Brandeis Center Chairman Kenneth L. Marcus discusses anti-Israel protestors in Chicago cheering Iranian attack on Israel (Fox News Live, 4/14/24). Play Kenneth Marcus Discusses Anti-Israel Protestors Cheering Iranian Attack on Israel (Fox News Live) videoTextBlockModalTitle × Your browser does not support the video tag.
On March 26, the Brandeis Center hosted a Capitol Hill briefing titled “The Israel-Gaza War: How Hamas Propaganda Impacts American Students.” Brandeis Center Founder and Chairman Kenneth L. Marcus delivered opening remarks, while LDB Senior Counsel Mark Goldfeder interviewed urban warfare expert John W. Spencer. Brandeis Center President Alyza D. Lewin provided final remarks. Spencer is an award-winning scholar, professor, author, combat veteran, national security and military analyst, and internationally recognized expert and advisor on urban warfare, military strategy, and tactics. Spencer provided congressional staffers with a detailed breakdown of the current conflict, including insight from his own travels to Gaza. While dispelling common allegations against the Israeli government and Israeli Defense Forces, he also highlighted Hamas’ continued assault against Palestinian civilians and Israeli hostages. Unfortunately, the false information disseminated by Hamas to the international community and media trickles down to university campuses. Some students and faculty – knowingly or unknowingly – perpetuate harmful blood libel to the detriment of students. Others openly sympathize with Hamas’ mission, chanting for the elimination of Israel and Jews. “Holding Jewish students responsible for Israel’s actions is blatantly anti-Semitic,” said Brandeis Center Director of Policy Education Emma Enig. “But it’s even worse when the charges against Israel are false. Why are students being forced to defend themselves against Hamas propaganda online and in the classroom?” Play LDB Capitol Hill Policy Briefing: The Israel-Gaza War: How Hamas Propaganda Impacts American Students videoTextBlockModalTitle × Your browser does not support the video tag.
Published in the Washington Examiner on 3/23/24; Story by Peter Cordi Jewish students are “under siege” on campus, and a poll released Monday revealed that the various anti-Israel efforts pushed in higher education nationwide have made the Jewish community feel increasingly unsafe. Seventy-three percent of Jewish students reported feeling less safe on campus after the Oct. 7 attack, and it is not the fear of an attack on American soil that scares them but the increasingly hostile environment campuses have become for Jewish students as anti-Israel initiatives gain momentum. “Since Oct. 7, Jewish students on campus are facing a disturbing escalation of physical attacks, harassment, and antisemitism, including a sharp rise in BDS campaigns,” CEO of the Israel on Campus Coalition Jacob Baime told the Washington Examiner. “Despite these challenges, Jewish students have shown remarkable resilience.” In 2021, a poll found that 65% of students in the leading Jewish fraternity and sorority felt unsafe on campus, with 50% going as far as hiding their Jewish identity out of fear. Following the terrorist attack on Oct. 7, 2023, the ADL reported a 400% uptick in antisemitic incidents, contributing to this increased feeling of unsafety. “There have been a lot of anti-Israel protests, there have been a lot of antisemitic demonstrations and efforts, but the BDS movement is one that has really been widespread as it’s reaching college campuses,” Carly Cooperman, CEO and pollster at Schoen Cooperman Research told the Washington Examiner in an interview. The poll was conducted by Cooperman and SCR founder Douglas Schoen in partnership with the Israel on Campus Coalition and found that the boycott, divest, and sanction movement is largely to blame for facilitating an “unsafe” atmosphere for Jewish students. The poll found that 77% of Jewish college students believe the BDS movement is antisemitic or has antisemitic supporters and that 65% believe it poses a real threat to Jewish students. “Generally, there’s more of a lack of knowledge among college students about BDS,” Cooperman said. “And then, once [students] gain information about BDS, it quickly turns people to also acknowledge the antisemitic sentiments, too.” The poll found that Jewish students feel it is “critical” to take a stand against BDS initiatives on campus, with 81% expressing the importance of using one’s own voice to stand with the Jewish community. Some people believe “Jewish students don’t necessarily feel comfortable taking a stand,” Cooperman said. “They almost rather just lay low, and I understand that argument as it relates to safety, but I think there is an interest in standing up for Judaism, for the right to be Jewish.” Cooperman, alongside Schoen, expressed the need for non-Jewish students to take a stand against anti-Israel initiatives in the wake of this “alarming” poll in an op-ed for the Hill in which they described the current status of the Jewish community on campus as being “under siege.” She told the Washington Examiner that non-Jewish students must “continue the fight and the efforts that are being made to counter the resolutions that BDS is trying to pass on campus.” The poll additionally looked at how college students in general feel about Israel and BDS, finding a stark contrast between the sentiment of college students and the average person. As universities, along with their faculty and students, have become more left-liberal, the dichotomy often used by those on the left of “oppressor and oppressed” is being inappropriately used to characterize Israel’s role in the conflict with Hamas, Cooperman argued. “They’ve made this entire thing about oppression of civilians, despite the fact that Hamas literally uses civilians as shields,” she said. “It’s [Hamas’s] goal to make Israel look bad by making them kill people in order to get to [the point] that no one’s paying attention to the actual terrorist attack that took place.” “The perspectives of young people are so different and really lack a lot of historical context of the evolution of Israel. So I’m not saying it’s realistic that there can be a countereducation effort, but I think we’ve got to try to give people information beyond trying to fight these [BDS] resolutions,” Cooperman continued. The Washington Examiner spoke with Kenneth Marcus, founder and head of the Brandeis Center, to shed light on the campus culture that has prompted his organization to launch a number of civil rights lawsuits. “Universities need to be both reactive and proactive. They need to respond to antisemitism with the same seriousness that they display when addressing other forms of discrimination. This means dismantling the two-tiered system under which microaggressions against other groups are fiercely resisted while even macroaggressions against Jewish students are minimized,” he said. Marcus, who served as assistant secretary of education for civil rights in the Trump administration, explained that a “serious response” would require looking at the “deep cultural rot” on campus and identified a number of programs sold as fostering inclusivity but instead result in only furthering the problem. “University leaders need to ask how it is that our finest institutions are turning out a generation of students who so easily succumb to the vilest forms of prejudice. This means taking a hard look at the whole constellation of programs that are supposed to make colleges better and instead are making them worse: everything from DEI to anti-racist programming to critical race theory to liberated ethnic studies to post-Colonial curricula to the whole identity-industrial complex,” he said. “This problem will not just blow over,” Marcus warned. “It may even get worse before it gets better. What we know from our experience with campus antisemitism over recent decades is that spiking campus turmoil may last from weeks to months, and it may even last for years.” Unsurprised by the results of Monday’s poll, Marcus said, “The fact is that all Jewish students are now less safe. While the media focus on rampant hate speech, what we’re seeing is not just speech but also assault, intimidation, and vandalism.” “There’s some degree where it’s being [sold] as ‘This is free speech. This is pro-Palestinian. This is supporting the people in Gaza,’” Cooperman explained. “Imagine if 81% of students from any other group felt targeted and unwelcome on campus. For Jewish students, that’s the disturbing reality due to BDS votes,” Baime said. “BDS is not about free speech. It’s about free hate. It’s time for university leaders to step in and cancel these votes.”
