The University of California system is a microcosm of faculty antisemitism, the AMCHA Initiative explained in the exhaustive 158-page report, which focused on the Los Angeles, Berkeley, and Santa Cruz campuses.

By Dion J. Pierre, The Algemeiner

Over 100 Jewish advocacy groups have signed a petition imploring the University of California (UC) system to confront faculty antisemitism amid the fallout over a new AMCHA Initiative report which argued that professors accelerated the campus antisemitism crisis by promoting the use of their platforms to promote anti-Jewish tropes in the name of opposing Israel and Zionism.

“We urge the [UC Board of Regents] to act now: stop faculty and academic units from using UC authority, resources, classrooms, and UC-branded platforms to advance political advocacy as institutional practice by strictly enforcing UC’s existing rules, and strengthening them where needed,” said the petition, which has so far amassed 124 signatures from groups, as well as 4,000 individuals.

“This is not about policing faculty speech. It is about enforcing the crucial boundary between private speech and institutional advocacy.”

It continued, “When that boundary disappears, academic norms break down and students face harassment, intimidation, and exclusion. We call on you to protect students, restore the university’s academic integrity, and rebuild public trust in the University of California.”

The petition’s signatories include Alums for Campus Fairness, the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, The Lawfare Project, Zionist Organization of America, and Students Supporting Israel (SSI).

The AMCHA Initiative report, titled “When Faculty Take Sides: How Academic Infrastructure Drives Antisemitism at the University of California,” examined the “antisemitism crisis” across UC campuses since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.

It included dozens of examples of faculty antisemitism, including their calling for driving Jewish institutions off campus; founding pro-Hamas, Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP) chapters; and endorsing institutional adoption of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.

The University of California system is a microcosm of faculty antisemitism, the AMCHA Initiative explained in the exhaustive 158-page report, which focused on the Los Angeles, Berkeley, and Santa Cruz campuses.

“The report documents how concentrated networks of faculty activists on each campus, often operating through academic units and faculty-led advocacy formations, convert institutional platforms into vehicles for organized anti-Zionist advocacy and mobilization,” the report said, adding that the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) alone holds at least 115 faculty endorsers of the BDS movement, according to the report.

Meanwhile, dozens of its academic departments issued statements of support of the pro-Hamas encampments which struck college campuses during the 2023-2024 academic school year and became the hubs of antisemitic assault and discrimination.

It also said that FJP chapters offered more than supportive words, “defending and helping orchestrate boycott-aligned activism (including encampment demands), seeking to deplatform Israeli speakers, and filing an amicus brief … that denied Zionism’s place within Jewish identity and defended exclusionary encampment conduct toward Zionist Jewish students, including expulsion from campus spaces.”

UC Office of the President spokesperson Rachel Zaentz reportedly said the UC system was taking AMCHA’s report “seriously” and reviewing it. However, UC spokesperson Dan Mogulof expressed concerns about the methodology used to compile the data.

“While we appreciate this organization’s dedication to confronting antisemitism, it is unfortunate that no apparent effort was made to seek information directly from the campus and/or confirm information, some of which appears to have been gathered from unreliable sources,” Mogulof told The Daily Californian.

The AMCHA report followed previous studies revealing the extent of faculty misconduct in higher education promoting anti-Israel animus and even outright antisemitism.

In February, The Algemeiner learned that, according to a lawsuit, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University assigned a Jewish student a project on “what Jews do to make themselves such a hated group.”

Similar incidents have come at a fast clip since the Hamas-led Oct. 7 massacre: a Cornell University professor praised the terrorist group’s atrocities, which included mass sexual assaults; a Columbia University professor exalted Hamas terrorists who paraglided into a music festival to murder Israeli youth as the “air force of the Palestinian resistance”; and a Harvard University FJP chapter shared an antisemitic cartoon which depicted Zionists as murderers of Blacks and Arabs.

The AMCHA Initiative has explored faculty antisemitism before.

In September 2024, the organization published a groundbreaking study which showed that FJP is fueling antisemitic hate crimes, efforts to impose divestment on endowments, and the collapse of discipline and order on college campuses.

Using data analysis, AMCHA researchers said they were able to establish a correlation between a school’s hosting an FJP chapter and anti-Zionist and antisemitic activity.

For example, the researchers found that the presence of FJP on a college campuses increased by seven times “the likelihood of physical assaults and Jewish students” and increased by three times the chance that a Jewish student would be subject to threats of violence and death.

FJP, AMCHA’s researchers added, also “prolonged” the duration of “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” protests on college campuses, in which students occupied a section of campus illegally and refused to leave unless administrators capitulated to demands for a boycott of Israel.

They said that such demonstrations lasted over four and a half times longer where FJP faculty — who, they noted, spent 9.5 more days protesting than those at non-FJP schools — were free to influence and provide logistic and material support to students.

Additionally, FJP facilitated the proposing and adopting of student government resolutions demanding acceptance of the BDS movement — which aims to isolate Israel culturally, financially, and diplomatically as the first step toward its destruction.

Wherever FJP was, the researchers said, BDS was “4.9 times likely to pass” and “nearly 11 times more likely to be included in student demands,” evincing, they continued, that FJP plays an outsized role in radicalizing university students at the more than 100 schools — including Harvard University, Brown University, Princeton University, the University of Michigan, and Yale University — where it is active.

“One of the important functions of these groups is to give academic legitimacy to the notion that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, and that’s a hugely important trope being trafficked on campuses right now,” AMCHA Initiative executive director Tammi Rossman-Benjamin told The Algemeiner at the time.

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The University of California system is a microcosm of faculty antisemitism, the AMCHA Initiative explains in the exhaustive 158-page report, which focuses on the Los Angeles, Berkeley, and Santa Cruz campuses.

By Dion J. Pierre, The Algemeiner

The antisemitism crisis at the University of California was started and accelerated by anti-Zionist faculty, according to a new report which draws on hundreds of antisemitic incidents to paint a picture of a higher education system that has become unmoored from its educational mission.

The AMCHA Initiative, a nonprofit organization dedicated to documenting and combating antisemitism at US institutions of higher education, on Wednesday released its latest report, titled “When Faculty Take Sides: How Academic Infrastructure Drives Antisemitism at the University of California.”

