To be a Jewish student on a college campus this past year has frequently been a harrowing experience. Anti-Semitic protests have made those campuses feel dangerous—and sometimes clearly be dangerous—and the universities have generally done very little to deal with that.
In response, many students have taken legal action.
One of the latest fruits of the lawsuits against universities came on August 13, when a judge ruled against the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), which had allowed protesters to set up “no Zionist” zones on campus, complete with checkpoints.
Judge Mark Scarsi put his outrage into the first paragraph of his decision:
“In the year 2024, in the United States of America, in the State of California, in the City of Los Angeles, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith. This fact is so unimaginable and so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom that it bears repeating: Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith. UCLA does not dispute this. Instead, UCLA claims that it has no responsibility to protect the religious freedom of its Jewish students because the exclusion was engineered by third-party protesters. But under constitutional principles, UCLA may not allow services to some students when UCLA knows that other students are excluded on religious grounds, regardless of who engineered the exclusion.”
In the UCLA case, the three students who brought the case were represented by the Becket Fund and Clement & Murphy LLC, two well-known legal practices. But what if you can’t afford a lawyer?
That problem is what a non-profit group, S.A.F.E. Campus, has attempted to alleviate by creating a network of lawyers who are willing to take cases about anti-Semitism either pro bono or on a 100 percent contingency basis, meaning that no money is paid by the plaintiff up front, and the lawyer takes a fee from whatever the judgment or settlement is.
(S.A.F.E. stands for Students, Alumni, and Faculty for Equality on Campus.)
For Jewish students or other Jews facing hatred, this kind of service can mean the difference between being able to stand up for themselves or being bullied, harassed or worse.
Seeing the Need
The executive director of S.A.F.E. Campus, Allen Schaefer, told Ami that the group first mobilized several years ago because of the treatment of Jews on City University of New York (CUNY) campuses, including the harassment of Jewish professors and other staff members.
“We realized that any incidents of anti-Semitism that were reported, whether it be a student or a faculty member who was discriminated against, fell on deaf ears. The administration wouldn’t do anything about it. The unions wouldn’t do anything about it.
“People were threatened. People were harassed. People had their tires punctured many times. They were pushed into rooms with doors locked behind them, with threats made against them. Jews were passed over for promotions.”
He noted that in 2012, the provost of CUNY’s Brooklyn College, William Tramontano, was accused of responding to a suggestion of a specific Jewish job applicant by saying, “You already have a Miriam.”
Tramontano had been accused of skipping over Orthodox Jewish staff for advancement, and Jewish professors brought a lawsuit.
Schaefer doesn’t beat around the bush in making comparisons. “We know many of the professors, and the stories that they share are heart-wrenching; the stuff that they’re going through is literally 1930s Nazi Germany.”
To read more, subscribe to Ami
Recent Comments