Published on front page of the New York Times on 3/24/24; Story by Vimal Patel. In government and as an outsider, Kenneth Marcus has tried to douse what he says is rising bias against Jews. Some see a crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech. In the early 2000s, as the uprising known as the second intifada instilled fear in Israelis through a series of suicide bombings, Kenneth Marcus, then an official in the U.S. Department of Education, watched with unease as pro-Palestinian protests shook college campuses. “We were seeing, internationally, a transformation of anti-Israel animus into something that looked like possibly a new form of antisemitism,” Mr. Marcus recalled in an interview, adding that U.S. universities were at the forefront of that resurgence. Ever since, Mr. Marcus, perhaps more than anyone, has tried to douse what he sees as a dangerous rise of campus antisemitism, often embedded in pro-Palestinian activism. He has done it as a government insider in the Bush and Trump administrations, helping to clarify protections for Jewish students under the 1964 Civil Rights Act and broadening the definition of what can be considered antisemitic. He has also been an outside agitator, filing and promoting federal claims of harassment of Jews that he knows will garner media attention and put pressure on college administrators, students and faculty. The impact of his life’s work has never been more felt than in the last few months, as universities reel from accusations that they have tolerated pro-Palestinian speech and protests that have veered into antisemitism. Since the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has opened dozens of investigations into allegations of antisemitism at colleges and K-12 schools, a dramatic increase from previous years. The bar for starting an investigation is low, but the government has opened cases into institutions as varied as Stanford, Wellesley, the New School and Montana State University. Mr. Marcus’s nonprofit, the Brandeis Center, initiated only a handful of these complaints, but his tactics have been widely copied by other groups. Mr. Marcus is “the single most effective and respected force when it comes to both litigation and the utilization of the civil rights statutes” to combat antisemitism, said Jeffrey Robbins, a visiting professor at Brown University, who once served on the Brandeis Center board. Few, if any, would take issue with the Office for Civil Rights extending protections to students facing antisemitic harassment. But critics say that Mr. Marcus’s larger ambition is to push a pro-Israel policy agenda and crack down on speech supporting Palestinians. His complaints have often included ugly details, like swastikas being scrawled on doors, and a university’s indifference to them. Those claims, however, have been mingled with examples of pro-Palestinian speech, which some critics say is not antisemitic, even if it makes Jewish students uncomfortable. One recent complaint against American University includes an example of a student who said that she overheard suite mates “accusing Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinians.” In November, his center filed a complaint against Wellesley College, stating that panelists at an event “minimized the atrocities committed by Hamas.” The whole point, free-speech supporters contend, is to stir the pot and put colleges under the microscope of a federal investigation. Many universities have since taken an aggressive stance against some forms of speech and protest, moves often decried by academic freedom groups. Columbia, Brandeis University and George Washington University have suspended their chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine. “These complaints are having the impact that they were designed to achieve,” said Radhika Sainath, a lawyer with Palestine Legal, a civil rights group. “Not to win on the merit, but to force universities to investigate, condemn and suppress speech supporting Palestinian rights, because they are so fearful of bad press and donor backlash.” Mr. Marcus said the complaints stand on their own merit, but he nodded to their larger impact. “We realize that the value achieved by these cases is far greater than the narrow resolution might be,” he said. The goal, he added, is “about changing the culture on college campuses so that antisemitism is addressed with the same seriousness as other forms of hate or bias.” Interning for Barney Frank and Reading Ayn Rand Mr. Marcus, 57, said that he had not intended to devote his career to fighting antisemitism. Growing up in Sharon, Mass., a small town south of Boston, he ran into children who hurled rocks at him and yelled, “Go back to your Jew town,” he said. But Sharon also had a sizable Jewish population, and he said that he thought of antisemitism as a “relic of the past.” His Depression-era parents adored Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and in high school, Mr. Marcus worked as an intern for Representative Barney Frank, the liberal congressman. Mr. Marcus’s politics began to change at the local library, where he read books by conservative thinkers, such as Thomas Sowell and Ayn Rand. While studying at Williams College and the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, he became captivated by the conservative legal movement. And as a young corporate litigator, he took on First Amendment cases, which drew him into civil rights work. By 2004, he was the interim leader of the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, where he helped reframe how the department considered antisemitism cases. Back then, the office declined to take those cases. That is because it was charged with enforcing Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color or national origin — but not religion. But in an official letter, Mr. Marcus wrote that the agency’s Title VI enforcement would include ancestry — meaning students who are harassed because of their ethnic and religious characteristics, including “Arab Muslims, Jewish Americans and Sikhs.” In 2010, the Obama administration endorsed and clarified that interpretation of Title VI. The complaints involving shared ancestry began with a trickle. The first, filed a month after Mr. Marcus’s 2004 letter, was by the Zionist Organization of America against the University of California, Irvine. The complaint included accusations of antisemitism related to the Middle East conflict, such as a sign by a student group that said, “Israelis Love to Kill Innocent Children.” In those early years, Mr. Marcus and the Z.O.A. were the main ones pushing the Title VI antisemitism cases, said Susan Tuchman, an official at Z.O.A. She recalled that an official of one major Jewish advocacy group, which she declined to name, yelled at her over the phone, saying that her complaint was counterproductive and targeted speech protected by the First Amendment. Mr. Marcus “understood when few others did,” she said, “that campus antisemitism was a serious problem and that Jewish students didn’t have the legal protections that they needed.” His independent advocacy began in earnest in 2011, when Mr. Marcus started the Brandeis Center, based in Washington (and unaffiliated with Brandeis University in Massachusetts). There were larger, more established Jewish groups, like the Anti-Defamation League, but Mr. Marcus said he wanted his nonprofit to focus on campus legal work. Media attention was an important part of his strategy. He explained his rationale in a 2013 column in The Jerusalem Post, after President Obama’s Office for Civil Rights had dismissed an early wave of such complaints, including the Irvine case, saying they involved protected speech. “These cases — even when rejected — expose administrators to bad publicity,” Mr. Marcus wrote, adding, “If a university shows a failure to treat initial complaints seriously, it hurts them with donors, faculty, political leaders and prospective students.” Mr. Marcus said the complaints create “a very strong disincentive for outrageous behavior.” “Needless to say,” he wrote, “getting caught up in a civil-rights complaint is not a good way to build a résumé or impress a future employer.” In 2018, his tactics led some liberal groups to oppose his appointment as the civil rights chief of the Department of Education. The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition of liberal groups, wrote in a letter to senators that Mr. Marcus had sought to use the complaint process “to chill a particular political point of view, rather than address unlawful discrimination.” The letter also accused Mr. Marcus of undermining policies, like race-conscious admissions, that shielded other groups. The Senate narrowly confirmed him on a party-line vote. Antisemitism, Redefined After he took office in 2018, Mr. Marcus did not try to make peace with his critics. He promptly reopened a Title VI case, brought by the Zionist Organization of America against Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. The Z.O.A. had appealed the dismissal of its case for insufficient evidence. He used the Rutgers case to embrace, for the first time, a definition of antisemitism put forth by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which includes holding Israel to a “double standard” or claiming its existence is a “racist endeavor.” To Mr. Marcus, the definition helped pressure colleges to stop tolerating behavior against Jews that would be unacceptable if directed at racial minority groups or L.G.B.T.Q. students. But to pro-Palestinian supporters, Mr. Marcus was using the definition to try to crack down on their speech. They said that the Education Department already had the power to investigate and punish harassment, and this new definition just confused administrators about what was allowable. “No one says we need the I.H.R.A. definition so we can go after Nazis talking about killing Jews or classic antisemitic tropes about Jews and media and banks,” said Lara Friedman, the president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace. The definition, rather, “is about getting at this other supposed antisemitism.” The next year, the Trump administration issued a sweeping executive order on combating antisemitism and instructed all agencies to consider the I.H.R.A. definition in examining Title VI complaints. The complaints seem to be affecting campus culture — for better or worse depending on whom you ask. The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights said it has opened up 89 shared ancestry investigations into colleges and K-12 schools since Oct. 7, making up more than 40 percent of such cases opened since 2004. Education Department officials in the Biden administration have said there is no tension between the First Amendment and Title VI. They said universities can prevent hostile learning environments without curbing free expression by, for example, properly investigating complaints, creating support services for students or condemning hateful speech. But academic freedom supporters counter that administrators will go out of their way to avoid complaints altogether, especially now that the department has accepted the I.H.R.A. definition. The executive order remains in effect, and the Biden administration is considering a regulation on the matter. Last month, Debbie Becher, a sociology professor at Barnard College, wrote in the student newspaper that the school’s president asked her to “pause” the showing of “Israelism,” a documentary critical of Israel. In their meeting, the president, Laura Rosenbury, cited worries about Title VI and pointed out that the film was cited in a lawsuit accusing Harvard of antisemitism. Ms. Rosenbury did not respond to interview requests. “My arguments that this was overt censorship, a violation of academic freedom, and dangerous for Barnard’s culture fell on deaf ears,” wrote Dr. Becher, who went forward with the event. Mr. Marcus continues to press his case. The Brandeis Center, which started as a one-man operation, now has 13 litigators. He said he is happy there but would not rule out another stint in a future Trump administration. “I’ve spent my career focused on this battle,” he said, “and it seems sometimes as if it’s all been leading up to this very moment.”
