The Anti-Defamation League and Academic Engagement Network helped sponsor a conference on combating antisemitism in law at UCLA last week featuring speakers affiliated with anti-Zionist organizations, whom attendees said used the event to promote anti-Israel and antisemitism rhetoric. The ADL said afterward that it was “pleased to co-sponsor the conference,” while the head of AEN said she would have pulled out of the event had she known of the speakers’ list.

In addition to the ADL and AEN, the conference was sponsored by the UCLA Hillel, UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies, Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law, Herbert and Elinor Nootbaar Institute on Law, Religion, and Ethics, Pepperdine Caruso School of Law, Shotz Family Foundation in honor of Hebrew Helpers, People4Peace and Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp LLP.

Speakers at the fourth annual Law vs. Antisemitism conference, which was held this year at UCLA for two days beginning on March 23, included University of Toronto law professor Mohammed Fadel; Thomas Harvey, a civil rights lawyer representing Faculty for Justice in Palestine; and Ben Lorber, a former campus coordinator for Jewish Voice for Peace. 

Anat Alon-Beck, a Case Western Reserve University associate law professor who attended the conference, told Jewish Insider that she walked out of Lorber’s session titled “The Policy-Legal ‘Nexus’ in Regulating Campus Antisemitism” because she was “appalled” by Lorber’s “bias and invalidating of all of the antisemitism I’ve been experiencing on campus.” 

The next panel Alon-Beck attended, about the Frankel v. UCLA Regents case, which featured Fadel and Harvey, was equally “disgraceful and one-sided,” she said. The federal suit, filed in June 2024, centers on the allegations of Jewish students and a UCLA professor that the university refused to clear what the plaintiffs called a “Jew Exclusion Zone” on campus, which they charged was a violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.

“Those were two very important topics [and] the speakers were not balanced,” Alon-Beck said. 

The latter panel was moderated by Duquesne University law professor Rona Kaufman, who said that the discussion became charged when Fadel “defined Zionism as an ideology of Jewish ethnic supremacy.” 

“Equating Zionism with white supremacy [or] Nazism, that’s a blood libel,” Kaufman told JI.  “Mohammed Fadel absolutely should not have been at our conference. For me, this conference is a place to go to for people who recognize that there are aspects of antisemitism spread about the Jewish people and are working to combat it, not a platform to spread the very blood libel [I am] working to deconstruct.” Fadel did not respond to a request for comment from JI. 

Kaufman said the conference has changed in the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks. It is her understanding that “for the first three years, the only people who attended the conference were people who were genuinely concerned about antisemitism and who were doing work to theorize antisemitism in law,” she reflected. 

The conference’s co-founder, Diane Klein, an adjunct professor of law at Pepperdine Caruso School of Law and Loyola Law School (Los Angeles), defended her selection of speakers. Klein told JI that Fadel approached her earlier this year and advocated that events such as the conference “needed to include perspectives from people who he described as ‘victims of Zionism.’” 

“I think he is right about that,” Klein said. “I don’t think believing that there are persons who understand their experience as having been victims of Zionism is antisemitic. It is from that point of view that he expressed an interest in presenting.” 

A spokesperson for the ADL declined to weigh in on any of the controversial speakers in a statement to JI, instead noting that the group was “pleased to co-sponsor the conference and to support bringing legal academics and representatives of Jewish organizations together to discuss these issues.”

“The organizers deserve credit for productively calling attention to ways in which the legal system can help address antisemitism,” the ADL said. 

But Miriam Elman, executive director of AEN, which works to fight anti-Israel sentiment and antisemitism at U.S. universities, said had she been aware of the lineup, “I would have pulled our funding.” 

“I’m all in favor of dialogue and debate,” Elman said, but she believes that the selection of speakers “crossed a red line.” 

Next year’s conference is slated to be held at Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law in Manhattan.