Examining the “antisemitism crisis” across University of California (UC) campuses since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, the study exposes Oct 7 denialism; faculty calling for driving Jewish institutions off campus; the founding of pro-Hamas, Faculty for Justice in Palestine groups; and hundreds of endorsers of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.

As AMCHA tells the story, the situation is not simply the work of students but also of willing, culpable adults who intentionally reprised the world’s oldest hatred while masking it as academic and intellectual freedom.

“While students are the most visible actors, faculty and academic departments are key institutional drivers of the hostile environment,” the AMCHA Initiative said on Wednesday in a press release shared with The Algemeiner.

“Across three campuses, many faculty who promoted anti-Israel activism through university channels had previously endorsed an academic boycott of Israel (academic BDS). The boycott’s guidelines explicitly call on supporters to implement ‘anti-normalization’ in their professional roles. These include excluding Zionist perspectives, speakers, and programs from academic life.”

AMCHA Initiative executive director Tammi Rossman-Benjamin added, “This is far bigger than a discipline issue — it’s a faculty governance failure. Until UC enforces clear boundaries on faculty and academic-unit conduct, Jewish students will continue to face intimidation, exclusion, and harassment sanctioned by the institution itself.”

The report follows previous studies revealing the extent of faculty misconduct in higher education promoting anti-Israel animus and even outright antisemitism.

Just last week, The Algemeiner learned that, according to a lawsuit, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University assigned a Jewish student a project on “what Jews do to make themselves such a hated group.”

Similar incidents have come at a fast clip since the Hamas-led Oct. 7 massacre: a Cornell University praised the terrorist group’s atrocities, which included mass sexual assaults; a Columbia University professor exalted Hamas terrorists who paraglided into a music festival to murder Israeli youth as the “air force of the Palestinian resistance”; and a Harvard University chapter of Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP) shared an antisemitic cartoon which depicted Zionists as murderers of Blacks and Arabs.

The University of California system is a microcosm of faculty antisemitism, the AMCHA Initiative explains in the exhaustive 158-page report, which focuses on the Los Angeles, Berkeley, and Santa Cruz campuses.

“The report documents how concentrated networks of faculty activists on each campus, often operating through academic units and faculty-led advocacy formations, convert institutional platforms into vehicles for organized anti-Zionist advocacy and mobilization,” the report states.

“It shows how those pathways are associated with recurring student harms and broader campus disruption. It then outlines concrete steps the UC Regents can take to restore institutional neutrality in academic units and set enforceable boundaries so UC resources and authority are not used to advance activist agendas inside the university’s core educational functions.”

The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) alone holds at least 115 faculty endorsers of the BDS movement, according to the report.

Meanwhile, dozens of its academic departments issued statements of support of the pro-Hamas encampments which struck college campuses during the 2023-2024 academic school year and became the hubs of antisemitic assault and discrimination.

Faculty for Justice in Palestine offered more than supportive words, the report says, “defending and helping orchestrate boycott-aligned activism (including encampment demands), seeking to deplatform Israeli speakers, and filing an amicus brief … that denied Zionism’s place within Jewish identity and defended exclusionary encampment conduct toward Zionist Jewish students, including expulsion from campus spaces.”

The federal government impounded, according to various reports, some $250 million to punish UCLA’s alleged exposing of Jewish students to discrimination by refusing to intervene when civil rights violations transpired or failing to correct a hostile environment after the fact.

The move came only days after UCLA agreed to donate $2.33 million to a consortium of Jewish civil rights organizations to resolve an antisemitism complaint filed by three students and an employee.

Many antisemitic incidents occurred at UCLA before the institution was ultimately sued and placed in the crosshairs of the Trump administration.

Just five days after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, as previously reported by The Algemeiner, anti-Zionist protesters chanted “Itbah El Yahud” at Bruin Plaza, which means “slaughter the Jews” in Arabic.

Other incidents included someone’s tearing a chapter page out of Philip Roth’s 2004 novel The Plot Against America, titled “Loudmouth Jew,” and leaving it outside the home of a UCLA faculty member, as well as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) staging a disturbing demonstration in which its members cudgeled a piñata, to which a picture of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s face was glued, while shouting “beat the Jew.”

The US Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division has ruled that UCLA’s response to antisemitic incidents constituted violations of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.

“Our investigation into the University of California system has found concerning evidence of systemic antisemitism at UCLA that demands severe accountability from the institution,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a statement.

“This disgusting breach of civil rights against students will not stand: the [Department of Justice] will force UCLA to pay a heavy price for putting Jewish Americans at risk and continue our ongoing investigations into other campuses in the UC system.”

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In Feb. 2024, UCLA’s student government passed a resolution endorsing the BDS movement, as well as false accusation that Israel is committing a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

By Dion J. Pierre, The Algemeiner

In a stinging blow to the BDS campaign’s international drive to economically isolate Israel, University of California (UC) President Michael Drake said Wednesday in a letter to university chancellors across the entire UC system that student governments operating on UC campuses may not enact boycotts of companies “based on their association with a particular country.”

Noting that university policies “require that financial and business decisions be grounded in sound business practices including competitive bidding,” Drake stressed that the same principle applies to student governments within the UC system, one of the largest public university systems in the country.

“Actions by University entities to implement boycotts of companies based on their association with a particular country would not align with these sound business practices,” Drake wrote.

“The right of individuals and groups to express their views on public matters is distinct from the responsibility of University entities to conduct their financial affairs in a manner consistent with University policy and applicable law,” Drake continued.

“This letter reaffirms both: the rights of students, faculty, and staff to express their views, and the university’s obligation to ensure that its units do not engage in financial boycotts of companies associated with a particular country.”

UC student governments have endorsed the BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) movement against Israel before, blurring distinctions in the public mind separating the stances of particular anti-Israel activists from the official institutional policy.

Such ambiguity is now fraught with risk for any university whose budget is supplemented by taxpayer funds awarded by the federal government in the form of research grants and contracts.

Since taking office in January, President Donald Trump has ordered the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other entities to freeze funding to universities participating in a boycott of Israel, as well as those operating diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs which practice racial discrimination.

Launched in 2005, the BDS campaign opposes Zionism — a movement supporting the Jewish people’s right to self-determination — and supports political demands that threaten Israel’s survival as a Jewish state.