Published in Times of Israel on 3/14/24; Story by Tal Schneider The Gulf kingdom has lavished billions on US higher education as it seeks soft power, but some allege the money may also be fueling anti-Israel and anti-Jewish trends at schools One will not find many Qatari flags fluttering in College Station, the town that Texas A&M University calls home. The tiny Middle Eastern state does not have its name on any of the buildings across the school’s sprawling campus, nor are those of Qatar’s ruling sheikhs engraved in Legacy Hall at the Jon L. Hagler Center, where the university’s major supporters are recognized. According to public documents, though, the land-grant university is awash in Qatari money. Between 2015 and 2023, $404 million worth of Doha’s cash made its way into school coffers, according to a federal register. Data recently obtained by a watchdog through the courts appear to show that the school actually received tens of millions more. The Aggies are hardly alone. According to a 2022 study, Qatar contributed $4.7 billion to dozens of academic institutions across the United States between 2001 and 2021. Some of the amounts are classified as “gifts” while others are labeled as “restricted agreements.” In recent months, as institutions of higher education across the US have been rocked by anti-Israel protests and allegations of inaction or apathy in the face of antisemitic rhetoric or worse, Qatar’s outlays have come under increased scrutiny over the role they may play in influencing attitudes toward the Jewish state in academia. “Qatar’s goal is not to promote antisemitic or pro-Palestinian messages, I believe, but antisemitism and pro-Palestinian sentiments are byproducts of policies convenient for them,” said Ariel Admoni, a PhD student at Bar Ilan University who specializes in foreign and domestic relations of Qatar and the Arabian Gulf. The 2022 study, conducted by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), argues that as funding from Middle Eastern countries increases – and becomes less transparent to the public – certain campuses experience campaigns to silence academics, an erosion of democratic values, and a lack of response to attacks on students’ freedom of expression. Using statistical analysis, the authors posited a correlation between schools that receive foreign funding and antisemitic or anti-Israel rhetoric, as well as allegations of antisemitic activity. According to the research, universities receiving the largest sums from Qatar have shown a willingness to align with anti-democratic norms fostered by repressive Middle Eastern petrostates, such as intolerance of certain types of speech. Oftentimes, these standards dovetail with movements in academia tamping down on freedom of expression in the name of creating a safe space for multicultural inclusion. However, critics say that the commitment to inclusion stops where support for Zionism or the Jewish community begins, with the result being an atmosphere on many of the top campuses in the US where Jews and Israel supporters feel unwelcome and unsafe. Academic investments Universities are supposed to report foreign investments, and the data is made public by the US Department of Education, which has a database online. Records published by the department show the breadth and depth of Qatari investments in US higher education. Among other schools, Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh received $301 million from Qatar between 2020 and 2023. The Virginia Commonwealth University received $125 million between 2019 and 2023, and Georgetown University received $210 million between 2015 and 2023, according to the federal register. Harvard, which has been embroiled in an antisemitism scandal that led to its president’s resignation, has taken over $8 million from Qatar since 2020. At the top of the list is Cornell, which has received a whopping $1.5 billion from Qatar since 2015. Nearly every country appears on the Department of Education database, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. That includes Israel, though the amounts, which are rarely more than a few hundred thousand dollars, are almost always tied to research agreements in life sciences and rarely come from the government itself. Other countries give heftier sums, which have come with their own questions. In 2021 Saudi Arabia provided $74 million to the University of Idaho and a year later gave $47 million to Chapman University. Both amounts were reported as tuition fees or guarantees for Saudi nationals. Germany is another country that has thrown money at schools, such as the $1.2 billion it gave to the University of Pennsylvania in 2018 alone. In 2021, US President Joe Biden, who situated a namesake think tank at Penn and was paid nearly $1 million by the school in 2018 and 2019, named its president as ambassador to Germany. Public conversations in the past had focused on Chinese money and influence flowing into US universities, which also reach astronomical amounts, such as contracts worth over $140 million paid to New York University between 2020 and 2023. Qatari connections go back decades According to Admoni, Qatar’s links to American academia date back to the 1970s and 1980s. “The Qataris utilize the academic institution as an unofficial arm of the government, providing a platform where they can convey messages not officially attributed to them,” he said. Much of the money comes from the Qatar Foundation, which was set up to advance education and Arab culture within Qatar and to “promote and engage in dialogue internationally to address and influence global topics,” according to a fact sheet. The fund’s landmark project is Education City in Doha, which hosts satellite campuses of six American universities, including Texas A&M, Cornell and Georgetown. The foundation is headed by Moza Bint Nasser, mother of the Qatari emir, who has been asked repeatedly to use her high profile to intercede on behalf of hostages being held in Gaza, including by Sara Netanyahu. Online and in public appearances, though, Bint Nasser has been critical of Israel’s war against Hamas and silent on the hostages. “If the government wants to communicate a message, they organize an academic conference, set up a forum with symposiums in the capital of Qatar, and within it, statements may be made, such as expressing dissatisfaction towards the United States by the speakers,” Admoni said. “The academic framework allows them to articulate things indirectly. In other words, Qatar pursues its own agenda, and for Qatar, an academic institution is a legitimate tool to achieve their foreign policy goals.” Universities justify their ongoing collaboration with Qatar and other schools by citing the need for international dialogue, mutual cultural enrichment, and the enhancement of academic research through social diversity. Academics in the United States argue that bringing the spirit of American academia to places like Doha will strengthen liberal values and academic freedom in the face of dictatorial societies, constituting a form of soft power diplomacy. Kenneth Marcus, who leads the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, which provides legal aid to students experiencing antisemitism on campus, said the cross-cultural exchanges can often bring students “indoctrinated with anti-Jewish propaganda” to campus, or send American students to places where they absorb antisemitic attitudes. “They may come in peace, but also in many cases, bring with them cultural attitudes towards Israel and Jewish communities in a way that is harmful in the United States,” he said of foreign students. “While we should welcome all people into our country, we should be very concerned about those foreign students who are bringing anti-Jewish, and in some cases anti-American attitudes.” “US students are increasingly studying on Qatari and other Gulf State campuses, which don’t have even remotely the academic freedom standards that we have in the United States,” he added. “Where there is reportedly a very high level of indoctrination, so that American students come back from foreign campuses having been propagandized and indoctrinated for a semester or a year, this then becomes a significant aspect of the climate at their home institutions.” Rising concerns On February 8, Texas A&M’s Board of Regents voted to close its Qatar campus, citing “heightened instability in the Middle East,” an oblique reference to Israel’s war with Hamas. Many, however, believe the move was tied to questions that have emerged over its ties to Qatar, particularly concerns voiced by conservatives that nuclear secrets could be leaked via the partnership. “When Gulf states invest in American universities, they might have a variety of motivations, including not only influencing the United States, but also building up their own educated citizenry. There are undoubtedly, though, a host of ramifications of these partnerships,” said Marcus, who served as assistant secretary for civil rights at the US Department of Education from 2018 to 2020. He noted that over the last 20 years, anti-Israel attitudes in academia had expanded, having once been largely isolated to Middle Eastern studies programs but now being present in a wide range of fields of study. “Even mental health programs, psychology programs, and medical schools are now badly infected with anti-Zionism,” he said. As campuses have become battlegrounds over Israeli and Palestinian narratives in the wake of the October 7 massacre of 1,200 people in southern Israel by Hamas terrorists, many have found it hard to ignore Qatar’s university funding and what that funding could buy. Though presenting itself as a fair mediator in indirect talks between Israel and Hamas, including over terms for the release of hostages abducted by Hamas on October 7 and still held in Gaza, Qatar has long hosted Hamas’s leadership and has been harshly critical of Israel. In a statement released as Hamas terrorists were carrying out atrocities across southern Israel, Doha declared Israel “solely responsible for the ongoing escalation” and justified the terror onslaught. “The Qataris excel at leveraging the Palestinian issue to draw attention to what suits them,” Admoni said. “In Western countries, particularly within educated circles, the pro-Palestinian struggle is perceived as a ‘convenient’ cause. Consequently, from the Qatari perspective, this portrayal positions them favorably on what they consider to be the right side of public opinion, especially among the youth.” According to Marcus, the draw of Qatari money also means school administrators may be less willing to call out antisemitism on campus. “It’s not at all surprising when US administrators are reluctant to impose the same discipline on foreign students when they’re getting foreign money because there is a range of pressures on them to avoid doing the right thing,״ he said. Doha’s ‘pragmatism’ As shown by the fact that it hosts both a major American military base and a Taliban embassy, Doha excels at maintaining alliances while navigating shifting and often discordant interests. Admoni noted that when Qatar was accused of funding the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda in 2017, Doha launched a charm offensive aimed at keeping Washington in its court, including cozying up to Jewish leaders. “They are very pragmatic and cynical politicians, and if they have a global goal like appearing as those who solve the Palestinian issue, they will do whatever it takes for that,” he said. “The Qataris aim to be tone-setters, active participants in the discourse, exerting influence wherever they can impact and where decision-makers gather,” Admoni added. “This involves investing in global sports, culture, politics, and academia to establish ‘soft power’ influence. It’s a form of soft diplomacy, ensuring that they cannot be ignored.” Editor’s note: A previous version of this story misidentified the Virginia university which received money from Qatar. We regret the error.
