Adira Fogelman didn’t expect to encounter Jew-hatred when she enrolled at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, but things changed after Oct. 7, she told the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights during a day-long hearing on campus antisemitism.
She testified that during an event about Israel on April 4, 2024, almost six months after the Hamas-led attacks against Israel in 2023, a group of masked people, apparently led by a professor, banged on windows and called for violence against Jews from outside the lecture.
“Chanted outside of a room full of Jews, organized by Jewish organizations on campus and featuring a Jewish Israeli speaker, the threatening message for Jews like me was unmistakable,” she told the commission.
Even as the protesters displayed signs with violent, pro-Hamas symbols, the many school administrators present “stood idly by and did exactly nothing to stop the intimidation and threats against Jews or even to identify the individual students involved,” according to Fogelman.
She testified that she filed a formal complaint, but “to this day, I’ve received no response from the office at Cal Poly tasked with investigating such complaints.”
The professor who seemed to be leading the agitators told her and other Jewish students that they were part of the Ku Klux Klan, since they were Zionists, and that they were responsible for killing babies, according to Fogelman. The professor also told a Jewish student to go back to Germany, she said.
“It should not be my responsibility, as a full-time student, to explain to a civil rights officer why telling an American Jew to go back to Germany is antisemitic,” she testified. “Nor should it be my responsibility to do the job that Cal Poly itself is supposed to do to hold those violating its rules accountable.”
Fogelman was one of four former and current college students who testified about their experiences.
‘Make situation better for future students’
Peter Kirsanow, a commission member who is co-leading its probe of Jew-hatred on campus, told JNS after the hearing that “right after Oct. 7, there was a considerable spike in antisemitic incidents.”
“Our job is to make sure that we investigate things like that,” he said.
The commission expects to issue a report and recommendations in September.
A junior, Fogelman told JNS that the panel asked her to testify, and she agreed, because she would “rather do what I can to make the situation better for future students than run away.”
“Antisemitism is always going to be around, but to be on a college campus is just the worst,” she said.
Rochelle Garza, commission chair, told JNS that the student testimony “was incredibly compelling.”
“I know it was anecdotal, but I think some of the themes that came out of the testimony were very compelling, especially around this concern of their colleges being targeted or losing funding,” she said. “Then they’re being scapegoated as Jewish students, and I find that is creating more harm.”
Harvard University sophomore Sarah Silverman, who is studying veterinary science, testified that her mezuzah was ripped off her doorpost and was found stuck into a wall near her room. “Late at night, when I needed to walk down the hallway to the bathroom, I would call my dad so I would not feel alone,” said Silverman, who is a Modern Orthodox Jew. “I worried the person who did this would come back, and administrators were kind, but I felt lost.”
Then something “even stranger happened,” she told the commission.
A national conversation emerged about Jew-hatred at Harvard, but students like her, who had experienced antisemitism, weren’t consulted. The Trump administration took steps to cut funding to the school, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services cited her in its letter to the school, but didn’t contact her, she said.
“When the government abruptly withdrew funding, I witnessed and experienced the immediate consequences,” she said. “Young scientists, many of them Jewish, were left feeling unprotected and uncertain about their futures. Policies described as protecting Jewish students did not make me feel protected. Instead, in a deeply troubling way, I felt blamed.”
Silverman said that Harvard could have done a better job addressing the antisemitism she experienced, but that the government response, in her opinion, was inappropriate. “Why was I not interviewed before my experience was used in a federal civil rights report?” she said.
Mondaire Jones, a former Democratic New York congressman on the commission who is overseeing the Jew-hatred probe with Kirsanow, told JNS that the Trump administration has cut important civil rights staff at the Education Department that ought to be in place to fight antisemitism.
“If you’re evaluating the federal response, I don’t see how you pretend that that’s not going on and evaluate how that would be impactful,” he said.
Linda Mangel, a veteran of the office who oversaw agreements with Brown University, Harvard University and George Washington University, told the commission that more than half of its staff in the Office for Civil Rights lost their jobs and seven of its 12 regional offices were shuttered in March 2025.
“The consequences of OCR’s diminished capacity should raise alarms for those committed to combatting antisemitism,” she testified.
The Trump administration, which has prioritized deep cuts to the Education Department, has said that it shifted responsibility for fighting Jew-hatred to the U.S. Justice Department, and lawyers have told JNS that Title VI complaints, under the 1964 Civil Rights Law, lack teeth to hold universities accountable.
Gregory Dolin, senior counsel in the civil rights division at the Justice Department, testified that the Trump administration “has made it clear, in both word and deed, that it will not tolerate the ancient scourge of antisemitism on American college campuses and will not permit our federal tax dollars to be used in any way to support this hateful ideology.”
Kenneth L. Marcus, founder and chairman of the Brandeis Center and a former U.S. assistant secretary of education for civil rights, told the commission that he was “very pleased” that friends in the Biden administration remembered that he had praised some of the things that they did and was “more pleased” that they forgot he had criticized some of what they did.
“The praise is that the prior administration, the Biden administration, continued the executive order on combating antisemitism and used Title VI in a forceful way, as I had recommended previously,” he testified. “The problem is that this approach, which was so important on Oct. 6, wasn’t in my view up to the moment with Oct. 7, when we had a crisis of historic proportions.”
“There has been general agreement that when one has a crisis which is extraordinary and unprecedented, we need a response that is unprecedented and extraordinary. If there is a challenge from prior administrations, it is that there wasn’t that sort of thing,” he said. “If we need to understand what’s happening with the Trump administration, we are seeing a whole-of-government approach using not just the Education Department but also HHS, Justice, the federal acquisition commission and other agencies in an extraordinary way.”
