Kelley Paul, a Santa Clara County superior court judge, told the California county’s Jewish district attorney on May 7 that he must recuse himself and his office from prosecuting the retrial of five current and former Stanford University students accused of occupying the university president’s office.
Removing Jeff Rosen, the district attorney, “basically on the basis of his Jewishness is a very bad omen for the Jewish community in California and in America,” Alyza Lewin, president of U.S. affairs at the Combat Antisemitism Movement, told JNS.
Rosen recognized that the vandalism “was rooted in antisemitism, even if it had not been prosecuted as a hate crime,” Lewin said.
Removing the district attorney “for recognizing discrimination against his people and saying publicly that he’s determined to try and protect Jews from antisemitism and that’s one of the things that motivates him and his work—that’s a statement that if it were made by someone who is a member of any other minority or ethnic group, everyone would recognize and support,” she told JNS.
“It’s only when a Jew makes that statement that now that becomes a basis for disqualifying them,” she said.
In February, a deadlocked jury on charges of felony vandalism and conspiracy to trespass against the five protesters yielded a mistrial.
The Mercury News reported that Paul ruled that the district attorney’s public comments and fundraising emails relating the case to Jew-hatred, despite a lack of hate crime charges, showed that “this is not a disinterested prosecution” and told him to recuse himself.
“While we disagree with the judge’s ruling, we respect it,” Sean Webby, communications director at the district attorney’s office, told JNS.
Webby referred questions to the California attorney general’s office. A spokesman for the latter told JNS that “we are evaluating the court’s ruling.”
“If you had a black prosecutor who said, ‘I do what I do because I want to make sure that I can help and protect the black community from the harassment, the discrimination, the unlawful conduct targeting blacks,’ everyone would say, ‘Great, we wouldn’t disqualify you from that. We totally understand why you, as a member of that community, feel so passionately about this,’” Lewin told JNS.
“The issue when it comes to Jews is that, over and over again, folks refuse to recognize today’s antisemitism,” she said. “They’ve refused to recognize that there are those who engage in crimes today who are hostile toward the very notion that Jews are a people and that Jews have an ancient history rooted in the land of Israel.”
“That’s a hostility that has nothing to do with the politics in the Middle East and has everything to do with how Jews define what it means to be Jewish,” Lewin said.
According to Lewin, the district attorney understands that Jew-hatred targets Jews on the basis of their shared ancestry and ethnicity.
“Now because he said that, he’s getting disqualified from prosecuting a case involving antisemitism,” she said.
The Jewish Community Relations Council Bay Area and Jewish Silicon Valley stated jointly that “without issuing a written ruling, the court has set a disturbing precedent that appears to impose a different standard on Jewish public officials.”
“This ruling has also validated the defense and their supporters’ ongoing campaign to smear one of our state’s highest-ranking Jewish officials,” the organizations stated.
“This decision uniquely targets minority prosecutors, suggesting they are incapable of pursuing justice in cases perceived to be impacting their own communities,” they added. “We must reject this double standard, which undermines the ability of all public servants to stand against hate without fear of professional disqualification.”
The Jewish groups called on Rob Bonta, the California attorney general and a Democrat, to appeal Paul’s decision.
“The case against the defendants must proceed,” they stated. “Anything less would undermine the fundamental principles of equal justice and impartiality under the law.”
In May 2025, Dana Nessel, attorney general of Michigan and a Jewish Democrat, dropped all charges against anti-Israel protesters involved in an encampment at the University of Michigan after the Jewish Federation of Greater Ann Arbor submitted to the court a letter defending Nessel from allegations of bias against Muslims and Arabs.
Nessel stated that the letter was inappropriate, and it led to her office dropping the charges.
Lewin told JNS that the anti-Israel protesters in the Stanford case are hoping for that same outcome with a new prosecutor, which Lewin said would be a “complete miscarriage of justice.”
“They should be held accountable for the vandalism that they did, separate and apart from whether or not it was motivated by antisemitism,” she said. “What this judge has now done is open up a pathway to an outcome like what happened there in Michigan.”
