Jewish students sue UCLA, claim school allowed anti-Israel protesters to block them from campus
On June 5, three Jewish UCLA students sued the university for not shutting down pro-Palestinian encampments, alleging discrimination against Jews.
'The University of California, Los Angeles, once considered among the most prestigious public institutions in the world, has deteriorated into a hotbed of antisemitism,' the lawsuit alleges.
On June 5, three Jewish UCLA students sued the university for not shutting down pro-Palestinian encampments, alleging discrimination against Jews. They are seeking an injunctive and monetary relief for various constitutional and civil rights violations, like Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The plaintiffs contend that the UCLA administration failed to adequately protect Jewish students on campus in the wake of the Oct. 7 attack against Israel and the subsequent surge in anti-Semitism at American institutions of higher education.
“The University of California, Los Angeles, once considered among the most prestigious public institutions in the world, has deteriorated into a hotbed of antisemitism,” the lawsuit alleges.
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“In the wake of these horrifying events, UCLA should have taken steps to ensure that its Jewish students were safe and protected from harassment and undeterred in obtaining full access to campus facilities,” the lawsuit asserts. “Instead, UCLA officials routinely turned their backs on Jewish students, aiding and abetting a culture that has allowed calls for the annihilation of the Jewish people, Nazi symbolism, and religious slurs to go unchecked.”
“With the knowledge and acquiescence of UCLA officials, the activists enforced what was effectively a ‘Jew Exclusion Zone,’ segregating Jewish students and preventing them from accessing the heart of campus, including classroom buildings and the main undergraduate library,” the suit states.
“[UCLA] knew,” defense attorney Mark Rienzi told the Beverly Hills Courier. “They knew the people were chanting, ‘death to the Jews,’ and things like that. Yet, they chose to allow them to have access to that part of campus, allow them to exclude other people, and then UCLA instructed its police officers and security staff not to help people through.”
Rienzi said that one of UCLA’s faults was failing to shut down the pro-Palestine encampment that formed on UCLA’s campus in a timely fashion.
“One of their choices was just to allow this to continue for a while and to help it to continue, and that’s illegal and unconstitutional and wrong, and they weren’t allowed to do that,” Rienzi continued. “But I think they thought or hoped they could just go along with it, and it would be OK. And it’s just illegal to do that to people.”
Rienzi concluded by saying that discrimination against Jewish students has been allowed to be upheld, claiming a unique antipathy toward the Jewish people from members of UCLA leadership and California government.
“If masked agitators had excluded any other marginalized group at UCLA, Gov. Gavin Newsom rightly would have sent in the National Guard immediately,” Rienzi said. “But UCLA instead caved to the antisemitic activists and allowed its Jewish students to be segregated from the heart of their own campus. That is a profound and illegal failure of leadership.”
Campus Reform has contacted the University of California, Los Angeles for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.