It seeks to isolate the country internationally with economic, political, and cultural boycotts.

Official guidelines issued for the campaign say that “projects with all Israeli academic institutions should come to an end” and delineate specific restrictions that its adherents should abide by, for instance denying letters of recommendation to students who seek to study in Israel.

In Feb. 2024, UCLA’s student government passed a resolution endorsing the BDS movement, as well as false accusation that Israel is committing a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

“The Israeli government has carried out a genocidal bombing campaign and ground invasion against Palestinians in Gaza — intentionally targeting hospitals universities, schools, shelters, churches, mosques, homes, neighborhoods, refugee camps, ambulances, medical personnel, [United Nations] workers, journalists and more,” claimed the resolution, passed 10-3 by the UCLA Undergraduate Student Association Council (USAC).

“Let it be resolved that the Undergraduate Student Association of UCLA formally call upon the UC Regents to withdraw investments in securities, endowments, mutual funds, and other monetary instruments … providing material assistance to the commission or maintenance of flagrant violations of international law.”

Only days earlier, the UC Davis student government passed legislation adopting BDS.

“This bill prohibits the purchase of products from corporations identified as profiting from the genocide and occupation of the Palestinian people by the BDS National Committee,” reads the measure, titled Senate Bill (SB) #52.

“This bill seeks to address the human rights violations of the nation-state and government of Israel and establish a guideline of ethical spending.”

Such policies would be guided by a “BDS List” of targeted companies curated by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a list which includes Puma, McDonald’s, Starbucks, Airbnb, Disney and Sabra. The language of the legislation afforded the UC Davis student association the authority to add more.

Powers enumerated in the bill include veto power over all vendor contracts, which SJP specifically applied to “purchase orders for custom t-shirts,” a provision with implications for pro-Israel groups on campus.

“No ASUCD funds shall be committed to the purchases of products or services of any corporation identified by the BDS List as being complicit in the violation of the human rights guaranteed to Palestinian civilians,” read the bill.

Responding to the resolutions two months later, in April 2024, the UC System said in a statement that it has always opposed “calls for boycott against and divestment from” the state of Israel.

“While the University affirms the right of our community members to express diverse viewpoints, a boycott of this sort impinges on the academic freedom of our students and faculty and the unfettered exchanges of ideas on our campuses,” the statement declared.

“Through careful management of the university’s retirement and endowment funds, UC investment provides a stable and growing revenue stream that benefits current and retired employees and supports the university’s education, research, and public service mission.”

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Four of the resolved cases involved the University of California, Los Angeles, where an unruly spring encampment — and pro-Israel counterdemonstrations — ended in violence and arrests.

By Andrew Lapin, JTA

The U.S. Department of Education announced it had resolved nine antisemitism- and Islamophobia-related civil rights complaints made against five campuses inside the University of California system on Friday, including some involving a prominent pro-Palestinian encampment in Los Angeles that had descended into violence in the spring.

The sweeping resolution comes in the final weeks of President Biden’s term, and as President-elect Donald Trump has threatened to eliminate the department altogether, which could potentially move antisemitism investigations under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to the Justice Department.

The Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights, which handles Title VI cases, wrote in an open letter to Michael Drake, president of the UC system, that it had “identified compliance concerns that the Universities appear not to have responded promptly or effectively” to allegations of harassment.

In addition, OCR said, three of the schools “appear to have engaged in different treatment of students based on actual or perceived national origin.”

Four of the resolved cases involved the University of California, Los Angeles, where an unruly spring encampment — and pro-Israel counterdemonstrations — ended in violence and arrests.

UCLA received complaints on behalf of both Jewish and pro-Palestinian students that the school had failed to protect them during the encampments, which also recently earned the campus a legal rebuke based on accusations that protesters blocked Jewish students’ access to parts of campus.

(An internal antisemitism task force at UCLA also recently found that the school had fostered an antisemitic environment, including as a result of the encampments.)

Two more complaints involved UC Davis, where a faculty member in October 2023 posted threats to “Zionist journalists” on social media, and where Muslim and Palestinian students alleged they had been doxxed and stalked.

The other three cases involved the targeting of a Jewish student body president at UC Santa Barbara; allegations of “anti-Zionist propaganda” posted in the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies department of UC Santa Cruz; and UC San Diego’s alleged failure to respond to harmful activity from its Students for Justice in Palestine chapter.

In a statement to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the UC system said it was “pleased” with the resolution agreement and that it “unequivocally rejects anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and all forms of harassment and discrimination.”

The statement pointed to other steps the school said it had taken lately to address the issue, including establishing its own office of civil rights, an anti-discrimination policy, and new limits on protests and other activities.

As part of the resolution agreement, the UC system agreed to annual Title VI training for staff and campus police, to report more information to OCR about how its campuses will respond to harassment complaints, and annual audits and regular campus climate assessments for the five campuses mentioned in the complaint.

Six of the nine complaints involved harassment against Jewish and Israeli students; OCR said it dismissed one of those complaints, involving a Jewish UCLA student who said SJP had blocked her from joining the group, due to lack of evidence.

The other three complaints involved harassment against Muslim, Arab or Palestinian students.

Justin Samuels, a non-Jewish conservative legal activist whose complaint triggered one of the UC Davis investigations, told JTA he was “happy to have helped” in their resolution.

Samuels has been active in filing Title VI complaints related to campus antisemitism in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks.

He added, “I expect the Trump administration to be a lot more proactive on shared ancestry discrimination.”

OCR has continued to resolve antisemitism-related Title VI cases since the election, though dozens more remain active in its system.

A separate resolution agreement, also announced Friday, ruled that the University of Cincinnati did not appropriately respond to complaints of discrimination against Jewish students related to a “Spooky Zionist” student gathering.

The university similarly agreed to regularly report its handling of discrimination cases to the office, and to additional employee training and campus climate assessments.

“The university appeared to operate under the mistaken understanding that if a complainant could not identify a perpetrator by name; the conduct was not directed at a specific individual; the conduct involved multiple perpetrators or a registered student organization; or the conduct occurred off campus, the university did not have an obligation to address alleged harassment,” the office determined in a statement.

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Jewish students were barred from walking near or through the UCLA encampment on their way to class unless they denounced the Zionist component of their Jewish identities.

