Published by JNS on November 6, 2025 The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law said on Thursday that the U.S. Department of Education will be opening an investigation into the Fashion Institute of Technology over a complaint it, along with the Anti-Defamation League, filed against the school in September 2024. The center said “Jewish students were subjected to severe and pervasive antisemitic harassment, discrimination and disparate treatment,” per the complaint. It also said the school violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, Rebecca Harris, a litigation staff attorney at the Brandeis Center, told JNS. (JNS sought comment from the Education Department.) Denise Katz-Prober, director of legal initiatives at the Brandeis Center, told JNS that “one of the central allegations in our complaint is that there have been numerous Jewish students who reported to us that baseless complaints intended fully to harass them were being filed against Jewish students, essentially weaponizing the internal grievance against the Jewish students to further harass them.” The Jewish students reported facing doxxing, threats and harassment simply for being in the vicinity of anti-Israel protests, she reported, adding that “the school told them that they could not proceed with their complaint.” And yet, the school moved forward with investigations of the “baseless, frivolous, false” complaints filed by anti-Israel protesters against the Jewish students, per Katz-Prober. “They’re selectively enforcing their disciplinary procedures,” she said. “This is problematic on a campus that has a hostile environment and where Jewish students are all experiencing severe harassment and discrimination on the basis of their Jewish identity,” Katz-Prober said. “It undermines their confidence in the very mechanisms that are intended to redress harassment and discrimination.” Other allegations in the complaint included “graffiti justifying Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre” and Jewish students facing online harassment, “deriding them as ‘Zionist pigs’” and being told that “we don’t do enough to bully the Zionists,” according to Katz-Prober. She further noted that a Jewish student’s offer to be president of a student club was rescinded because she was “deemed to be a supporter of Israel.” Katz-Prober said that in May, the organization had learned that the Education Department would be investigating the complaint; however, the Brandeis Center decided to announce it now “to explain the context” as to why it is filing an amicus brief in support of a Jewish student who is remaining anonymous in her suit against FIT. For its part, a university spokesman told JNS that “FIT does not and will not tolerate antisemitism.” ‘Punch a Zionist’ The Brandeis Center filed the brief on Thursday to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, stating that the court should overrule the lower court’s decision denying the student, referenced pseudonymously as “Jane Doe,” the ability to proceed with the case anonymously. The National Jewish Advocacy Center, not the Brandeis Center, is representing Doe in her suit, which was initially filed in January and amended the following month in the Southern District of New York. (JNS sought comment from the NJAC.) In documents related to Doe’s suit obtained by JNS, she alleges that while walking through campus in February 2024, a nonstudent anti-Israel protester handed her a flier with a QR code to sign a petition accusing Israel of ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza. Doe “shoved the false and defamatory flier back to the person who handed it to her, inadvertently jostling the person who handed it to her,” per the suit. Another protester proceeded to take Doe’s photo and posted it to multiple university social-media groups, causing Doe to face threats of violence. When she reported it to the school, she ended up being suspended for seven months. The school determined that she punched the protester, despite Doe’s assertions that any contact was incidental, the suit alleges. The lawsuit alleges that FIT violated federal and state antidiscrimination laws in its treatment of Doe. Harris told JNS that Doe meets the threshold to remain anonymous because she has “directly experienced personal threats of physical violence” and “she was on a campus where there were constantly chants and posters and stickers advocating for violence against students like her.” The chants, posters and stickers featured phrases like “punch a Zionist” and “the only good Zionist is a dead Zionist,” according to Harris. “We think the court undercounted both those specific incidents and also the general backdrop of antisemitism against which this is occurring,” she said. “In our brief, we really set forth tons of recent data, like studies, reports, anecdotal examples of antisemitism—violence, threats, ostracization that have occurred to American Jews, and specifically, Jewish students and academics on campuses.” Harris said that among the citations in the brief are the hate-crime data compiled by the FBI, surveys from major Jewish American organizations and Gallup polls. “We hear from students all the time who have faced terrible antisemitic discrimination and harassment, and they’re afraid to come forward publicly,” said Harris. “For us, it’s important to advocate on this issue so we have an avenue for students who are afraid to come forward to be able to do so anonymously.”