The Hillels of Westchester organization filed a Title VI complaint with the United States Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights Wednesday, alleging that the administration at Sarah Lawrence College has allowed the Bronxville, N.Y., school to become a hostile environment for Jewish students through a refusal to take action on instances of discrimination, harassment, and intimidation.
“Sarah Lawrence created a hostile environment for Jewish students through years of action and inaction — After more than 15 years of documented pleas for the College to support all facets of its Jewish community, we’ve reached a breaking point,” Hillels of Westchester executive director Rachel Klein wrote in a statement. “We are making this formal complaint to ensure the College improves so all future students can safely immerse in the college experience, and we hope the administration takes immediate, sustainable action.”
While the complaint outlines allegations dating back before October 7, some egregious examples since Hamas attacked Israel include personal harassment of Jewish students. One such student, the complaint says, received threatening text messages, with one person saying they would “beat up” the Jewish student and another saying it would have been fine if that Jewish student had died in Israel or been tortured because the author of the text did not “value [his] life.” That same student also received several threats from other community members who said they would kill themselves in front of him, the complaint alleges. The Jewish student reported the messages to the college administration, but university leadership took no action.
The authors of the complaint also mention the support that Sarah Lawrence’s director of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging gave to the campus Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter in the aftermath of October 7. The director sent an email on October 9 — before Israel began its military response to the Hamas attack — inviting Sarah Lawrence Hillel members to an SJP event titled “Hour of Solidarity with Palestine.” As the complaint notes, the national SJP organization celebrated the violence on October 7 as a “historic win for Palestinian resistance” and called for “not just slogans and rallies, but armed confrontation with the oppressors.” Sarah Lawrence’s SJP chapter advertised its “Hour of Solidarity with Palestine” event on its Instagram page with the words “LONG LIVE PALESTINE” and said the discussion was meant for “deconstructing the mainstream narrative” on Hamas’s massacres.
Samuel Abrams, a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told National Review he is not surprised by the allegations made in the complaint.
“As I think the complaint made clear, Sarah Lawrence is an unusual place where antisemitism and hate toward Jews is very intense,” Abrams said, “but it used to be very close to the line — people would say certain things, they’d hint at certain things, they’d make allusions and suggestions — but it wouldn’t cross the line and was hard to prove.”
He said that has changed since October 7.
“Students have come to me panicked, scared, frightened. They don’t know what to do or where to go,” Abrams — who has written about antisemitism on Sarah Lawrence’s campus multiple times in the past — told National Review. “They don’t feel supported. And if Sarah Lawrence is like they’ve been for my time with them, they’ll just hope it goes away. They can say a couple platitudes, the president and the board chair will write something to say ‘we respect everybody’ — which they don’t — and then hope it’ll disappear. But this stuff doesn’t just go away.”
The complaint includes allegations of harassment of Jewish students that occurred before October 7 as well, like anonymous Instagram posts calling out “Jewish American princesses” at Sarah Lawrence and another saying, “Don’t forget about the dirty, money-grubbing Juden mongrels.”
The Hillels of Westchester also detail the treatment the Hillel organization on campus has received in the complain, including the fact that the college has consistently denied the Hillel chapter its own building, something that exists on most campuses across the country, since 2014. In 2015, before campus antisemitism became such a high-profile issue, students at Sarah Lawrence advocated the boycotting of a Passover seder because it “failed to include the Palestinian narrative.”
Abrams told NR that, though there have not yet been adequate case studies to determine whether Title VI complaints are the most effective way to enact change in higher education, he hopes that this particular case can “move the needle a little bit.”
“I hate that we have to do these Title VI things, but I do hope that a number of them come down hard publicly enough to wake trustees up — and more importantly, to wake citizens up — to say this sort of behavior, this sort of aloofness, is one of the reasons why people don’t trust higher education,” Abrams said. “There’s a reason we’re concerned with higher education, and it’s because the leadership is just toxic and has to go. This is, hopefully, a lever that we can now pull to do that . . . it’s a step.”
National Review contacted Sarah Lawrence College for comment but had not received a response at press time.