By Dion J. Pierre, The Algemeiner

The University of California (UC) system has announced a ban on encampments, a major policy decision aimed at preventing student protesters from illegally occupying and living on school property in the wake of the anti-Israel demonstrations of this past spring semester.

Writing in a mass email, UC President Michael Drake said officials will uphold the “freedom to express diverse viewpoints” while enforcing “policies impacting expressive activities, including policies that prohibit camping or encampments, unauthorized structures, restrictions on free movement, masking to conceal identity,” and disobeying lawful orders to present identification.

Drake added, “Some of this work has already begun, and you will hear more about it from your campus leadership in the coming weeks. Our ultimate goal is for all of our community members to feel supported in their ability to express themselves, and to pursue their studies, research, patient care, and other work on our campuses. We also want our community members to understand what’s expected of them, including a clear understanding of the principles, policies, and laws that govern our behavior on campus.”

The missive came ahead of a new academic year and followed a tumultuous one in which pro-Hamas demonstrators, including some faculty, upended UC campuses, morphing them into what Jewish students and civil rights groups described as hubs of antisemitic discrimination and support for terrorism.

Setting up “Gaza Solidarity” encampments on school ground was the most disruptive behavior in which the protesters engaged, and universities in some cases protected it.

At UC Los Angeles (UCLA), chancellor Gene Block ordered that an encampment there be protected by physical barriers and campus police, allowing the area to become the site of violent clashes between pro-Hamas and pro-Israel protesters and a zone of nullification in which federal civil rights laws prohibiting the exclusion of individuals based on their racial or religious identity were, according to a US federal judge, flagrantly flouted.

Throughout the encampment’s existence, Jewish students were barred from walking near or through the area on their way to class unless they denounced the Zionist component of their Jewish identities, a policy which UCLA police upheld without compunction.

The federal judge ruled last week that UCLA’s actions violated the law. Drake appeared to be addressing such concerns regarding the “restriction of movement” on UC campuses in Monday’s statement.

UC is not the only higher education system acting preemptively to deter misconduct in the new academic year.

In just the past week, George Washington University suspended Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) for the entire fall term, Barnard College ordered the arrest of a pro-Hamas protester who made a scene while students moved into their dormitories, and Harvard University mounted signs across its property which explicitly state that “erecting or maintaining a tent or temporary structure” violates school rules.

“An individual who assists others in engaging in a prohibited act will be treated as if they committed the prohibited act themselves,” the signs say.

However, critics argue that such policies may lack teeth, pointing to the dozens of pro-Hamas protesters whose disciplinary charges were dropped over the summer.

Columbia University punished only a few of the students who were involved in occupying an administrative building and staging a riot after vowing to expel them, according to a new report.

Harvard University “downgraded” the disciplinary sanctions it levied against several pro-Hamas protesters it punished for illegally occupying Harvard Yard.

Other students evaded being held accountable by the criminal justice system, according to a July report by The New York Times.

The State Attorney’s Office of Cook County, Illinois dropped criminal charges filed against three Northwestern University faculty and one graduate student who allegedly obstructed law enforcement’s efforts to clear an unlawful demonstration at the Deering Meadow section of campus.

Prosecutors in Travis County, Texas chose not to pursue over 100 charges of criminal trespassing filed against University of Texas at Austin protesters, and 60 other Northwestern University protesters saw their charges dismissed, with prosecutors calling them “constitutionally dubious.”

The Times added, however, that some charges will stick, including those filed against someone who bit a police officer.

Commenting on Columbia University’s amnestying its protesters in a statement issued on Monday, US Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) maintained that protesters must be punished when they violate school rules.

“More than three months after the criminal takeover of Hamilton Hall, the vast majority of the student perpetrators remain in good standing. By allowing its own disciplinary process to be thwarted by radical students and faculty, Columbia has waved the white flag in surrender while offering up a get-out-of-jail-free card to those who participated in these unlawful actions,” she said.

“Breaking into campus buildings or creating antisemitic hostile environments like the encampment should never be given a single degree of latitude — the university’s willingness to do just that is reprehensible.”

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43% of students feel ‘Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the United States,’ a jump from 18% pre-Oct. 7th.

By Dion J. Pierre, The Algemeiner

Antisemitic and anti-Zionist attitudes at the University of California, Irvine increased after Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel, a new statistical study conducted by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has found.

The study — “Attitudes Toward Jews and Israel on California Campuses” — which began roughly four months before Oct. 7, aimed to measure anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist attitudes at four campuses within the University of California (UC) system to determine whether reports of surging antisemitism there are based in fact rather than perception.

The ADL surveyed hundreds of students — liberal and conservative, religious and secular, Jewish and non-Jewish — across the UC system, but because of an accident of timing, UC Irvine (UCI) emerged as a special case study, being the only school whose students submitted responses both before and after the Oct. 7 massacre.

Their answers were revealing, according to the ADL, and demonstrated that what Jewish students and faculty have reported feeling is real.

Before Oct. 7, 25 percent of UCI students agreed that “Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the United States.” After Oct. 7, that figure jumped 18 points, to 43 percent, the study found.

Similar increases occurred across the board.

For example, the percentage of students who agreed that “Jews have too much power in our country today” nearly doubled after the Hamas atrocities, increasing from 7.9 percent to 15.1 percent.

Additionally, 23.6 percent of students agreed after the Oct. 7 tragedy that “it is appropriate for opponents of Israel’s policies to boycott Jewish American owned businesses in their communities.”

“The uptick in antisemitism at UCI after the Hamas attack is perhaps the most disturbing of our findings. The uptick remains even when the other campuses are included,” the ADL report said.

“It indicates that widespread reports of feelings of isolation and hostility from their peers among Jewish students and faculty reflected lived rather than politically manufactured experience. We have not, however, explained the increase. Stronger expressions of antisemitism may reflect prejudice that can now be revealed; it has always been there and we are only now seeing it.”

The report also noted that “anti-Jewish attitudes are present and sometimes strongly so” at the three other University of California schools it studied — UC Los Angeles, UC Merced, and UC Riverside — and that, at every school, anti-Zionism is a “predictor” of antisemitism, meaning that students who object to Israel’s existence likely embrace ancient antisemitic tropes.

