Mitchell Goldberg, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, dismissed a lawsuit that Jewish students and former students brought against the University of Pennsylvania, alleging Jew-hatred on campus.
In the decision on Monday, Goldberg wrote that the suit did not demonstrate “intentional discrimination or deliberate indifference on the part of Penn.”
Jordan Davis and Noah Rubin, both Penn students, and Penn alumnus Eyal Yakoby filed the suit on Dec. 5 with the nonprofit Students Against Antisemitism.
The plaintiffs allege that the Ivy League university failed to protect them from antisemitic harassment after the Hamas-led terror attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and “permitted, tolerated and/or facilitated multiple antisemitic incidents on its campus that have created a hostile educational environment for Jewish students.”
The court found that the plaintiffs did not meet the legal bar necessary to hold the university liable under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which would require proving that the university discriminated intentionally or ignored harassment.
The judge also ruled that Penn had taken steps to address Jew-hatred on campus by creating a task force to launch an “action plan to combat antisemitism.”
Goldberg criticized the 111-page complaint, and said that he “repeatedly” stated in his opinion that “many of the more than 300 paragraphs in the amended complaint contain language which is unnecessarily inflammatory and ‘impertinent,’ and immaterial allegations that have virtually nothing to do with the claims which plaintiffs are endeavoring to raise.”
“Filing of yet another complaint would be plaintiffs’ third bite at the apple,” he wrote. “Plaintiffs are cautioned that if they choose to file a third complaint, the additional allegations must be alleged in good faith.”
The court gave the students one last chance to revise and refile their Title VI and breach of contract claims, noting that the students had credibly described “various incidents where they were personally subjected to derogatory language, verbally harassed and/or targeted because they were Jewish.”
