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At Berkeley Law, a Debate Over Zionism, Free Speech and Campus Ideals
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A student group, Law Students for Justice in Palestine, barred supporters of Zionism from speaking at its events. The outrage — and legal misunderstandings — grew from there.
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On the first day of the fall semester, Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley, learned that a student group created a bylaw that banned supporters of Zionism from speaking at its events.
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Mr. Chemerinsky said he rarely used profanity but did so in that moment. As a constitutional law scholar and co-author of a book about campus free speech, Mr. Chemerinsky said that he knew the group, the Berkeley chapter of Law Students for Justice in Palestine, had the legal right to exclude speakers based on their views.
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But he also knew the bylaw, which eight other student groups also adopted, would be polarizing within the law school and used as a cudgel by forces outside of it.
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In hindsight, he said, he underestimated the response. The story “went viral in a way that I could have never possibly imagined,” he said.
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The controversy, pushed along online by conservative commentators, hits two of the pressure points in campus politics today. The bylaw was adopted as antisemitism is rising across the country. And some critics of academia have cast left-wing students as censors who shout down other viewpoints, all but strangling, they say, honest intellectual debate.
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That collision of issues all but guaranteed a tense debate over free speech, even if a broad swath of speech experts say that student groups are allowed to ban speakers whose views they disagree with.
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“A student group has the right to choose the speakers they invite on the basis of viewpoint,” said Mr. Chemerinsky, who is Jewish and a Zionist. “Jewish law students don’t have to invite a Holocaust denier. Black students don’t have to invite white supremacists. If the women’s law association is putting out a program on abortion rights, they can invite only those who believe in abortion rights.”
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Mr. Chemerinsky said that excluding speakers based on race, religion, sex or sexual orientation would not be allowed, but he noted that the student groups were excluding speakers based on viewpoint. True, he said, many Jews view Zionism as integral to their identity, but such deep passions do not change the law.
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Other legal experts noted that the controversy showed just how mangled the understanding of the First Amendment had become, even at a place like Berkeley, the epicenter of the 1960s free-speech movement. The debate, they said, should focus on whether these bans align with the academic ideal of open, intellectual debate. Even if student groups can prohibit speakers, should they? And should such bans be codified — formally adopted with a bylaw?
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“There’s a real confusion about freedom of speech as a cultural value and freedom of speech as a legal concept,” said Will Creeley, the legal director of Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free-speech advocacy group.
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The issues are not limited to the Justice in Palestine group. Campus groups often invite only those they agree with. Hillel, the Jewish student group with hundreds of chapters on college campuses, also has rules prohibiting speakers who “delegitimize” Israel.
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In August, Law Students for Justice in Palestine announced that it, along with the eight other groups, had adopted a provision that it would “not invite speakers that have expressed and continued to hold views or host/sponsor/promote events in support of Zionism, the apartheid state of Israel and the occupation of Palestine.”
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The student group said the ban was meant to promote the welfare of Palestinian students and was part of a broader provision aligned with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel.
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Some Jewish students expressed concern and tensions flared within the law school. Noah Cohen, a law student at Berkeley, said that the bylaw was an example of how antisemitic rhetoric was being normalized in the United States. Mr. Cohen, who described himself as a Jewish supporter of Palestinian rights and statehood, said the bylaw made him and many other Jewish students feel “singled out and targeted.”
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In public statements, Law Students for Justice in Palestine rejected the accusation that its bylaw was antisemitic. It says that being Jewish is an identity, while Zionism — the support for a Jewish state — is a political viewpoint. It welcomes and supports Jewish speakers who are not Zionists, the group said.
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“Supporting Palestinian liberation does not mean opposition to Jewish people or the Jewish religion,” the group said in a statement to the Berkeley law community. Members of the group did not respond to messages seeking an interview.
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After learning about the bylaw, Mr. Chemerinsky met with the university’s Hillel rabbi and spoke with several Jewish students, but, aside from concerns within the law school, the reaction was relatively muted, he said.
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That changed, he said, after Kenneth L. Marcus, the civil rights chief of the U.S. Education Department during the Trump administration, wrote about the bylaw in September in The Jewish Journal under the explosive headline “Berkeley Develops Jewish Free Zones.”
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Mr. Marcus wrote that the bylaw was “frightening and unexpected, like a bang on the door in the night,” and said that free speech does not protect discriminatory conduct.
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The article went viral.
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Mr. Chemerinsky said he learned about Mr. Marcus’s article, which he described as “inflammatory and distorted,” while he was in Los Angeles for a conference. Mr. Chemerinsky said he typed out a response to the article, which was appended to it, and then didn’t think much of it. That afternoon, he was deluged by emails. At an alumni event that night, the law school’s perceived hostility to Jews was “all anyone wanted to talk about.”