The Department of Education has opened 48 cases tied to antisemitism at colleges and universities since Oct. 7, most related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict Published 3/1/24 in The Forward; Story by Arno Rosenfeld A federal investigation or lawsuit related to antisemitism on college campuses has been opened or filed nearly every other day on average since Oct. 7, according to a Forward analysis. The complaints describe a range of incidents, including white supremacist flyers at Montana State University and a drunken assault at the University of Tampa. Many complaints center on speech related to Israel. A student at the New School said he heard someone comment, “I wish you had been in Israel on Oct. 7 so you would have been raped, too.” This unprecedented flurry of civil rights lawsuits and Education Department investigations reflect spikes in antisemitic and anti-Israel incidents nationally during the Israel-Hamas war. But it’s also driven by an increased reliance on a legal doctrine — rooted in the idea that Zionism is part of Jews’ “shared ancestry” — that has been crafted to expand legal protections for Jewish students, especially those who support Israel. The Biden administration has encouraged Jewish students who feel targeted by increasing hostility toward Israel and its supporters on many college campuses to look to the department for protection. “This became an all-hands-on-deck moment after the terrorist attack,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said at a public briefing this month. “No student should ever feel that they are going into a learning environment where people are openly spewing hate.” The Department of Education is currently looking into 46 cases related to shared ancestry at higher education institutions, along with dozens more at the K-12 level, although they represent a tiny fraction of overall civil rights investigations. But it is difficult to discern the nature of each complaint, because the department makes little information public, and several cases allege Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism since Oct. 7. Harvard, for example, is being investigated over claims of both antisemitism and anti-Muslim bias. The cases are often called OCR or Title VI investigations, referring to the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights, which oversees them. Schools are compelled to cooperate or risk losing massive sums of federal funding. In addition, there are at least nine federal lawsuits against universities tied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — most also alleging antisemitism — making their way through the court system. The caseload takes so long to adjudicate, and the number of final resolutions to date so sparse, that it’s not clear whether the federal government and courts can deliver the relief that students and their supporters are demanding. But proponents of the litigation strategy say that more complaints and lawsuits are in the works, and that the escalation in campus antisemitism deserves an aggressive legal response. “Oct. 7 just poured fuel on a fire that was already out of control,” said Mark Ressler, an attorney who is suing several Ivy League universities on behalf of Jewish students. “Our view was that the appropriate way to address antisemitism on campus was to force universities to do what they’re required under federal law.” Even as some critics warn that some of the complaints are based on flimsy allegations, these remedies have offered a degree of validation for some Jewish students and the advocacy organizations supporting them. Katy Joseph, deputy director for faith-based partnerships at the Education Department, recalled meeting with a Yeshiva University student whose parents immigrated from the former Soviet Union and were flabbergasted by the country’s civil rights apparatus. “They said, ‘You’re meeting with someone from the federal government about addressing antisemitism — who could imagine that the federal government would care about what Jewish students are experiencing?’” Joseph recounted. A new doctrine covers Jews — and possibly Israel Investigations into alleged antisemitism in American schools is a relatively new phenomenon for the Education Department because religious discrimination falls outside its purview and, until 2004, that is how it categorized discrimination against Jews. This had long frustrated some Jewish civil rights leaders, who felt that Jews were getting short shrift from the federal government for viewing them too narrowly as a religious group. When Ken Marcus took over the department’s civil rights office during the George W. Bush administration, he started looking for test cases for a new category of “shared ancestry” that would allow officials to investigate cases that touched on religion. He found one when a Sikh child in New Jersey was beaten by classmates who saw his turban and taunted him as “Osama,” a reference to the infamous Muslim terrorist. Marcus believed that the discrimination wasn’t strictly religious in nature because the bullies weren’t intending to go after the boy’s Sikh identity. And it wasn’t obviously racial, either, since it was the turban that had drawn the bullies’ attention. He authorized the department to investigate these types of cases under its authority to prohibit discrimination based on race or national origin, creating a new category called “shared ancestry.” Every subsequent administration has agreed that these cases fall under the department’s purview. More controversial is the question of what, exactly, constitutes discrimination against Jews based on their shared ancestry. Marcus and many Jewish advocacy groups have taken the position that anti-Zionism — opposition to a Jewish state in Israel — is often antisemitic because many Jews identify with Israel as part of their shared ancestry. Organizations like Hillel have made this argument to colleges and universities for several years, with mixed success, and Marcus successfully lobbied the Trump administration to require the Education Department to use a definition of antisemitism that classifies much anti-Zionism as antisemitic. Many recent complaints reflect this view. A Rutgers law student, for example, taking issue with a text group chat in which other students were expressing support for the Palestinian cause, filed a complaint with the department. And a lawsuit against Harvard objects to a screening of Israelism, a film about American Jews who have become disillusioned with Israel, as antisemitic. Shabbos Kastenbaum, one of the students suing Harvard, said he was especially upset that one of the panelists who spoke after the screening suggested that Jews had internalized the trauma they suffered during the Holocaust and were now lashing out against the Palestinians. “The crux of the complaint is that someone is engaging in antisemitic tropes,” he said. Some of the smaller number of complaints filed on behalf of Arab and Muslim students also reference incidents involving speech about the conflict. San Diego State University is under investigation for an email sent to students following Oct. 7 that condemned the “horrific” Hamas attack, while expressing sympathy for both Israelis and Palestinians who had been killed. ‘A very low bar’ Advocacy groups often herald the Education Department’s opening of an investigation as evidence that their case has merit. That used to be the case, according to Miriam Nunberg, a former civil rights staffer at the department, who told JTA that a decade ago her team would only open investigations if the complaints seemed serious enough. But now the policy is to open investigations into any complaint that claims a school violated a civil rights law over which it has jurisdiction, as long as the alleged violation took place within the last six months. “The opening of an investigation does not mean the law was violated,” said a senior Education Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the department did not permit her to speak publicly on the matter. “There’s a very low bar for opening complaints.” The law also allows anyone to file a complaint, including those who have no affiliation with the school or firsthand knowledge of the incidents. Advocates say that’s important, so the onus is not on a potentially vulnerable victim of discrimination to report a problem, and because civil rights violations have a negative impact on society — not just on the handful of people directly impacted. But this low bar, critics point out, also means the department must open cases even when there is not a clear victim of discrimination, or when investigators do not believe the claims have merit. If the “shared ancestry” category has made it easier to file a suit against a college, so has the fact that no one in an alleged incident has to go to school or work there to file a complaint against it. Tulane, for example, is being investigated over the assault of a Jewish student at a protest although all four people arrested in the incident were unaffiliated with the New Orleans university and the student’s attorney has said the school is not responsible. Two years ago a single anonymous individual was responsible for nearly 40% of the 18,804 investigations that the department opened, mostly centered on allegations of sex discrimination based on the person’s review of school data about athletics. Who’s filing these cases? Though the department doesn’t reveal the details of what it’s investigating, many organizations have shared complaints they have filed about antisemitism in recent months. The Forward created a database of all known federal investigations and lawsuits based on the limited information released by the Education Department and lawsuit announcements. Though the department began releasing a list of its shared ancestry investigations in November, it does not share details of those cases, including whether the allegations involve antisemitism. According to the Forward’s review, most of the complaints filed by organizations came from legal advocacy groups like the Brandeis Center and the Lawfare Project, which focus on defending Jewish students and Israel. But these groups have a higher standard for taking a