Other areas of the report stand to be controversial in parts of the pro-Israel community for challenging a widely held view that colleges, being dominated by left-wing faculty and students, “brainwash” students with anti-Zionist beliefs — a claim for which the ADL said it found no evidence.

Anti-Zionist college students, it argued, likely form their opinions before starting post-secondary education.

However, critics of higher education have imagined a more nuanced picture of progressive bias on college campuses, one in which students are selected by admissions committees in part for their political views.

Such beliefs crystallize, they argue, because of positive social reinforcement and minimal to no exposure to alternative viewpoints.

The ADL report came after the AMCHA Initiative, a campus antisemitism watchdog, in March noted that progressive anti-Zionist faculty did more than ever before to make Zionism anathema on their campuses after Oct. 7 and did, in fact, radicalize or sway students whose opinions about Israel were neutral or positive.

In a report titled “Academic Agitators: The Role of Anti-Zionist Faculty Activism in Escalating Antisemitism at the University of California After October 7, 2023,” the AMCHA Initiative found that incidents of faculty engaging in anti-Zionist advocacy increased 1,100 percent between Oct. 7, 2023 and March 15, 2024.

Professors, especially those involved in the anti-Zionist group Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP), used their classrooms to indoctrinate students into becoming anti-Zionist and aided student groups in their efforts to alienate and defame Jewish students as “privileged” and “genocide deniers,” according to the study.

The report cited numerous examples of faculty-driven anti-Zionism, including a UC Santa Cruz professor writing “zionism [sic] is not welcome on our campus,” a UC Berkeley graduate student teacher awarding academic benefits for participating in anti-Zionist events, and the UC Merced Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department posting a statement that described Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 massacre as “genocide” and denied that Hamas is a terrorist group.

UC faculty transfer their attitudes as well as a vocabulary of anti-Zionism to students, the report added.

Since Oct. 7, anti-Zionist students have used language that can be directly traced to ideas espoused by their professors, and, at other times, students and teachers collaborated.

UC Santa Cruz’s Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department, for example proclaimed, “Skip school and work. Do not look away from the genocide,” in a message to students promoting Students for Justice in Palestine’s “Shut It Down for Palestine” demonstration held in November.

In July, AMCHA Initiative founder and executive director Tammi Rossman-Benjamin noted that in addition to promoting anti-Zionism, college admissions and hiring policies dictated by affirmative action — also described as racial preferences — all but ensure that many incoming students and faculty are far to the left of center and anti-Zionist.

“Racial preferences pit racial identity against the meritocracy, and one of the reasons that Jews have became so prominent in academia is because it is a system that rewards talent, character, and grit. Jews tend to be well-educated and highly achieving, and when an institution’s primary concern is the quality of the individual as opposed to the color of his or her skin or perceived background, Jews excel,” Rossman-Benjamin explained.

“What the university stands for, academic integrity and excellence, are values that have lifted Jews up in America, and, in addition to being critical for advancing humanity, they have been one of the most important sources of our strength in this country.”

She continued, “However, when you impose academic criteria that has nothing to do with those values and nothing to do with academic integrity but everything to do with a political agenda that really at its core is discriminatory and hateful — and antisemitic — you make the university not just a hostile place for Jews but also a hostile place for learning. What’s so interesting is that the way you know that contemporary progressivism is not just a fraudulent and bankrupt ideology but an evil one, is that it produces antisemitism. Antisemitism is a bellwether of its malevolence. If it were positive and healthy, it would lift people up — but it isn’t. In fact, it is hurting them in the deepest ways.”

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Hundreds of protesters set up an encampment on school grounds, and it took riot police four hours to clear the area of rioters.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1790938693554843738

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The report cites numerous examples of faculty-driven anti-Zionism, including a UC Santa Cruz professor writing, ‘Zionism [sic] is not welcome on our campus.’

By Dion J. Pierre, The Algemeiner

Anti-Zionist faculty within the University of California (UC) system are doing more than ever before to make Zionism anathema on their campuses, according to a new study published by AMCHA Initiative, an antisemitism watchdog group.

The report — titled “Academic Agitators: The Role of Anti-Zionist Faculty Activism in Escalating Antisemitism at the University of California After October 7, 2023” — found that incidents of faculty engaging in anti-Zionist advocacy increased 1,100 percent between Oct. 7, 2023 and March 15, 2024.

Professors, especially those involved in the anti-Zionist group Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP), have used their classrooms to indoctrinate students into becoming anti-Zionist and aided student groups in their efforts to alienate and defame Jewish students as “privileged” and “genocide deniers,” according to the study.

The report cites numerous examples of faculty-driven anti-Zionism, including a UC Santa Cruz professor writing “zionism [sic] is not welcome on our campus,” a UC Berkeley graduate student teacher awarding academic benefits for participating in anti-Zionist events, and the UC Merced Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department posting a statement that described Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 massacre as “genocide” and denied that Hamas is a terrorist group.

“Campus administrators are scared to enforce university policies and state laws that clearly prohibit such faculty abuse. The Regents, who are trying to address one small piece of the problem with a new policy prohibiting political statements on departmental websites, are struggling to do even that,” AMCHA executive director and co-founder Tammi Rossman-Benjamin told The Algemeiner in a statement. “Unless and until the Regents can take back the reins and govern the university as is their mandate under the California constitution, including by ensuring university policy and state law are enforced, Jewish students will not be safe on UC campuses.”

UC faculty transfer their attitudes as well as a vocabulary of anti-Zionism to students, the report adds. Since Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel, anti-Zionist students have used language that can be directly traced to ideas espoused by their professors, and, at other times, students and teachers collaborate.

UC Santa Cruz’s Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department, for example, said, “Skip school and work. Do not look away from the genocide,” in a message to students promoting a Students for Justice in Palestine’s “Shut It Down for Palestine” demonstration held in November.

“Anti-Zionist faculty are out of control at the University of California. They are using their academic positions, departmental infrastructure, and university resources to spread hatred of the Jewish state and its on-campus supporters, and in so doing, are fomenting the harassment and even assault of Jewish students — all with impunity,” Rossman-Benjamin added.

Some of the problems described in AMCHA’s report are now on the radar of federal lawmakers.

Last week, the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce launched an investigation into alleged antisemitism at the University of California, Berkeley, three weeks after a mob of anti-Zionist students stormed a campus building and verbally attacked and spat on Jewish students attending a talk by an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldier.

