Two groundbreaking lawsuits recently filed in California underscore how far antisemitism in education has escalated since the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
In one, the U.S. Department of Justice sued the University of California, alleging a hostile work environment for Jewish and Israeli faculty and staff at UCLA. Another suit against the State of California alleges antisemitic harassment and discrimination against Jewish students in public schools, with particular focus on what some teachers and curricula are bringing into classrooms.
While these lawsuits can bring to light the scope and persistence of the crisis, they can’t identify the institutional breakdown that has fueled antisemitism and made it so durable. That deeper failure is harder to litigate, but impossible and wrong to ignore.
A recent analysis, “When Faculty Take Sides: How Academic Infrastructure Drives Antisemitism at the University of California,” documents what that breakdown looks like, and what it has produced on three UC campuses.
After Oct. 7, antisemitic targeting (including assault, harassment and vandalism) rose 3,100% at UCLA, 530% at UC Berkeley and 1,100% at UC Santa Cruz. While much of the public conversation has treated this crisis as student-driven and episodic, the evidence suggests otherwise: The surge reflects a breakdown of governance in academic life. UC has failed to enforce boundaries on how faculty members use academic authority and departmental power for organized political advocacy—conditions that predictably produce hostility, exclusion and targeting.
At the heart of that organized political advocacy is the academic boycott of Israel, promoted for years as a professional obligation. Academic BDS calls for the boycott of Israeli universities and scholars, but its own guidelines go much further, urging faculty to engage in “anti-normalization”—in other words, the total exclusion of Zionist perspectives, speakers and programs from academic life. Those commitments shape teaching, speaker invitations and department messaging, especially when those committed to them exercise institutional authority.
The scale and placement of that authority matter. The analysis identified 115 academic-boycott endorsers at UCLA, including 20 chairs, directors or associate deans; 171 at Berkeley, including 19 academic heads; and 55 at Santa Cruz, including an associate campus provost, four residential college provosts and multiple department heads. With such large concentrations of academic BDS supporters, many of them in leadership roles, anti-normalization can readily be integrated into institutional practice.
That practice shows up when departments speak in an official voice.
At UCLA, 36 departments (many led by academic boycotters) issued statements endorsing the encampment where Jewish students were harassed, and protesters glorified terrorism and called for Israel’s elimination. One statement claimed that their department was “proud to see” student protesters “take academic lessons on decolonial theory and put it into praxis.” Another expressed pride in student activism “for a free Palestine” and called on the university to sever its study-abroad programs with Israel.
The same practice shows up in official departmental ceremonies. At UC Santa Cruz, a Critical Race and Ethnic Studies “Senior Celebration” presented graduates with stoles bearing Palestinian-flag and keffiyeh imagery beneath a projected image from the previous year’s unlawful encampment, where the department’s faculty and students were prominent participants. Some 70% of that department’s faculty have endorsed academic BDS, including the chair.
Departments also carry that practice into public programming. Across the three campuses, numerous departments sponsored dozens of one-sided anti-Israel events—23 at UCLA (18 departments), 27 at Santa Cruz (19 departments), and 40 at Berkeley (34 departments)—without sponsoring a single event with a competing perspective.
Not surprisingly, these talks frequently included boycott-aligned rhetoric that demonized Israel and its supporters and justified violence. At UCLA, speakers dismissed reports of Hamas atrocities as “lies” and “propaganda.” At Santa Cruz, an Education Department colloquium urged early-childhood educators to adopt “an anti-Zionist commitment.” At Berkeley, speakers treated Jewish students’ antisemitism concerns as bad-faith “smear” campaigns.
After Oct. 7, faculty networks became a major accelerant of hostility and exclusion. Chapters of Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP) and Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (FSJP) emerged on all three campuses with an explicit goal of leveraging their faculty roles to promote academic BDS and its anti-normalization goals.
At Santa Cruz, FJP declared “Zionism is not welcome on our campus,” collaborated on efforts to expel Hillel from campus, and urged instructors to withhold grades until UC adopted BDS. At UCLA, FJP pledged to fight for Palestine “by any means necessary” and defended the exclusion of “Zionist” students from campus spaces in federal court. At Berkeley, FSJP circulated toolkits urging instructors to embed anti-Israel narratives into syllabi, skirt rules against classroom advocacy and stage instructional walkouts to pressure the university to boycott Israel.
When confronted with this record, universities often retreat to a familiar defense: It is protected speech or optional programming. But students can’t opt out of the environment shaped by what faculty and departments teach, promote and endorse in an official voice. When anti-normalization is integrated into institutional practice, it doesn’t stay academic; it turns “Zionist” into a campus slur and helps legitimize the harassment, intimidation and even violence that follow. Calling it “optional” isn’t an answer; it’s an abdication of responsibility.
With federal agencies now investigating campus climate and state lawmakers weighing oversight measures, the stakes extend far beyond internal campus debates. The path out of this crisis runs through governance: enforce the boundary between scholarship and political advocacy, so academic authority and university resources aren’t used to advance political programs. That doesn’t require suppressing debate. It requires restoring the difference between rigorous inquiry and institutionalized advocacy.
That boundary doesn’t just matter in higher education. Tomorrow’s K-12 teachers are trained in these same universities, and when faculty treat politicized advocacy as institutional practice, they train future educators to carry that politicization into their own classrooms. If universities cannot or will not enforce that boundary, the legal challenges unfolding now may be only the beginning.
