Experts told JNS that University of Pittsburgh has shown that it isn’t serious about combatting Jew-hatred after the public school’s working group on antisemitism released a report and the university said that it won’t adopt a definition of Jew-hatred.
“How can anyone expect the university administration to take seriously incidents of antisemitism when administrators won’t even define what constitutes antisemitism?” Brandy Shufutinsky, director of the education and national security program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told JNS.
Gerard Filitti, senior counsel at the Lawfare Project, told JNS that “without a definition that reaches anti-Zionist harassment and an accountability body the university does not control, the rest is process without teeth.”
“This is the posture of an administration claiming to fight Jew-hatred without implementing the architecture to end it,” he said. (JNS sought comment from Pitt.)
The university created the working group in March 2025 after “multiple reports of antisemitic activity” on the public campus after Oct. 7. The group advised the school to create a portal for reporting misconduct, clarify that its policies on Jew-hatred extend to electronic communications and state clearly that time, place and manner can restrict certain speech on campus.
The working group also told the university to form an independent unit to address Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and require students, faculty and staff to undergo Jew-hatred training. The report stated that “antisemitism may be expressed as anti-Israel or anti-Zionist bias.”
The chancellor’s office stated on Monday that the group’s recommendations are “thoughtful and actionable” but that Pitt “did not charge the working group with creating a formal institutional definition, and the university is not adopting a single definition in this response or elsewhere.”
“This position reflects the university’s recognition that Jewish experience, identity and scholarship are diverse and that no single definition fully captures and relates to the range of lived experiences, concerns and perspectives within and regarding the Jewish community,” it said.
Filitti told JNS that Pitt “agreed with the sentiment but refused the substance” of the report.
The university’s response “never once uses the words ‘Israel’ or ‘Zionism’ in its training section, instead announcing it will adopt no definition of antisemitism at all,” he said.
Shufutinsky told JNS that Pitt’s statement on the report “excuses the refusal to define antisemitism.”
The eight-page report also recommends that Pitt form an “advisory council that includes Hillel, Chabad, the Jewish Federation and other appropriate Jewish institutions and groups.” The university responded by saying that it “appreciates the recommendation for an external advisory council and will work with stakeholders to determine the appropriate structure and what format would be most effective and appropriate for the university.”
Filitti told JNS that “the report did not ask the university to ‘consider’ an advisory council. It named the members and set the meeting cadence.”
“That became a promise to ‘work with stakeholders to determine the appropriate structure,’ reserving to the university the power to shape the body into something it controls,” he said.
Raeefa Shams, communications and programming director at Academic Engagement Network, told JNS that AEN is “pleased” with Pitt’s response, especially clarifying time, place and manner restrictions, increasing academic resources and classes on contemporary Jew-hatred and implementing antisemitism training that “addresses anti-Zionism and anti-Israel bias.”
“While we have often recommended the IHRA definition of antisemitism as an important tool in understanding and addressing the issue, we do appreciate that the report clearly states that ‘antisemitism may be expressed as anti-Israel or anti-Zionist bias,’” she said.
Mark Goldfeder, director of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, told JNS that the university’s statement is “a masterpiece of the ‘agree and dissolve’ genre.”
“The report says build an independent Title VI unit. The response says Title VI compliance functions ‘will be aligned within the office of compliance, investigations and ethics,’ a restructuring the university says it had begun before the report was released,” Goldfeder said. “That is not implementation. That is rebranding.”
“The report says launch a new unified portal, the response says complaints ‘should continue to be brought through the Pitt Concern Connection,’ the existing system whose inadequacy occasioned the recommendation,” he said. “The report says create an advisory council with named institutions and a meeting schedule, the response says the university ‘will work with stakeholders to determine the appropriate structure and what format would be most effective.’ A committee to contemplate a council.”
He added that “the words Zionist, anti-Zionist and anti-Israel appear nowhere in the response.”
“By my count the response ‘agrees with’ or ‘affirms’ the report roughly 10 times and makes exactly one dated, verifiable commitment: refreshing the free speech website by the end of summer 2026,” Goldfeder told JNS. “They agreed with everything. They committed to a website.”
