Published by JNS on 5/1/2025 In recent months, colleges and universities have been sued in court and undergone federal probes for alleged inaction protecting Jews on campus. Two federal lawsuits, which the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and others filed on Friday, target different defendants—individuals accused of setting up anti-Israel encampments and carrying out antisemitic attacks and making threats at UCLA and Columbia University. “This is not just hate-filled students spewing ugliness,” Kenneth L. Marcus, chair of the Brandeis Center, told JNS. “This is a network of outside organizations working with students and faculty to engage in significant criminal behavior.” “It is necessary here not just to hold the university accountable but to go after the perpetrators directly,” Marcus said. Marcus told JNS that the campus Jew-hatred, which occurred at UCLA and Columbia, is part of an “international effort to bring Hamas’s terror agenda to the United States.” “What we’re dealing with in these two cases is clearly a national and international problem, which we will continue to fight not just on these campuses, but elsewhere,” he said. “We will be fighting anti-Zionist criminals wherever they are operating, using the tools of civil litigation.” It would be “entirely appropriate” for government agencies to involve themselves, “because what we have identified is not just a matter of civil wrongdoing but also criminality,” Marcus said. The center’s findings raise “questions about the corporate status and tax-exempt status of some of these groups,” he said. ‘Zip-tying the exits shut’ Mariano Torres and Lester Wilson, who were janitors at Columbia when antisemitic protesters stormed Hamilton Hall, allege in their suit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York that masked protesters targeted them violently while they worked the overnight shift on April 29, 2024. Protesters assaulted Torres, who is Latino, and threatened him and called him a “Jew-lover” and “Zionist,” according to the complaint. Wilson, who is black, tried to remove the protesters, who shoved him and taunted him with slurs, including “Jew-lover” and “Jew-worker” as he begged to be let out, the complaint adds. The lawsuit names the People’s Forum and nearly 50 people as defendants, and it adds that those defendants allegedly conspired with groups like Columbia University Apartheid Divest, Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine, Columbia-Barnard Jewish Voice for Peace, Within Our Lifetime-United for Palestine and Westchester People’s Action Coalition to occupy Hamilton Hall. “From the earliest moments of the storming of Hamilton Hall, Mr. Torres and Mr. Wilson observed several individuals barking orders to their followers in the mob, directing their fellow occupiers to different floors and rooms in the building,” per the complaint. “Some of the occupiers were responsible for ‘fortifying’ the building by barricading the exits with items, such as vending machines and furniture,” the complaint adds. “Others were responsible for zip-tying the exits shut, and others distributed supplies throughout the building.” Marcus told JNS that “we see that a bigger approach is required, because we’re dealing not just with a hostile environment but a criminal one.” “What we have found is a conspiracy to capture Hamilton Hall and occupy it through criminal means in a way that looks nothing like the organic student protests that have been described,” he said. ‘Jew exclusion zone’ Anti-Israel protesters, who set up an encampment at UCLA, also created “checkpoints” and “human phalanxes” to deny Jewish students access to areas of campus, including Powell Library and Royce Hall, according to the second complaint. “Together, these measures amounted to a ‘Jew exclusion zone’ backed by the concrete threat of physical violence,” the complaint alleges. “To defend the zone, members of the encampment organized into teams of ‘security’ personnel armed with wooden planks, makeshift shields, pepper spray, tasers and even a sword.” Four members of the Jewish community at the public university—a law student who chairs Young Americans for Freedom on campus, a sophomore at the school, a Jewish doctor and professor at UCLA and the rabbi who co-directs the Chabad house on campus—are named as the plaintiffs in the suit, which was filed in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. The suit names nine defendants: National Students for Justice in Palestine and the unnamed president of its UCLA chapter, AJP Educational Foundation, American Muslims for Palestine executive director Osama Abuirshaid and board director Hatem Bazian, Faculty for Justice in Palestine Network, UC Divest Coalition, WESPAC Foundation and People’s City Council. Marcus told JNS that “at UCLA, we’ve seen not only an encampment that excluded Jewish students but also further illegal activity by both students and non-students, working in conspiracy with some of the most anti-Zionist extremists on American campuses.” “Some of these are national organizations advancing Hamas’s antisemitic agenda in the United States,” Marcus said. Jew-hatred that has festered on campus is now seeping beyond the gates of academia, according to Marcus. “The goal of these lawsuits is both to hold individual perpetrators accountable and obtain justice against these national organizations that are wreaking havoc across the country,” he told JNS. “This is not just about addressing protests that went bad, but about responding to a kind of warfare that is being waged on college campuses.”