WASHINGTON – Three UCLA Jewish students and a Jewish UCLA professor filed an amended complaint today in their lawsuit against UCLA for its role in helping antisemitic agitators exclude Jews from campus. The amended complaint in Frankel v. Regents of the University of California sheds more light on UCLA’s failures to stop antisemitism on campus during and after the rise of the initial Jew Exclusion Zone, details how each defendant was personally involved, and describes how student groups have responded to the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s brutal terrorist attacks on Israel, with one student group even memorializing the October 7 massacre and another encampment forming yesterday.
The complaint also mentions a recently filed report by UCLA’s own Task Force to Combat Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias which sharply criticizes the university for its antisemitic actions and environment. The report, which surveyed 428 members of UCLA’s Jewish community, details the systematic exclusion of Jews from UCLA’s campus and documents over 100 reports of individuals who were physically attacked or threatened. Additionally, three-quarters of respondents felt that antisemitism is “taken less seriously than other forms of hate and discrimination at UCLA.”
The Task Force noted that it was “troubled by the defense that was offered by the university” in this case and urged the university to stop fighting it: “Jews and Israelis have been victims of discrimination and harassment on the UCLA campus, and the University should commit to remediation, rather than fighting the case.”
A federal judge ordered UCLA in August to stop helping antisemitic agitators exclude Jews from parts of campus, calling the university’s actions “abhorrent” and “unimaginable.” UCLA responded by insisting that it bears no blame for the rampant antisemitism it encouraged and facilitated, and that any harm to Jewish students and faculty was “not by reason of anything [UCLA] did or failed to do.” UCLA has even questioned whether Jewish students and faculty were harmed at all. The Task Force, for its part, found that the Court “[a]ppropriately” “rejected UCLA’s defense and issued the injunction.”
“UCLA should throw in the towel and finally admit that the administration not only allowed antisemitic encampments but encouraged them,” said Mark Rienzi, president of Becket and an attorney for the students and professor. “A federal court and now UCLA’s own antisemitism task force have denounced UCLA’s blatant facilitation of Jew-hatred on campus and called for the school to stop fighting in court. UCLA should agree to make the court’s order permanent and protect its Jewish students and faculty rather than discriminate against them.”
Becket and co-counsel Clement & Murphy PLLC represent the students and professor.
SOURCE Becket Law