case than some other complainants. Alyza Lewin, president of the Brandeis Center, said the organization has declined to represent several students who may go on to file some of the weaker complaints independently. “They’re filed by people who are unhappy, who are upset and who feel that they want to do something, and they’re very well-intentioned when they file them, but they may very well be filing complaints that might not have a successful resolution,” Lewin told JTA in a piece published Thursday detailing the recent uptick in cases. More partisan actors have also joined the fray, including Campus Reform, a news outlet run by a conservative training center whose editor has filed at least nine federal complaints accusing various universities of antisemitism. Cardona said that his team knows that some of the antisemitism complaints are coming from people who may have political motivations, but that doesn’t change the department’s obligation to investigate. “I can’t say that we’re not aware of it,” he said. “There are a lot of things that have become politicized in this country and at the end of the day it’s our responsibility to make sure we’re thinking about the students.” ‘Vindicating their rights’ in court While the Education Department investigates potential violations of federal law, complaints filed with the agency are not lawsuits. That means students or outside organizations don’t need to hire lawyers to sue a college or university. But it also means adjudication may be very slow, and they are unlikely to receive monetary damages even if the school is found to have violated their rights. Of the 10 lawsuits filed against higher education institutions since Oct. 7 related to antisemitism or Israel on campus, four have been filed by one law firm, Kasowitz Benson Torres, whose lead partner Marc Kasowitz served as former president Donald Trump’s longtime personal attorney. Ressler, the attorney overseeing the cases, has sued Harvard, New York University, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia and Barnard, and said he is looking for more schools to sue. Ressler said his firm started recruiting student plaintiffs well before Oct. 7. Several individuals, who Ressler described as prominent Jewish leaders but declined to name, approached Kasowitz over the summer and told him they wanted to use the courts to fight antisemitism, including campus diversity initiatives they found problematic. Federal lawsuits generally supersede administrative complaints, like those made through the Education Department, where officials said they have closed investigations into Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania after those schools were sued. Ressler said litigation, far more effectively than filing a complaint with the Education Department, can force college administrators to hand over emails and other evidence of potential discrimination, and to defend themselves in public. “American citizens vindicate their civil rights by going to federal court,” he said. ‘Pleading’ for resources It can take years to resolve a complaint at the Education Department. Investigators are handling an average of 50 cases each compared to 36 cases two years ago and fewer than 10 each during the Bush administration. Education Department officials and Democrats, along with some Jewish advocacy groups, have been lobbying to increase funding for the department’s civil rights office, arguing that it needs more investigators to handle the caseload and require schools to better protect students. The office currently receives $140 million in annual funding and has requested an increase to $177 million, although an outside coalition of civil rights groups wrote a recent letter calling on Congress to double its allocation to $280 million. “It is astonishing to me that the complaint volume is so high,” said the senior department official. “And we have been pleading for years for Congress to increase our budget.” Congressional Republicans have held hearings and launched investigations into campus antisemitism, but generally oppose increased funding for the department, calling for overall cuts to the federal budget. Marcus said the funding question was largely a partisan battle, and that only a tiny fraction of any new dollars would go toward addressing antisemitism because most of the office’s 19,000 annual cases are about discrimination against students based on gender and disability. “Antisemitism cases — even post-Oct. 7 — are such a small percentage of OCR’s total caseload,” said Marcus, who now runs the Brandeis Center, which has filed at least four complaints with the department since October. “Antisemitism should be left out of this.” Liz King, with the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, a coalition that sent the letter to Congress demanding more funding, said that the “shared ancestry” cases — including those about antisemitism — represent some of the most time-consuming. “We really resent the idea that more complicated cases would fall to the bottom of the pile,” she said.
Published by Jewish Policy Center’s inFocus magazine’s winter 2024 issue Editor’s Note: This conversation is excerpted from a panel discussion, “Enriching the U.S.-Israel Alliance by Combating Antisemitism,” at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC on October 23, 2023, even before the full weight of events was felt. Kenneth L. Marcus is the founder and chairman of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law. He is also a distinguished senior fellow at the Center for Liberty and Law at George Mason University Law School and formerly Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the US Department of Education and has served as Staff Director of the United States Commission on Civil Rights. Ellie Cohanim is a broadcast journalist who served as Deputy Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism at the US Department of State. She had previously been a Special Correspondent and Senior Vice President for Jewish Broadcasting Service (JBS) and an Executive at Yeshiva University, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and UJA Federation of New York. Ellie Cohanim: To begin our conversation allow me to share context: Jews around the world are in a state of shock and horror. On October 7 while Jewish families in Israel celebrated the Simchat Torah holiday, Hamas infiltrated Jewish communities of southern Israel, massacred 1,200 people, wounded nearly 5,000 others, and committed atrocities not seen since the Holocaust. Israel says that 80 percent of the 1,200 murdered that day were tortured first. Hamas kidnapped young women, toddlers, babies, elderly people, and seems to have unleashed the forces of hate across the globe on that day. Ken, not only did we witness these horrific crimes, these atrocities committed against the Jewish people—but before Israel had even responded, before Israelis had even the opportunity to identify, never mind bury their dead—we saw students across US college campuses come out and protest, and rally, in support of Hamas. What is happening on our college campuses? There is something called the Marcus Doctrine, which is attributed to you. Can you also tell us about that and how it ties into what we are experiencing today? Ken Marcus: I have been fighting campus antisemitism for more than 20 years. It gets worse and worse, but never have we experienced anything like the past couple of weeks. It has been surging over the last few years, but this really has been something unlike anything we saw before. Think about what’s happening now. What we just saw, and as you described, was mass torture, murder, rape of civilians, burning people alive, decapitation. The immediate response from college campuses in many places was to support the terrorists. In one case, a professor talking about being “exhilarated.” In many cases, student groups arguing that people should “join the resistance,” meaning the genocidal attack on Jewish people. This goes beyond the hostile environments that we have seen over recent years. What we’re experiencing now is a mass phenomenon. Once we see it, we can’t unsee it. University presidents and the public now must face the fact that on our college campuses, something monstrous is developing. We have very substantial movements of pro-Hamas, pro-terrorist, pro-genocidal groups at some of the most important universities in the United States. Right now, there are university presidents arguing about whether they should or should not issue a “statement.” Those presidents who either don’t issue a statement or want a “both sides” statement are utterly incapable of understanding the moral issues. But even for those who do issue a statement and even a statement with moral clarity, it’s still just a statement! If you are the president of a university today, you are now aware that for all the millions of dollars you have put into “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion” (DEI), you have created the opposite of DEI. For all that your admissions have done to create a student body that reflects the values you pretend to hold, you have created a student body which is in favor of murder. For all that you say that your curriculum should do more than just provide information or critical thinking, you have curricula that is training pro-terrorist people. This is beyond “statements.” We are at a time in which if you are a university president and you have not thought about cleaning house, you shouldn’t be there. It’s not about—“do you issue a statement.” It’s about—do you realize that you are running an institution that is fundamentally and totally wrongheaded in its approach and that is sending this country in the wrong direction? Even a good statement isn’t enough. You asked about what I call the Title VI Policy—and what other people may call the Marcus Doctrine. That is the notion that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits certain forms of race, color, or national origin discrimination in the public schools, and in colleges and universities, but that doesn’t mention religion, nevertheless protects Jews and certain other groups that have ethnic backgrounds as well as religious ones. It is based on the idea that