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In an interview, Mr. Marcus, a Berkeley law school alumnus, said that he was contacted by law students there who were concerned about the bylaw. He said he spent weeks trying to support them and wrote his article after Berkeley did not “rectify the problem.”
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Not allowing Zionist speakers, he said, was a proxy for prohibiting Jews. The provisions, he said, are “aimed at the Jewish community and those who support the Jewish community,” even while acknowledging that the policy could allow Jewish speakers and bar those who are not Jewish.
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The article stoked outrage. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and the singer Barbra Streisand both tweeted about it. “When does anti-Zionism bleed into broad anti-Semitism?” Ms. Streisand wrote.
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Politicians called for action. Brad Sherman, a Democratic representative from California, said in a statement that funding to the groups should be conditional on revoking the provision. Another Democratic congressman, Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, said that the Education Department should investigate “whether and how federal taxpayer dollars are used to discriminate against Jewish and pro-Israel students” at the university.
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Burt Neuborne, a constitutional scholar and emeritus professor at the law school at New York University, said those who wanted Mr. Chemerinsky to punish Law Students for Justice in Palestine “do more harm to the First Amendment than this group ever could.”
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“A bunch of students who have a silly rule that they won’t listen to people they disagree with, they’re acting, I think, foolishly,” said Mr. Neuborne, a former legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. “But a dean who punishes students for doing that is actually violating the First Amendment.”
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Campus speech experts said it was uncommon to codify bans on certain speakers. And Mr. Chemerinsky said that only a small fraction of student groups out of some 100 at the law school adopted the ban on Zionist speakers.
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At the same time, Mr. Chemerinsky called the bylaw antisemitic and not in the spirit of open dialogue. What was especially troubling, he said, was that it prohibited Zionists from speaking about any topic at all to the groups, effectively excluding a large share of Jews.
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Dylan Saba, a recent graduate of the Berkeley law school and a lawyer for Palestine Legal, which has been advising the students behind the bylaw, said that there was a double standard in how Palestinian students were portrayed in campus speech debates, noting that Hillel has said that it does not host anti-Zionists as speakers.
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Hillel adopted guidelines in 2010 that prohibit chapters from collaborating with speakers or groups that “delegitimize, demonize, or apply a double standard to Israel.” The rules sparked a revolt among some local chapters. Swarthmore College ditched the Hillel name over the matter.
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Adam Lehman, Hillel International’s chief executive, said in a statement that the group’s guidelines were developed to counter antisemitism on campus and provide students with a “safe space to explore and express their diverse Jewish identities.”
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Mr. Lehman said the group’s guidelines did not prohibit speakers supportive of Palestinian rights if they did not “deny the Jewish people the right to self-determination.” The Berkeley bylaw, he said, bars “anyone who supports this Jewish right of self-determination, regardless of their views on or support for Palestinian rights.”
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Mr. Chemerinsky, however, said he has also condemned the Hillel rules and believes they, along with the Berkeley bylaw, are “inconsistent with what a campus should be.”
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In many ways, Mr. Chemerinsky was well suited to navigate the issues. In 1999, he helped found the Progressive Jewish Alliance, a social justice group based in Los Angeles. He is also co-chair of the National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement at the University of California, and a co-author of a book on campus speech.
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But the last semester has been a challenge. Many students have been doxxed and harassed for their connection to the bylaw, Mr. Chemerinsky said. In the weeks after Mr. Marcus’s article, he added, a right-wing group that describes itself as a media watchdog drove trucks near campus comparing the students who adopted the bylaw to Hitler, and included the names of the students who were in the organizations that adopted the bylaw, even if they voted against it.
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As the semester ended on Friday, Mr. Chemerinsky was still dealing with the fallout.
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The Office for Civil Rights at the Education Department said on Dec. 13 that it would open an investigation into whether Berkeley responded appropriately, according to Arsen Ostrovsky, who filed a complaint on behalf of the International Legal Forum, a Tel Aviv-based antisemitism watchdog group, and Gabriel Groisman, a Florida-based attorney.
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Opening an investigation does not imply that the office has determined that the case has merit, according to a letter sent to Mr. Ostrovsky by the Office for Civil Rights.
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Mr. Chemerinsky said the complaint, which calls on Berkeley to “immediately invalidate” the bylaw, includes the same flawed assumptions from previous attacks. He said he was confident Berkeley was on “strong legal ground.”
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“Every dean or school administrator always worries about being accused of discrimination,” he said. “I never imagined I would be accused of discrimination against Jews.”