Lawsuit Against UC Berkeley Over Campus Antisemitism To Go Forward, Court Rules

Lawsuit Against UC Berkeley Over Campus Antisemitism To Go Forward, Court Rules

A lawsuit brought by two Jewish civil rights groups against UC Berkeley over unchecked campus antisemitism will go forward, a federal court has ruled.

In their complaint filed in November 2023, the Brandeis Center and Jewish Americans for Fairness in Education (JAFE) allege antisemitic discrimination and harassment against UC Berkeley in violation not only of its own policy, but of federal civil rights laws and the U.S. Constitution. The original complaint was amended last year to include, among other things, more recent antisemitic incidents.

The Brandeis Center lawsuit, which we covered here, was the first of its kind to be filed against a university in the wake of the nationwide surge in campus antisemitism following Hamas’s massacre of Israelis on October 7.

With so much attention focused on Columbia and the other Ivies recently, this Brandeis Center case is a reminder that West Coast schools are also rotten with antisemitism.  At UC Berkeley, antisemitism masked as anti-Zionism has been festering for years. After the Hamas attacks, it “erupted.”

From the amended complaint:

Since October 7, 2023, the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust, Jewish students at UC Berkeley have been the targets of unrelenting harassment and physical violence, all of which has been widely publicized and is well-known to University officials. Shortly after the attacks, a Jewish student draped in an Israeli flag was attacked by two protestors who struck him in the head with a metal water bottle. A Jewish professor on campus received an e-mail calling for his gassing and murder. Another Jewish professor was the victim of vandalism, with graffiti messages calling him a terrorist and saying he “gets horny to genocide.” Many Jewish students are afraid to go to class. A Jewish graduate student was the victim of a home break-in with a note left saying: “F[*]k the Jews, Free Palestine from the River to the Sea.”

These developments weren’t new at UC Berkeley, the plaintiffs say; they were just the newest manifestation of campus antisemitism that had been allowed to spread and grow because the school chose to ignore it.

Things got even worse since the Jewish groups first filed their lawsuit. Last February, antisemitic hordes smashed their way through glass windows to shut down an event featuring an Israeli speaker, the amended complaint says. The police and students were overwhelmed, as seen on video here:

WATCH: UC Berkeley Jewish Students Forced To Evacuate Building After Mob Storms Event With IDF Soldier

'Berkeley is on the wrong side of history and it's not a safe place for Jews anymore' pic.twitter.com/vJ1E05giNC

— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) February 27, 2024

Far-left extremists at @UCBerkeley pounded on the glass doors and eventually smashed their way through to try to shut down a student event on Feb. 26 featuring an IDF soldier. pic.twitter.com/UqQL5b182C

— Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) February 27, 2024

A female student was allegedly assaulted as she tried to shut the door to keep the masked protesters from entering the event:

Tonight at UC BERKELEY

During Ron Bar Yoshafat’s speaking engagement a Jewish student who was just trying to attend the event was physically assaulted by SJP. @StopAntisemites @IsraelWarRoom @EndJewHatred pic.twitter.com/3hwFuxesgQ

— Aden Kosoi (@adenkosoi) February 27, 2024

Both the students and the speaker had to flee the mob, organized by Bears for Palestine, an official student group against whom, the plaintiffs say, the school has taken no action.

Even progressive Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and his wife weren’t safe last April, the lawsuit says, when the Law Students for Justice in Palestine hijacked a dinner party they hosted for third-year students. At the private event held at their home, the keffiyeh-clad leader of the Berkeley student group subjected the couple and their guests to an anti-Israel tirade, captured here on video:

This longer video of the confrontation at Dean Chemerinsky and Professor Fisk’s home shows in more detail just how insufferable these students are.

And Chemerinsky has confirmed it’s a private residence (see below), which, as you can see, they were asked to leave repeatedly. pic.twitter.com/ojbaK1fnuM

— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) April 11, 2024

The lawsuit says antisemitism escalated because the school allowed anti-Israel policies that are in fact antisemitic. In their amended complaint, they allege that Berkeley has discriminated against Jewish students and faculty on its campus.

And now, the Northern District of California federal court has ruled that the Jewish groups’ claims under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for violations of the Equal Protection and Free Exercise Clauses of the U.S. Constitution will go forward, as will their Title VI claim for discrimination against Jews.

“Taken as a whole,” Judge James Donato wrote, the Brandeis lawsuit “plausibly alleges disparate treatment with discriminatory intent and policy enforcement that is ‘not generally applicable.'” It also plausibly alleges that Berkeley was “deliberately indifferent to the on-campus harassment and hostile environment.”

Since the lawsuit plausibly alleges that Jewish students and faculty were disparately treated because they are Jewish, the court didn’t have to address the thorny question of whether Zionism is a central tenet of Judaism. That is what the plaintiffs allege, but the court cautiously avoided addressing the issue. The Establishment Clause, it said, forbids courts from deciding what the tenets of a religion are, especially when, as here, there is genuine disagreement about the matter.

As the focus of antisemitism has shifted to the Middle East in modern times, the question of whether anti-Zionism is antisemitism isn’t likely to go away. But for now at least, in this case, the court won’t have to answer it.

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