UC Berkeley came under scrutiny last month after a mob of hundreds of pro-Palestinian students and non-students shut down an event at its Zellerbach Hall featuring Israeli reservist Ran Bar-Yoshafat, forcing Jewish students to flee to a secret safe room as the protesters overwhelmed campus police.

Footage of the incident showed a frenzied mass of anti-Zionist agitators banging on the doors of Zellerbach. The mob then, according to witnesses, eventually stormed the building — breaking windows in the process, according to reports in The Daily Wire — and precipitated the decision to evacuate the area.

During the infiltration of Zellerbach, one of the mob — assembled by Bears for Palestine, which had earlier proclaimed its intention to cancel the event — spit on a Jewish student and called him a “Jew,” pejoratively.

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Preceding the massacre of Oct. 7th and even more so after, instances of hate speech, threats, exclusion, and even assault have been prevalent on campus with Jewish students fearful for their safety.

By Dion J. Pierre, The Algemeiner

The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law has filed a lawsuit against the University of California, Berkeley for allegedly failing to address surging antisemitic hatred on campus, arguing the school has allowed a hostile environment to fester and neglected to stop campus groups from requiring Jewish students and faculty to denounce Zionism.

“This suit targets the longstanding, unchecked spread of antisemitism at the University of California Berkeley, which, following the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, has erupted in on-campus displays of hatred, harassment, and physical violence against Jews,” said the complaint filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California on Tuesday. “Court intervention is now needed to protect students and faculty and to end this antisemitic discrimination and harassment, which violates university policy, federal civil rights law, and the US Constitution.”

The complaint, obtained by The Algemeiner, argued that anti-Jewish discrimination was prevalent on campus long before Hamas’ massacre across southern Israel last month.

“For over a year, student organizations at Berkeley Law have been enacting and enforcing policies that confront Jews with an unthinkable unlawful ultimatum: Disavow an integral component of your Jewish identity — Zionism — or be denied the same rights and opportunities enjoyed by other members of the campus community,” the document read.

The lawsuit, which requested from the court an injunction on excluding Zionists from student clubs and faculty groups, also named as defendants the regents and other leaders of the University of California, as well as Berkeley Law School.

The complaint provided several examples of antisemitic harassment and exclusion on campus, including a bylaw banning Zionists speakers that 23 Berkeley Law groups adopted in Sept. 2021, campus groups Women of Berkeley Law and the Queer Caucus requiring support for the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel to join its ranks, and the Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law, and Justice banning Zionists from submitting articles and speaking at its events.

The campus environment worsened after Hamas’ Oct. 7 onslaught across southern Israel, in which the Palestinian terror group murdered over 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took more than 240 others as hostages to Gaza, according to the complaint. Indeed, the suit alleged that hate mail and death threats have been sent to Jewish students, that Jewish students have opted not to attend class because walking through campus risked encountering angry pro-Palestinian supporters, and that an anti-Israel demonstrator bashed a Jewish student draped in an Israeli flag over the head with a metal water bottle.

“On campus, you have students out in the open being attacked, and the university won’t call it a hate crime. That’s a problem,” Hannah Schlacter, a second-year student at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, told The Algemeiner. “There’s a policy in place for how to handle a hate crime, and the [University of California Police Department] did not follow it, and when the student asked why, my understanding is that they didn’t follow the policy in place; they just made up different excuses.”

Schlacter added that Jewish students were victims of a double standard, being the only minorities not protected from discrimination by the university’s Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging.

“A big reason I feel anger and disappointment is the realization that the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion that I thought I would be included in don’t apply to me,” she continued. “This is so much bigger than just the Berkeley campus.”

Brandeis Center founder and chairman Kenneth Marcus, who graduated from Berkeley Law, told The Algemeiner that conditions at the school required a legal remedy.

“The situation has only deteriorated over the past year, as well as spreading to other parts of the university. And since Oct. 7, it has gotten so bad that it became clear that we couldn’t wait any longer before taking legal action,” Marcus explained. “There has been actual physical assault and a very seriously escalated problem on campus. Many other campuses have problems too, but Berkeley is unusual in that it had such a challenging situation even before Oct. 7, as well as a history of administrators declining to take appropriate action, which has made the situation worse.”

On Tuesday, a UC Berkeley spokesperson denied the Brandeis Center’s allegations, saying that the school has “long been committed to confronting antisemitism, and to supporting the needs and interests of its Jewish students, faculty, and staff.” The spokesperson cited as evidence the school’s establishment in 2019 of a “groundbreaking” Antisemitism Education Initiative.

Additionally, Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky shared a statement with The Algemeiner defending the school.

“Berkeley Law is dedicated and works hard at being a conducive learning environment for our Jewish students and all of our students,” Chemerinsky said. “The complaint filed by the Brandeis Center paints a picture of the Law School that is stunningly inaccurate and ignores the First Amendment. For example, student organizations have the First Amendment right to choose their speakers, including based on their viewpoint. Although there is much that the campus can and does do to create an inclusive learning environment, it cannot stop speech even if it is offensive.”

The school did not address its handling of the alleged assault on a Jewish student.

The Brandeis Center argued in its complaint, as it has successfully argued in the past, that forcing Jews to denounce Zionism and excluding Zionists from campus activities is not protected by the First Amendment’s right to free speech.

“Anti-Zionism is discrimination against those who recognize the Jews’ ancestral heritage — in particular the Jews’ historic connection to the land of Israel and the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in their ancestral homeland — as key components of their Jewish identity,” the complaint argued. “The United States, along with at least forty-two other nations, has recognized that demonizing, delegitimizing, and applying a double standard to Israel — all forms of anti-Zionism that are distinct from criticism of the State of Israel or opposition to the policies of the Israeli government — are forms of antisemitism.

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The launching conference for ‘Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism’ takes place this coming October at UC Santa Cruz and New York University Law School.

By David M. Litman via The Algemeiner

A newly-formed “Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism” (ICSZ) will almost certainly never produce any serious insight into Zionism, but the institute itself is proving to be a useful case study in the inherent antisemitism of anti-Zionism.

The ICSZ is a project of a handful of professors and activists who purport to be embarking on a “critical study” of Zionism. A review of the “founding collective” and their “points of unity” brings out a clear picture of their mission and beliefs: they demand those very things they simultaneously demand the world’s Jewry be denied.