a group that has ethnic or ancestral characteristics should not lose the protections that they would have, if they did not have a shared common faith. The Biden administration, to its credit, has expanded the use of the Marcus Doctrine to include not only the Department of Education—whose civil rights agency I headed—and the Department of Justice, but also eight other agencies. So, there are now 10 cabinet level agencies committed to the policy. I’m pleased with this. This is something that’s taken some 20 years to establish, but once we have this notion that these federal agencies are going to deal with antisemitism, are they going to deal with antisemitism? Because the signs aren’t great, the signs really aren’t great. So now they know they have to do something, let’s see them do it. Cohanim: Let’s talk now for a moment about Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). The Louis Brandeis Center was leading an effort recently on an SJP campus program they held on October 12, the so-called “National Day of Resistance.” SJP chapters are known for their anti-Israel propaganda, often with inflammatory and combative rhetoric. Can you tell us what happened with SJP and how do we turn this tide of Jew-hate on US campuses? Marcus: I’ll give you a few examples of what’s happening on the campus and why it is that, respectfully, I agree that President [of the University of Florida] Ben Sasse’s statement was one of the best, maybe the best, but it’s a low bar. I’m not sure that it was good enough for the University of Florida, and it certainly isn’t enough for the universities that are seeing much worse levels of antisemitism. [Editor’s Note: Sasse’s letter read, in part, “We will protect our students and we will protect speech. This is always true: Our Constitution protects the rights of people to make abject idiots of themselves. I also want to be clear about this: We will protect our Jewish students from violence. If anti-Israel protests come, we will absolutely be ready to act if anyone dares to escalate beyond peaceful protest. Speech is protected—violence and vandalism are not.”] I’ve gotten reports of physical attacks on Jewish students in the wake of the call for “resistance.” And when they use the term “resistance,” they’re using the Hamas term. They’re calling for people to join in a worldwide movement that has reached its culmination—so far—in a pogrom involving torture, rape, and murder. They’re calling for people around the world to join in replicating the atrocities that have already happened. In the wake of that, we’re seeing physical attacks on Jewish students. We’re seeing vandalism of Jewish institutions. We’re seeing students being followed, being taunted, being harassed in various ways. This is happening all over the place and it’s often supported by faculty members. Seldom are our university administrators really doing very much if anything about it. Keep this in mind. If you’re thinking about the campus in the same way after October 7 that you did before October 7, you’re not thinking about it right. Prior to that, yes, we were seeing environments made toxic by antisemitic and anti-American ideology. Yes, we were seeing Jewish students who were being harassed, marginalized, and excluded to the extent that Zionism was an integral part of their identity, but what we’re seeing now is university-funded—and in some cases taxpayer-funded—efforts to advance in a conscious and intentional manner, the program and communications agenda of a US State Department-designated terrorist organization. To be clear, what I’m describing is potentially a felony. So, if you’re a university president who is not sure whether you should or shouldn’t make a statement, let me say that on many campuses, it’s too late anyhow. Statements are okay in response to statements and people who are simply saying false things. You can then say things that are the truth. If people are saying things that are immoral, you can give a moral example. But if people are committing assault and vandalism, you can’t just make a statement. If your university’s facilities and resources are being used in a way that intentionally advances the agenda of a terrorist organization, if you aren’t sure whether you are committing a felony, forget about the statement. You need to take much greater actions even than the best of the university presidents are making. We need to hear very strong messages from university presidents, from attorneys general, from governors that this can’t continue. It’s not a question of political disagreement. It’s not even just a question of bigotry or harassment anymore. Now it’s also a question of whether our public institutions are being used not only to undermine American foreign policy, but potentially to advance terrorism in a way that is federally criminal. Cohanim: It is hard for us to believe that we have reached this low at our institutions of “higher” learning. Ken, you spoke a bit about a few steps that the Biden administration has taken to combat antisemitism. Do you think it should be doing more, and what kind of initiatives would you recommend? Marcus: The Biden administration issued a National Strategy on dealing with antisemitism and should be applauded for its breadth and for public attention it brought to the issue. But in terms of substantive work it is doing, I would say that so far it has lagged behind that of the last few administrations. I would also say that there has been a sense from those speaking with people in the Biden administration that they issued their National Strategy and were planning to do nothing more until after the election. I hope no one in the administration has been thinking that since October 7. Because while there are some good things in the National Strategy, it wasn’t sufficient for October 6, and it surely isn’t sufficient for now. I’ll give you a few examples. The Biden administration has continuously promised to issue a formal regulation that would implement the Trump Executive Order on Combating Antisemitism, and yet continually throughout this administration has delayed doing so. The current deadline, self-imposed by the Biden administration, is December of this year. Notably, they’ve been saying very little bit about it. They haven’t even mentioned it in many months, leaving some to think that they’re not ever going to do it. At a minimum, they should be doing what they promised. The US Education Department Office for Civil Rights has issued some materials, but when it comes to the anti-Zionist forms of antisemitism, the Department of Education hasn’t even spoken with the same specificity that we’ve even seen from the White House—and at a minimum, they should be able to do that. Now, look at all the campuses at which there is so much antisemitism over the last two weeks; all you need to have is Google and you can see substantial amounts of harassment and “hostile environment,” which the Department of Education is obligated to address. The education department shouldn’t be waiting to get complaints. There should be a nationwide compliance initiative from the Secretary of Education right now—at a minimum—to address those campuses, where obviously there are problems, because they’re all over the blogosphere and the papers. Audience Question: In the context of “corporate woke-ism,” I’m curious what you think companies should be saying about this? Is this different than coming out and talking about other issues? What would a good response from corporate America look like? Marcus: Those in the corporate world, especially the human resources world, can look to the Society of Human Resources Managers (SHRM) as a good source of advice. I’ve shared my thoughts with SHRM and they have those thoughts on their website. There are a number of things they should do to begin with; there are things they already should have been doing. A lot of corporations have months to recognize African American, women, Asian, and other workers, but don’t have them for Jewish workers. May is Jewish American History Month. Let them recognize that. Some of them have employee resource groups (ERGs) for African American and Hispanic and other identity groups but have refused to allow their Jewish workers to create them based on the notion that Jewishness is a religion only. They should be educated on that and provide the same ERG opportunities for Jewish employees as for others. They should monitor their DEI programs to see whether they’re making things worse, because sometimes that is the case. To the extent that they have education programs on various forms of discrimination, they should make sure that they’re including antisemitism, including those forms of antisemitism that we’re seeing today—which is to say left-wing as well as right-wing antisemitism. To the extent that they made statements about the Ukraine invasion or other world affairs, they should be making them about the Hamas pogrom as well. To the extent that they make accommodations for other workers who have various sorts of needs, they should consider their Israeli American employees who might be called to duty in Israel and might need some accommodations. They should certainly be making the sorts of statements that they make for others, and they should be considering both antisemitism and Jewish identity in the same way that they treat any other ethnic or racial background. Question: I’m a Jewish college student and my friends and I have personally experienced antisemitism, specifically by the organization that you mentioned, Students for Justice in Palestine. How can we ensure that Jewish students feel safe in college campuses expressing both their Jewish identity and their Zionist beliefs? Marcus: To the extent that you or your fellow students have been harassed, certainly talk to the Louis D. Brandeis Center. There are a lot of resources that can help you feel safe. We talk to students every day about that. Of course, there are also other institutions on campus that can support you ranging from Hillel to Chabad and Jewish Studies, but depending on what the issue is, I think the most important thing is that you do not feel alone. If you are facing a problem, there are a lot of organizations here to support you.
