Antisemitism and Free Speech on Campus

Michelle N. Amponsah and Joyce E. Kim
Harvard Crimson

Excerpt: Harvard filed a motion in federal court on Friday to dismiss a lawsuit filed by six Jewish students that alleged the University failed to address “severe and pervasive” antisemitism on campus.

The University’s 38-page memorandum in support of its motion to dismiss outlined the “tangible steps” Harvard’s administration has taken to investigate and tackle antisemitism on its campus, including the presidential task force on combating antisemitism that interim Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 established in January.

Josh Blackman
The Volokh Conspiracy, Reason Magazine

[Editor’s note: The original image was pulled from Berkeley Law Students for Justice in Palestine’s Instagram and replaced with one that does not feature bloody utensils]

Excerpt: Back in October, UC Berkeley Dean Erwin Chemerinsky wrote that "Nothing has prepared me for the antisemitism I see on college campuses now." At the time, I praised Erwin's bold remarks, though I feared things would only get worse. And they have.

Last week, Berkeley Law Students for Justice in Palestine depicted Dean Chemerinsky in a cartoon with blood-soaked utensils. This image appeals to the ancient blood libel that has pervaded anti-semitic propaganda for millennia. That students thought this image was appropriate is shocking. Failure to use the appropriate pronouns is immediately grounds for cancellation. But invoking the trope that Jews eat children is just another meme.

Maggie Hicks
The Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: When Kenneth Stern drafted the working definition of antisemitism 20 years ago as director of the antisemitism division for the American Jewish Committee, he wanted to help researchers better understand the frequency of violence targeted at Jewish communities.

Stern, who is now the director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate, is alarmed by its use on college campuses. He believes colleges and politicians who adopt his definition into antidiscrimination policies could then censor anyone who criticizes or says something controversial about Israel. While the definition itself should help people identify clear harassment, using it in legislation allows colleges and lawmakers to clamp down on any protected speech, no matter if it’s harmful or offensive, Stern says.

David French
New York Times

Excerpt: This Monday, March 11, roughly 200 Jewish students and supporters marched through the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, and it was newsworthy that they were not attacked. Local news hailed that they were able to, as one headline noted, “successfully march without confrontation.”

I spent virtually my entire legal career defending free speech on campus, including the free speech of Muslim students and staff members. I’ve also walked through metal detectors at a tense and volatile Columbia University to defend the academic freedom of Jewish students challenging antisemitic statements made by university professors. And during those decades of litigation and my subsequent years in journalism, I have never seen such comprehensive abuse directed against a vulnerable campus minority group as I’ve seen directed at Jewish students and faculty since Hamas’s terror attack on Oct. 7.

Maryclaire Dale
Associated Press

Excerpt: Pro-Palestinian faculty at the University of Pennsylvania have sued the Ivy League school to stop it from sending sensitive internal material to a congressional committee investigating antisemitism on campus — a probe they call “a new form of McCarthyism.”

Professor Huda Fakhreddine and other members of Penn Faculty for Justice in Palestine fear the school is poised to send files, emails, student records and other material to Congress, putting both their safety and academic freedom at risk.

Mary Whitfill Roeloffs
Forbes

Excerpt: The New York Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit in Manhattan on behalf of a pair of pro-Palestinian student groups that were suspended last fall after their protests pushing for a cease-fire in Gaza allegedly violated university policy—as tension over the Israel-Hamas war spills onto campuses and causes some donors to withdraw support of legacy schools.