Rutgers University targeted Jewish students but let anti-Semites go unpunished, House committee finds
One student was charged with ‘[a]cts of dishonesty,’ ‘[b]ullying, intimidation, and harassment,’ and ‘[d]efamation’ for speaking out against a student who compared Israel to Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.
The report found that Rutgers students accused of anti-Semitism and disruptive protests against Israel faced no disciplinary measures.
A Republican Staff Report from a House committee found that Rutgers University in New Jersey allowed anti-Semites to go with impunity while punishing Jewish students.
The House Committee on Education and the Workforce report, published Thursday, is titled “Antisemitism on college campuses exposed,” and claims to expose a “stunning lack of accountability by university leaders for students engaging in antisemitic harassment, assault, trespass, and destruction of school property.”
Colleges and universities not only made “shocking concessions” to disruptive activists, the report claims, but also ignored the plight of Jewish students or even targeted them for speaking out.
In a section focusing on Rutgers specifically, the committee staff mention the case of a Jewish student who sat through a presentation in which another student compared Israel to Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, “inappropriately featured images of Holocaust victims, and ridiculed Jewish students in the class for participating in Birthright Israel.”
The Jewish student later spoke about what happened, and “submitted a bias report against the student who gave the presentation.” Instead of addressing the Jewish student’s concerns, however, Rutgers “opened a conduct investigation into the Jewish student” and “charged [her] with multiple conduct violations,” including “[a]cts of dishonesty,” “[b]ullying, intimidation, and harassment,” and “[d]efamation.”
Rutgers used the Jewish student’s bias report that expressed her concerns as “the foundation upon which Rutgers levied the case against [her].”
The university ultimately punished the Jewish student with a “full year of disciplinary probation” while doing nothing against the student who was accused of anti-Semitism.
The report cites another case at the New Jersey school as well. Yoel Ackerman, a Jewish law student, “pushed back against antisemitic, pro-Hamas messages in the Rutgers Law School Student Bar Association group chat” and was subsequently “subjected to antisemitic harassment.”
Specifically, his opponents downplayed Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, forced him to “apologize for speaking out against antisemitism,” and then temporarily suspended him from the school’s Student Bar Association.
Ackerman spoke about what happened to him with the Jewish Law Students Association, at which point Rutgers Law School leaders “opened disciplinary proceedings against him – falsely accusing him of ‘defamation’ of his antisemitic classmates.”
Though Ackerman was disciplined by the school, Rutgers did nothing against law students despite their “repeated disruptions of classes and open antisemitic harassment” during the school’s anti-Israel tent encampment.
Campus Reform has reached out to Rutgers University for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.