Consider the “Points of Unity,” which starts out with: “Zionism is a settler colonial racial project. Like the US, Israel is a settler colonial state. The Institute opposes Zionism and colonialism.”

It then declares, “[w]e reject the exclusionary/scarcity model of academic work.” The document further decries that “academia is an exclusionary environment” and says that its members “aim to broaden the community of participation in rigorous research and conversation on Zionism…”

Yet, the members and supporters of ICSZ have long battled to create exactly what they decry: an exclusionary environment.

The ICSZ’s ideal “community of participation” is thus one in which Israelis and the vast majority of the world’s Jewish population is excluded, notwithstanding the subject (Zionism) is fundamentally about the rights of those exact people.

The ICSZ has multiple connections with the “U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel,” whose entire purpose is to exclude from and restrict the “community of participation” in academia. Not only is USACBI one of the co-sponsors for the ICSZ’s upcoming 2023 conference (titled “Battling the ‘IHRA definition’: Theory & Activism”), but multiple founding members of ICSZ are from USACBI.

Among the “founding collective” is Rabab Abdulhadi, an extremist professor at San Francisco State University known for claiming that “welcoming Zionists on campus” amounts to “a declaration of war against Arabs, Muslims, [and] Palestinians…”

She’s also one of USACBI’s co-founders. Abdulhadi’s conduct over the years has been so antithetical to the idea of “broadening the community of participation” that she helped lead to her university system being sued over discrimination against Jewish students.

The suit resulted in a settlement agreement in which her university system was forced to “issue a statement that persons of all faiths, ethnicities, national origins, and viewpoints, including but not limited to Jews, Israelis, and Zionists, are welcome on the SFSU campus.”

Even before the settlement agreement, the university president felt it necessary to issue a statement saying that Abdulhadi’s rhetoric was “contrary” to the university’s “principles of inclusion, thoughtful intellectual discourse, and sharing of ideas that are central to our academic environment.”

C. Heike Schotten, a member of USACBI’s “organizing collective,” also sits on ICSZ’s “founding collective.” Among the other eight “founding collective” members are Lisa Duggan and Christine Hong. Both are listed as “endorsers” of USACBI. Duggan is perhaps best known for having led the American Studies Association when it voted to endorse an academic boycott of just one country in the world: Israel. Sheryl Nestel, another “founding collective” member, signed a petition in 2019 supporting the BDS movement and opposing a summer exchange program with an Israeli university.

The double standard is particularly evident when considering statements by ICSZ’s director, Emmaia Gelman. Gelman has signed petitions pressuring educational institutions to “support the academic and cultural boycott of Israeli academic institutions,”[1] but also petitions that argue “[i]t is no longer acceptable to speak over Palestinians” in the context of academic writings. Yet, she directs an institute that is solely focused on “studying Zionism.”

It appears Gelman’s position is that while Palestinians should speak for themselves in academia, Israelis can be restricted from speaking, especially about Israel and Zionism. No one should speak over Palestinians, but Gelman and her fellow “anti-Zionists” are allowed to speak over Israelis and Zionists (i.e., 95% of Jews).

Scare quotes

It’s thus unsurprising that the ICSZ’s “points of unity” contain other classic antisemitic tropes. The institute says it will be “[s]tudying Zionism — its direct work for the Israeli state and its ‘other work’…” The scare quotes are ICSZ’s. The meaning is clarified just a few sentences later. After committing to “join in resistance to structures of racism, group supremacy, violence, militarism, colonialism, and capitalism,” the institute states it will research “the role that Zionism plays in struggles over racism and violence.” The institute has found what ails the world and it will now work to connect those ills with a Jewish cause.

The institute seems to justify its blatant discrimination by depicting Palestinians as victims of oppression and Israeli “settler-colonialism.” Of course, Zionism — the very subject they purport to study — is itself a movement for self-determination of the Jewish people in their indigenous homeland, one that was forced to defend itself against multiple surrounding armies. It was perhaps one of the most successful liberation movements in history. But rather than contend with this and be forced to justify their discriminatory positions, the institute just implies that Zionism is the “appropriation of liberatory rhetoric by repressive political forces.”

It’s a fundamentally illiberal and authoritarian set of positions put together by the ICSZ, one clearly at odds with what higher education is supposed to embody. Perhaps that’s why the institute’s members “reject academic professional success as a measure” in favor of ideological purity. They’ve developed a theory, and that theory conveniently means evidence and arguments to the contrary are to be silenced. But more importantly, that theory means the very Jews to be studied must also be silenced.

David M. Litman is a Research Analyst at the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA), where a version of this article was first published.

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Civil rights inquiry filed against University of California over “discriminatory” Berkeley “ban” on Zionist speakers.

By The Algemeiner

A proposed ban excluding supporters of Zionism from speaking at student-hosted events at Berkley University is being challenged before the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.

On Sunday, two lawyers filed a complaint with the federal government against Berkeley Law School over a August 2022 decision of at least 9 student groups to adopt a bylaw excluding Zionist speakers.

The complaint, filed by attorneys Arsen Ostrovsky and Gabriel Groisman, called on the Department of Education to investigate the university for “profound and deep-seated antisemitic discrimination” under violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which bars discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin in federally-funded programs.

“The groups that have implemented this discriminatory policy attempt to hide their discrimination against the Jewish community by excluding “Zionists,” the two lawyers said in a statement Sunday. “This thin veil is completely transparent as Zionism is an integral, indispensable and core element of the Jewish identity.”

The complaint also called on the federal government to compel UC Berkeley to adopt the widely endorsed International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism and requires the university to create a training program, to educate about antisemitism, its history and modern manifestations.

Proposed by Students for Justice in Palestine at Berkeley Law as part of a resolution endorsing the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement, the measure was endorsed by eight other student groups. It has been criticized by lawmakers, Jewish groups and human rights organizations for posing a threat to academic and intellectual freedom.

In October, UC Berkeley law faculty, working with the Academic Engagement Network, a nonprofit that promotes free expression and academic freedom on college campuses issued a statement affirming “the principle of free and open speech at the law school.”