Published 12/15/23 by Insider Higher Ed; Story by Jessica Blake A survey of about 2,000 Jewish students across the country found their perceptions of antisemitism varied from one campus to another. A new report by Brandeis University says Jewish students’ perceptions of campus climate vary “dramatically” from institution to institution. The report, released Thursday by the university’s Maurice and Marilyn Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies, is based on a survey of Jewish students at colleges and universities across the country and was designed to determine which campuses were “hot spots of antisemitism” since the start of the Israel-Hamas war. Participants were asked about their views on the level of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel hostility on their campuses as well as their overall degree of concern about antisemitism. Each institution was then assigned a quartile ranking based on the results. As many as 83 percent of students at institutions in the top quartile for hostility reported some or much concern about antisemitism, compared to relatively few—55 percent—students in the lowest quartile. The survey sampled about 2,000 undergraduate students who had applied to participate in Birthright Israel, a heritage trip to Jerusalem for young adults of Jewish background. The respondents’ levels of religious and/or cultural education in primary and secondary school varied, and so did their opinions of the Israeli government. The sample population also spanned 51 colleges and universities of diverse size, location, selectivity and estimated Jewish population. Ken Stern, director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate, voiced concern about the limitations of the survey and the students’ ties to Birthright Israel. “This isn’t representative of all Jewish students,” he said. Reports of antisemitism on college campuses and tensions on campuses related to the Israel-Hamas war have been a topic of heated discussion across the country since the conflict broke out in Israel on Oct. 7. Many college leaders have been widely criticized for their responses to Jewish students’ complaints of antisemitic incidents and hostility toward them on campuses. However, efforts to track students’ perceptions of antisemitism on campuses have been relatively limited. The Anti-Defamation League released findings from a similar survey in November. In addition to bolstering the volume of existing data on college antisemitism, Leonard Saxe, a professor of contemporary Jewish studies at Brandeis and co-author of the report, said he hopes the findings broaden the scope of campus climate coverage by national media. So far, public attention has mostly focused on elite private universities in the Northeast. “The universities that had been in the headlines … are not necessarily representative of what’s going on across the board,” Saxe said. He noted that at some colleges, such as Tulane University in New Orleans, there have been serious incidents of antisemitism and even assaults on Jewish students at protests, yet survey results show that Tulane students perceive the institution as one with a comparatively low level of hostility. “If you read newspapers, you would think that every single campus in the country is on fire,” he said. “But there are some campuses, even campuses that had serious incidents, where students don’t feel the level of harassment and being targeted that they do at other campuses.” “We think that that tells us that there may be things that campuses can do to address the problem,” Saxe added. Julia Jassey, CEO and co-founder of Jewish on Campus—a student-driven national organization, believes the data will be validating for many students. “It seems quite in line with the stories that we’re hearing and with the experiences that are being highlighted,” Jassey said. “While the antisemitic hostility is varying, the experience overwhelmingly among students across various campuses is that antisemitism is a real and growing problem.” She added that the most commonly perceived occurrences of antisemitism are no longer those of traditional tropes about the Jewish community but are in the context of the war and critiques of Israel as a nation. Across all four categories of institutions, from those with the highest to lowest levels of overall antisemitism, at least 63 percent of students reported a sense of anti-Israel hostility on campus, compared to at least 49 percent who agreed there was hostility against Jews. And survey data showed that concerns about anti-Israel hostility were not limited to Jewish students who had self-declared favorable views of the Israeli government. Among the 44 percent of respondents who had unfavorable views of the Israeli government, 45 percent were very concerned about antisemitism related to criticism of Israel. Other trends include students at institutions in all four categories expressing more concern about hostility emanating from people on the political left than the right and reporting incidents involving peers more than faculty and administrators. Jassey believes knowledge of such trends will better equip university leaders to respond. “It both highlights the variation between different campuses … but also shows that a lot of these trends are overarching across lots of campuses,” she said. The report also notes that antisemitism is “far more prevalent” now than it was in 2016, when Brandeis conducted a similar study. Pamela Nadell, director of the Jewish studies program at American University, said her research confirms similar trends, and she noted events such as a physically combative 2018 rally involving pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students at New York University or when the Williams College student government declined official recognition of a newly formed pro-Israel student group in 2019. “We can’t look at what is happening on the college campus without understanding that it’s part of a wider phenomenon in the United States,” said Nadell, who testified at the Dec. 5 congressional hearing about college leaders’ responses to antisemitism. “If we needed more evidence to prove that, we would just look at the fact that in May 2023, the White House issued the National Strategy to Combat Antisemitism.” Alyza Lewin, president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, a Jewish civil rights group, worries that the variations in rankings across campuses may give some college administrators the false impression that antisemitism is not a growing problem on their campus. “It would behoove all university administrators to realize that anti-Semitism is spreading like wildfire across campuses in the US,” Lewin said in an email. Corey Saylor, research and advocacy director at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said there is little, if any, parallel research or comparable tracking of incidents of Islamophobia on college campuses. Saylor said that although it is a topic of interest at his organization and likely many others, it’s a project CAIR doesn’t have the bandwidth to complete. “My department handles both research and individual advocacy cases,” he said. “My team’s monthly caseload went up 678 percent” in October and November, compared to earlier this year. However, Saylor said that anecdotally he’s hearing a general trend that students who participate in rallies and protests “on behalf of Palestinian humanity” feel unprotected by campus administration and are concerned about being doxed, or having their personal information revealed online, and targeted. He believes the public narrative about antisemitism on college campuses is pushing university administrators to prioritize addressing antisemitism over other forms of bias. “Antisemitism needs to be dealt with. It’s atrocious,” Saylor said. “But that reality does not lessen the atrociousness of other forms of bias, such as anti-Arab bigotry or Islamophobia.”
Published 12/14/23 in New York Times; Story by Vimal Patel Before the Israel-Hamas war, universities were already engulfed in debates over what kinds of speech are acceptable. The toppling of the University of Pennsylvania’s president, Elizabeth Magill — four days after her testimony before Congress on whether to punish students if they called for genocide — was a victory for those who believe that pro-Palestinian protesters have gone too far in their speech. To many Jews, protest slogans like “intifada revolution” and “from the river to the sea” are antisemitic and threatening — and proof of a double standard. Universities, they say, have ignored their fears and pleas for security, while creating a battalion of administrators who are devoted to diversity and equity programs and are quick to protect their students. “Their moral blindness when it comes to antisemitism is especially concerning when it appears to conflict so dramatically with their approach to bias and hate against other groups,” Kenneth Marcus, the head of the Brandeis Center, a Jewish civil rights group, said before Ms. Magill’s resignation. For many longtime observers of the campus speech wars, however, this moment is a dire one for freedom of expression. Ms. Magill’s troubles, after all, did not start with the hearing, but with a Palestinian writers’ conference that was held on campus in September. Donors to Penn asked her to cancel the event, which they said included antisemitic speakers, but she declined on the grounds of free speech. “What just happened is, they canceled Liz Magill,” said Jonathan Zimmerman, an education historian at Penn who writes about free speech. “They reinforced cancel culture. What this means is there’s going to be yet more fear and anxiety around what you can say, and how, and that can’t be good for the university.” Penn’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors characterized the recent attacks on universities as distortions that threaten the ability of students and faculty to teach, study and discuss Israel and Palestine. “These attacks strike at the heart of the mission of an educational institution: to foster open, critical, and rigorous research and teaching that can produce knowledge for the public good in a democratic society,” the association said in a statement posted on Saturday. Penn and Harvard are not bound by the First Amendment, but they each have committed to offering the same protection. On Tuesday, Harvard’s governing board said it stood behind the university’s president, Claudine Gay, who had come under fire after testifying alongside Ms. Magill. “We champion open discourse and academic freedom,” the board said in a statement. Critics are quick to point out, however, that universities have not always done so consistently. For instance, in 2021 a department at M.I.T. called off a public lecture by Dorian Abbot, a University of Chicago geophysicist, because he had publicly opposed some aspects of affirmative action. Law students at Stanford heckled a conservative federal judge who had worked against gay marriage and transgender rights. At Penn, conservatives condemned an effort to punish Amy Wax, a tenured law professor, for a series of actions she took, including some that are protected by academic freedom, like bringing a white supremacist to speak to her class. Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard who opposes cracking down on free expression, said that speech by itself, however ugly, should not be punished. But, he said, universities have not made the best case for themselves as champions of unfettered debate. “The problem with the university presidents saying that calls for genocide are not punishable is that they have such a risible record of defending free speech in the past that they don’t have a leg to stand on,” Dr. Pinker said in an interview. The question is what happens from here. At Penn, there is already a debate about changing speech codes. The board of advisers at the university’s Wharton business school — who helped lead the charge against Ms. Magill — recently recommended in a letter that Penn amend the university’s code of conduct. Among the proposals: Students and faculty will not “engage in hate speech, whether veiled or explicit, that incites violence.” Nor will they “use language that threatens the physical safety of community members.” And anyone who violates the standards would be “subject to immediate discipline.” But a number of observers warn that further restrictions on speech are not the right solution. Jonathan Friedman, a director at PEN America, a free-expression advocacy group, said the Wharton proposal was vague and would threaten to ban a wide range of speech. It would be unenforceable, he wrote, and would probably backfire. Dr. Pinker argued in a recent essay that forbidding antisemitic speech would not improve the situation. He said that universities should adopt clear policies, which “might start with the First Amendment,” but then draw a line at behavior that gets in the way of a university’s educational mission. So carrying placards would be OK, he said, but not heckling or vandalism — which is already the standard at many universities. Also forbidden would be gauntlets of intimidating protesters who confront students walking to classes. Still, to Dr. Pinker the issues are larger than just speech codes. He argued that a university that was truly committed to free speech would reset its campus culture to be more accepting of differing opinions. That would include, he said, “viewpoint diversity” in hiring, as well as institutional neutrality on issues of the day. Harvard announced last month that as part of its response to antisemitism, the university would “more fully integrate antisemitism into the work” of its Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging. But rather than expanding the purview of diversity and equity programs, Dr. Pinker has called for the opposite. He argues that these programs, which he thinks should be curbed, enforce “a uniformity of opinion, a hierarchy of victim groups, and the exclusion of freethinkers.” Scott Bok, who resigned as chairman of Penn’s board when Ms. Magill resigned, disputed that the school had become “too woke,” and he defended the need for diversity efforts. The Penn that he attended in the 1980s, he remembered, did not have many Black, Asian or Latino students. “We should not turn back to that world,” he wrote this week in an opinion article in The Philadelphia Inquirer. For Professor Zimmerman, a true commitment to free speech issues means that universities — and their critics — must accept that language will sometimes offend. Despite the uproar, Ms. Magill’s comments at the congressional hearing were correct, he said. In deciding whether to discipline a student who calls for genocide, context matters. When it comes to free speech, “there’s no other way to put it — either you believe in it or you don’t,” Professor Zimmerman said. “And if you believe in it, it means protection for heinous things that people say, unless they’re posing an immediate and direct threat to other people.”
