involves an incident from a year ago when three Israeli students were intentionally discriminated against and tormented throughout a course that they took at Harvard Kennedy School with Professor Marshall Ganz. After they proposed a project about their Israeli Jewish identity, Arab and Muslim classmates objected, complaining that the idea of a “Jewish democracy” was “offensive.” The professor and teaching fellows agreed. The professor compared the existence of a “Jewish state” to “white supremacy,” and threatened the students with “consequences” if they proceeded with the topic. When the students persisted, Ganz’s misconduct metastasized into repeated taunting and humiliation throughout the course. Ganz then lowered the students’ grades as a “consequence” for their refusal to change their topic.
After the Brandeis Center sent a complaint to the university, in March 2023, Harvard launched a third-party-investigation, which agreed with the Brandeis Center and concluded Ganz had illegally created “a hostile education environment,” denied the Israeli students “a learning environment free from bias,” and “denigrated” them “on the basis of their Israeli national origin and Jewish ethnicity and ancestry.” Harvard Kennedy School Dean Douglas Elmendorf accepted the investigator’s findings and committed to addressing the illegal harassment and discrimination. Yet to date Harvard has not announced the incident, publicly apologized for the discrimination, fired or suspended the professor or disciplined the teaching assistants. It has not even provided training to prevent anti-Semitism or anti-Israel bias in the future. Instead, Harvard’s magazine profiled Ganz and touted him as a civil rights hero.
“For years Harvard’s leaders have allowed the school to become a breeding ground for hateful anti-Jewish and radical anti-Israel views,” stated Kenneth L. Marcus, founder and chairman of the Brandeis Center and the former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education for Civil Rights. “An outside investigator warned of the problem more than a year ago, Harvard Kennedy School’s Dean acknowledged it, and yet crickets. When are university leaders going to learn that in order to prevent your school from becoming a cesspool of anti-Semitism action is required? Schools must hold students and faculty accountable. They must follow through with public consequences when Jews are harassed and discriminated against like they would for any other minority group, as required by law.”
According to the Brandeis Center complaint, “Jews are fair game” at Harvard. “Students and faculty can harass and discriminate against Jews, and they can do so openly and with impunity.” And making matters even worse, “Harvard will go out of its way to protect anti-Semitic protestors and conspiracy-theorists.” It goes on to say that had Jewish students been “members of any other protected class, Harvard would have disciplined the offenders swiftly and vigorously.”
The complaint documents how Harvard aggressively enforces anti-bullying and anti-discrimination policies to protect other minorities, and it cites numerous examples over the last few years where the school has been vigilant to oust students or force out professors for taking positions that do not fit with school’s philosophy, vision, and policies.
The lawsuit alleges that Harvard has violated numerous of its own policies as well as Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Title VI prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin, including discrimination against Jews on the basis of their actual or perceived shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics, in educational institutions that receive federal funding. Under the law, harassing, marginalizing, demonizing, and excluding Jewish students on the basis of the Zionist component of their Jewish identity is just as unlawful and discriminatory as attacking a Jewish student for observing the Sabbath or keeping kosher. UNESCO has cautioned that “Jew” and “Zionist” are often used interchangeably today in an attempt by anti-Semites to cloak their hate. In fact, according to President Biden’s U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, released in May 2023, “Jewish students and educators are targeted for derision and exclusion on college campuses, often because of their real or perceived views about the State of Israel. When Jews are targeted because of their beliefs or their identity, when Israel is singled out because of anti-Jewish hatred, that is antisemitism. And that is unacceptable.”
In 2023, Harvard received $676 million in federal funding. The Department of Education and the U.S. House Education and Workforce Committee are currently investigating Harvard for anti-Semitism.
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StandWithUs Center for Legal Justice (SCLJ) and two MIT students amended their federal
alleging the university’s approval, support, and enablement of antisemitism in violation of the students’ rights under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and other federal laws. Significantly, the amended complaint incorporates a class count and a claim under civil rights legislation, known as the Ku Klux Klan Laws, for coordinated antisemitic actions which MIT enabled and which deprived Jewish and Israeli students of their constitutional rights. The complaint also includes additional, egregious acts of discrimination, harassment, and intimidation that came to light after the initial lawsuit was filed on March 7, 2024.
SCLJ and other plaintiffs have asked the court to halt MIT’s discriminatory policies against Jews and order MIT to pay monetary damages for violating the students’ civil rights.
The amended complaint alleges that in the months since this lawsuit was originally filed, MIT has doubled down on its unlawful conduct, allowing antisemitic demonstrators to deprive Jewish and Israeli students of their constitutional rights rather than take action to enforce its own rules. For example, rather than dismantle an antisemitic encampment set up in clear violation of MIT rules and which prevented Jewish students’ safe access to a Passover seder at the campus Hillel, MIT forced Jewish and Israeli students to relocate the seder.
A copy of the amended complaint is posted on the SCLJ website. SCLJ and the students are being represented in court by Marlene Goldenberg of Nigh Goldenberg Raso & Vaughn, PLLC, Melissa Weiner of Pearson Warshaw, LLP, Janet Varnell of Varnell & Warwick, P.A., Jason P. Sultzer of Sultzer & Lipari, PLLC, and David Abrams of the Zionist Advocacy Center.
“MIT’s selective enforcement of its own policies forced Jewish students to skip classes, take final exams online, and relocate cultural and religious events,” said Marlene Goldenberg. “Section 1986 of the Ku Klux Klan Act was enacted in 1871 to ensure that the people and institutions with the power to stop racial violence and discrimination could not stand by and allow it to happen. More than 150 years later, we have reached a point where this law now needs to be used to protect Jewish students on college campuses.”
“Since our original filing against MIT, the administration has continued to refuse to hold perpetrators of antisemitic conduct accountable,” said Yael Lerman, director of SCLJ. “MIT not only enables antisemitic demonstrators to deprive Jewish and Israeli students of their constitutional rights but has demanded that Jewish victims of discrimination accept this deprivation of rights by avoiding certain campus locations. The Ku Klux Klan Laws can compel MIT to finally protect the rights of Jewish and Israeli students, since it is obvious that absent judicial intervention, MIT will not do so.”
Read the amended complaint here: https://swulegaljustice.org/mit-lawsuit/