The University of California, Berkeley’s chapter of Law Students for Justice in Palestine posted an antisemitic caricature on its Instagram page on Monday.
The political cartoon depicts Erwin Chemerinsky, the Jewish dean of UC Berkeley School of Law, holding a bloodied knife and fork with the caption “No Dinner with Zionist Chem While Gaza Starves.” Critics say the graphic invokes the medieval blood libel against Jews.
The cause of the offensive image was associated with Chemerinsky’s recent dinner invitation for third-year law students.
Within a half-hour of the image’s posting, the group replaced it with a similar one, minus blood on the utensils.
The caption to the post read: “This dinner is the prime example of a normalization PR event that hopes to distract students from Dean Chem’s complicity and support for the genocide of the Palestinian peoples. While Dean Chem wants to wine and dine his students, he continues to approve of UC investments into weapons companies like Blackrock, Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop and more.”