Published by Jewish Insider on 11/28/23; Story by Haley Cohen UC Berkeley professor: ‘There’s a group of students who feel free to say the nastiest slurs as long as they substitute Zionist for Jew’ Citing claims of a “longstanding, unchecked spread of antisemitism” on the University of California, Berkeley’s campus, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law filed a complaint on behalf of Jewish students on Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging that the campus is a “hotbed of anti-Jewish hostility and harassment,” Jewish Insider has learned. The lawsuit, which names the University of California (UC) Regents, UC President Michael Drake, UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ and other officials as defendants, claims that since Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attack in Israel, antisemitism has been exacerbated at the school — citing several on-campus incidents of intimidation, harassment and physical violence against Jewish students. UC Berkeley Jewish students wrote in the complaint that the school does so little to protect Jewish students, it feels as if the school is condoning antisemitism. They added that officials at the university display a “general disregard” for Jewish students. “The concerns of Jewish students are not being taken seriously and incidents that are affecting Jewish students are not being treated the same as incidents that would affect another targeted minority on campus,” Hannah Schlacter, an MBA student at the school, told JI. The complaint, a copy of which was obtained by JI, details a pro-Palestinian rally following Oct. 7 in which a Jewish undergraduate who was draped in an Israeli flag was attacked by two protesters who struck him in the head with a metal water bottle. It further cites that Jewish students and Jewish faculty are receiving hate mail calling for their gassing and murder, and claims that many Jewish students report feeling afraid to go to class. Pro-Palestinian protesters, the suit continues, disrupted a prayer gathering by Jewish students and blocked the main entrance to campus, and a faculty member went on an 18-minute anti-Israel rant in front of roughly 1,000 freshmen in his lecture class. “Frankly, I’m not sure why a Jewish student would come to [Berkeley] law school,” UCB professor Steven Davidoff Solomon, who teaches an undergraduate class on antisemitism in the law, told JI. “There’s a group of students who feel free to say the nastiest slurs as long as they substitute Zionist for Jew and they repeatedly do that while the administration refuses to take steps to condemn it, to conduct training, to take measures they would take if it was discrimination against other minorities, and it’s disappointing,” he said, calling the lawsuit a “last resort.” UC Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky acknowledged rising antisemitism at the school in a Los Angeles Times op-ed. “I am a 70-year-old Jewish man, but never in my life have I seen or felt the antisemitism of the last few weeks.” He noted that, “[t]wo weeks ago, at a town hall, a student told me that what would make her feel safe in the law school would be to ‘get rid of the Zionists.’” He added he had “heard several times that I have been called ‘part of a Zionist conspiracy,’ which echoes antisemitic tropes that have been expressed for centuries.” Schlacter, who testified about antisemitism on campus to the University of California Board of Regents earlier this month, said, “When we look at the policy in place, it appears the policy is not being enforced for issues affecting Jewish students. When it isn’t enforced for our situation but is for other situations, that to me is discrimination.” “Moreover, policy not being enforced sends a message that when there are hate crimes against Jewish students, that is accepted because it will be swept under the rug,” she continued. “We’ve made efforts to speak to the administration and do not feel like we are taken seriously. There’s a disconnect between the asks students are making [and] the actions the administration is taking.” After Schlacter and other students met with UC Regents, the board committed $7 million to combating antisemitism and Islamophobia. “Seven million dollars distributed across 10 campuses per year, I’m not sure how far that will go,” she said. “Also, throwing money at the problem is not getting to the root, which is that Jewish students are being treated differently and policies are not being enforced when there’s Jewish students involved.” Schlacter said she does not want to see the campus anti-Israel group, Bears for Palestine, named for the school’s mascot, shut down, as several other schools have done with chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine. “Disbanding those groups is not a long-term solution,” she said. “The long-term solution is looking at culture across the UC system. Why is there hostility and how do we combat that in the culture? What programs and initiatives can we launch to have a more truly inclusive culture?” Schlacter said she would like to see the school’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion office employees be trained on identifying antisemitism. UCB Chabad Rabbi Gil Leeds, who is also a UCB alum and has served as the campus Chabad rabbi since 2007, said the antisemitism situation is worse than it’s ever been at the school. “Jewish students assaulted at rallies is a whole new level of hostilities that we haven’t seen,” Leeds said, noting that several students involved with Chabad are from Israel. “Police are scared to get involved because they are worried about greater violence. That shows you what we’re dealing with.” Leeds said there has been “tremendous fear and trepidation,” particularly last month when National SJP called for a “Day of Resistance” at campuses nationwide. “Our armed guard that day came prepared with tear gas, everything he thought he would need… the company that we contacted would not agree to send us an unarmed guard, that’s the level of intensity.” The lawsuit states that while antisemitism has increased since Oct. 7, it has long been prevalent on campus. It cites a decision last year by nine law school student organizations to amend their constitutions with a bylaw that bans any pro-Israel speaker. The numbers have now swelled to 23 groups, including academic journals that prohibit Zionists from publishing and pro-bono organizations that prevent Jewish students from receiving hands-on legal experience, training, supervision and mentorship. The ban denies Jewish law students networking opportunities provided to others; deprives them of earning pro-bono hours for state bar requirements; curtails their avenues for developing and improving legal research, writing, and editing skills; and limits their choices for obtaining academic credits towards graduation, according to the lawsuit, which notes this is all illegal under federal law and university policies. ”The situation at Berkeley has deteriorated to the point that something really needs to be done beyond just raising awareness. We’re facing antisemitism at campuses around the country, but Berkeley is especially bad. Of all places, Berkeley had a number of warnings that they needed to address antisemitism and anti-Zionism, and yet they failed to heed them,” said Kenneth Marcus, the Brandeis Center founder and a Berkeley Law school alum. While the situation that was highlighted last year focused on the law school, Marcus said “it has certainly spread far beyond that and we have been getting reports throughout the university, including the undergraduate institution.” According to the complaint, Berkeley’s acquiescence to these discriminatory policies has helped give antisemitism free reign on campus in violation of the law. “This suit targets the longstanding, unchecked spread of antisemitism at the University of California Berkeley, which, following the October 7 Hamas attacks, has erupted in on-campus displays of hatred, harassment, and physical violence against Jews,” states the complaint. “Court interventIon is now needed to protect students and faculty and to end this anti-Semitc discrimination and harassment, which violates University policy, federal civil rights laws, and the U.S. Constitution.” Earlier this month, the Brandeis Center, the Anti-Defamation League, Hillel International and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP launched the Campus Antisemitism Legal Line (CALL), a free legal protection helpline for college students who have experienced antisemitism. “After Oct. 7 there’s been a lack of moral leadership but when you look more closely, Jewish students [at Berkeley] have been discriminated against for well over a year,” the ADL’s Central Pacific regional director, Marc Levine, told JI. “It wasn’t just demonstration in support of Hamas’ attacks that this began. Student groups already were actively banning Zionists from participating in their activities.” Levine, a former California State assembly member, called on local politicians to hold the University of California accountable for the “gutless response to antisemitism on campus.”