The Department of Education has formally opened an investigation into alleged discrimination against Jewish students at the University of California, Berkeley after several student groups pledged to support a blanket ban on all Zionist speakers.
The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights sent a letter last week to the attorneys who filed a complaint over the ban, confirming that an investigation would be opened.
The Office of Civil Rights is seeking to determine “whether the University failed to respond appropriately in the fall 2022 semester to notice from Jewish law students, faculty, and staff that they experienced a hostile environment at the law school based on their shared Jewish ancestry,” the agency’s regional director Zachary Pelchat wrote in documents provided to National Review.
In August 2022, a handful of student groups at Berkeley Law adopted a platform written by the school’s resident anti-Israel group, Berkeley Law Students for Justice in Palestine, vowing not to “invite speakers that have expressed and continued to hold views or host/sponsor/promote events in support of Zionism, the apartheid state of Israel, and the occupation of Palestine.”
Although the statement was circulated widely across the law school, only nine student groups joined, including Womxn of Color Collective, Queer Caucus, Women of Berkeley Law, Law Students of African Descent, as well as the school’s legal association for Muslim, Middle Eastern, and North African students.
The move prompted Arsen Ostrovsky of the International Legal Forum — an antisemitism watchdog organization — and Gabriel Groisman to file a federal civil-rights complaint on behalf of Jewish students and faculty in mid November.
“The groups that have implemented this discriminatory policy attempt to hide their discrimination against the Jewish community by excluding ‘Zionists.’ This thin veil is completely transparent as Zionism is an integral, indispensable and core element of the Jewish identity. There can be no equivocation: anti-Zionism is antisemitism,” the pair wrote in a press release from November 20.
Reached for comment, Berkeley Law noted that “The university will fully cooperate with the investigation. The campus has in place strong anti-discrimination policies that support our belief in and compliance with what we understand to be the values and obligations enshrined in Title VI and the First Amendment.”
The Department of Education is currently investigating similar claims of systemic antisemitism targeting Jewish students at the University of Southern California, the University of Illinois, Brooklyn College, and Stanford University.
A recent study by AMCHA, an organization that documents antisemitic hate crimes on college campuses, found assaults against Jewish students doubled during the 2021–22 academic year.