Everyone is aware of the historic surge in antisemitism on college campuses after October 7, 2023. For months on end, images of the pro-Palestine encampments, attacks on Jewish students, and chants to “globalize the Intifada” went viral as they occurred in real time.
However, far fewer may know about the antisemitism taking place away from public view, embedded in the institutions that sat on their hands while their campuses descended into chaos: In classrooms and conference halls, colleges have been teaching their students that it’s socially acceptable to hate Jews.
To counter the campus antisemitism crisis, you have to strike at its source—the faculty. That’s the argument the Legal Insurrection Foundation made this week when it joined a coalition of over 120 education, religious, and civil rights groups in a letter urging the University of California Regents to address faculty-driven antisemitism on its campuses.
Their letter follows a report by the AMCHA Initiative, “When Faculty Take Sides: How Academic Infrastructure Drives Antisemitism at the University of California.”
The watchdog group says antisemitism in the UC system is being fueled not only by students, but by “UC’s own academic infrastructure—faculty and academic units using UC authority, including classrooms, departmental platforms, and official UC-branded channels, to advance political agendas as institutional practice.”
“As long as political agendas remain embedded in official academic functions and unit activity, measures focused on student discipline, protest management, or after-the-fact protections will be insufficient.”
The ongoing faculty activism comes even as UC is under federal scrutiny for antisemitic harassment and discrimination against Jewish students. And it comes despite UC’s Title VI 2024 resolution agreement with federal authorities to address systemwide antisemitism.
AMCHA investigated three representative UC schools: UCLA, UC Berkeley, and UC Santa Cruz, where the overall increase in acts of antisemitism during the 2023-2025 academic years rose by as high as over 3,000 percent.
Many of the faculty members across all three universities endorse academic BDS, the campaign to boycott Israeli academic institutions. And they do so perched in leadership positions from which they influence course content and official messaging—all with the academic authority bestowed on them by their schools.
Closely aligned are the Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP) and the Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (FJSP) groups. Over 100 chapters sprung up at universities after October 7th, with the express purpose of promoting anti-Israel boycotts. FJP and FSJP gave anti-Zionist faculty the organizational infrastructure from which to promote their anti-Zionist activism, the report says.
At UCLA, FJP was directly involved in the 2024 Palestine Solidarity Encampment, including a faculty walkout and making public statements demanding full amnesty for participants.
The FSJP played a similar role at UC Berkeley, where it promoted anti-Israel teaching materials and programming, blending academic BDS into the campus cultural norm. Among its materials, FSJP released a “Pledge to Speak About Palestine Toolkit” that “guides instructors on how to embed anti-Zionist materials into coursework while circumventing university rules against political indoctrination (describing teaching as ‘an act of resistance’).”
Faculty were also directly involved in targeting Jewish students at Berkeley. Over 40% of the antisemitic incidents during the period AMCHA studied involved faculty in some way.
It will come as no surprise to LI readers that the most rabid antisemites are to be found in the humanities departments. They are completely taken over by radicalized, anti-Zionist faculty, something Professor Jacobson pointed out a while ago here. At UC Santa Cruz, according to the report, the “Center for Racial Justice”—founded with seed funding from the university and housed in its Humanities Division—serves as an “institutional platform” for embedding academic BDS at the school.
It is one thing for faculty and staff to express their own personal views in their own personal capacity, and another for them to do so using UC resources, websites, and classrooms, creating the impression the school has given its imprimatur to their Jew-hate.
LIF and the other signatories to the letter aren’t asking the UC regents to police campus speech; they’re asking them to simply enforce their existing rules to stop faculty from using school resources to advance their anti-Israel agendas. With the tools they already have on hand, they should restore the university to its core mission of scholarly pursuit, not political activism.
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