“For many Jews, Zionism is a core component of their identity and ethnic and ancestral heritage,” it said. “As an educational institution we hope that the student groups that have now endorsed a ‘No Zionists speakers’ pledge will engage in dialogue on these issues.”

The October statement was signed by UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, Koret Professor of Law Peter S. Menell, and Claire Sanders Clements Professor Emeritus Malcolm Feeley.

But Sunday’s complaint alleges that Chemerinsky has not taken “meaningful steps” in response to the proposed ban.

In an op-ed, Chemerinsky argued that “a handful of student organizations — fewer than 10 out of over 100 — initially adopted the by the law.”

“But the rest rejected it or ignored it,” Chermerinsky added. “Most importantly, no group has violated the Law School’s policy and excluded a speaker on account of being Jewish or holding particular views about Israel. Such conduct, of course, would be subject to sanctions.”

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High schoolers to learn about “white supremacy,” “anti-Blackness” and “patriarchy.”

By Alex Nester, Washington Free Beacon

Students applying to any of the University of California’s 10 campuses may soon be required to take ethnic studies courses taught through an “anti-racist and anti-colonial” lens, following a faculty board vote meeting last week.

The University of California‘s Academic Senate on March 30 considered “course content guidelines” for ethnic studies courses that high schoolers will be required to take before applying to the school system. The guidelines mandate students learn about “the impact of systems of power and oppression,” such as “empire,” “white supremacy,” “anti-Blackness,” “xenophobia,” and “patriarchy” in the courses.

This is the latest step in a years-long battle over ethnic studies in California, where the State Assembly and Department of Education have in recent years proposed several controversial drafts of course standards.

Gov. Gavin Newsom (D.) vetoed a State Assembly Bill in 2020 that would have implemented an earlier draft of the model ethnic studies curriculum—which drew ire from conservatives for including chants to Aztec gods and excluding Jews from discussions about oppressed religious and ethnic minorities.

After the department rewrote model standards, Newsom signed a separate bill last fall to require high schools to teach ethnic studies by 2025.

In November 2020, the University of California’s Academic Senate added the one-semester ethnic studies as a course requirement for high schoolers graduating in 2030.

The proposed guidelines discussed during last week’s meeting would force high schools—including charter or private schools with students seeking entry to the University of California system—to “center anti-racism and anti-racist solidarity” in their ethnic studies courses.

In addition to making land acknowledgments, high school ethnic studies classes should “honor anti-colonial and liberatory movements that struggle for social justice” and “critique histories of imperialism, dehumanization, and genocide to expose how they are connected to present-day ideologies, systems, and dominant cultures that perpetuate racial violence, white supremacy, and other forms of oppression,” the guidelines state.

It’s unclear how students from outside California public schools could meet the ethnic studies requirement.

Antisemitic curriculum

More than 1,200 University of California students, faculty, and alumni signed a petition against the proposed guidelines, saying a group of “activist” faculty members behind the changes are trying to evade state law and “unleash hatred and bigotry, especially antisemitism, into California’s public, charter, and private schools.”

Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, the director of AMCHA—a group that tracks antisemitism on college campuses—said she believes the University of California’s proposed guidelines force high schools to adopt a radical and antisemitic form of ethnic studies. Lessons on “anti-colonialism,” Rossman-Benjamin said, often lambast Israel and Jewish communities.

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Twenty-five percent “of these students placed the Palestinian Territories west of Lebanon, in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea,” Hassner wrote.

By The Algemeiner Staff 

Most students who care strongly about the “Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories” do not have knowledge of basic facts surrounding the subject, and do not share similar concerns about other geopolitical conflicts, a recent study has suggested.

The survey, carried out among 230 undergraduates at the University of California, Berkeley, was conducted by Ron Hassner, the Helen Diller Family Chair in Israel Studies at the school who published an essay on his results on Monday.

It asked respondents to rate their attitude on 18 issues, “including U.S.-Iran relations, the civil war in Yemen, drone warfare, etc., on a five-point scale, ranging from ‘I’m not that interested’ (1 point out of 5) to ‘I care deeply’ (5 points out of 5),” explained Hassner, who also included a series of open-ended questions “on history, geography, and current affairs.”

One hundred of the participating students, or 43 percent, expressed the highest rate of interest in Israel’s control of Palestinian territories, while simultaneously caring “far less about other Middle East occupations, such as the Kurdish struggle for independence, the occupation of Western Sahara, or the occupation of Northern Cyprus,” Hassner found.

Of the 100 students who said they “care deeply” about the Palestinian territories, only 10 also reported the same level of interest in the Sahrawi independence movement in Western Sahara, while only six were equally enthusiastic to learn about all Middle Eastern independence movements.

The students’ professed level of interest also did not appear to correlate with their understanding of the Palestinian issue. Eighty-four percent of those in the most passionate cohort could not name the decade when Israel captured Judea and Samaria, while 75 percent could not locate the Palestinian territories in question on a map.

Twenty-five percent “of these students placed the Palestinian Territories west of Lebanon, in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea,” Hassner wrote. “The class average for this blunder was 14%.”

The professor pointed to another finding in the survey data, which indicated that students who expressed the most interest in the Palestinian issue were less informed than more moderate peers, who “are more likely to admit gaps in their knowledge and, as a result, are less likely to hold erroneous beliefs.”

The most passionate students were also the least likely to leave questions unanswered and “the most likely to offer a wild guess,” marking them as the most overconfident respondents.

The same pattern was present in all answers related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“Only 16% of students who ‘care deeply’ about the Palestinian issue provided the correct decade for the Six-Day War and only 17% were able to guess that the population of Israel was somewhere between 8 and 12 million people,” Hassner shared. “The others offered guesses ranging from as low as 100,000 persons to as high as 150 million persons.”

While acknowledging that his survey could not answer why students were driven to profess strong opinions on issues they were not particularly knowledgeable about, Hassner posited that “it does indicate, strongly, that education and moderation go hand in hand.”

“The questions that students answered most accurately involved Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Morocco, all countries for which they expressed moderate but not extreme interest,” he wrote. “If misinformation is both a cause and a consequence of political passion, then good teaching is the antidote.”

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Popular radio talk show host Ben Shapiro explains why he believes it’s important to prevent militant anarchists, communists and socialists, who have banded together under the Antifa movement, from violently denying the right of free speech to those with whom they disagree.

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