For a brief moment, it looked like 2024 all over again: Tents were erected at Yale University’s central plaza on Tuesday night, with anti-Israel activists hoping to loudly protest the visit of far-right Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir to campus. Videos of students in keffiyehs, shouting protest slogans, started to spread online on Tuesday night.

But then something unexpected happened. University administrators showed up, threatening disciplinary action, and the protesters were told to leave — or face consequences. So they left. The new encampment didn’t last a couple hours, let alone overnight. The next day, Yale announced that it had revoked its recognition of Yalies4Palestine, the student group that organized the protest. (On Wednesday night, a large protest occurred outside the off-campus building where Ben-Gvir was speaking.)

Meanwhile, at Cornell University, President Michael Kotlikoff announced on Wednesday that he had canceled an upcoming campus performance by R&B singer Kehlani because of her history of anti-Israel social media posts. He wrote in an email to Cornell affiliates that he had heard from many people who were “angry, hurt and confused” that the school’s annual spring music festival “would feature a performer who has espoused antisemitic, anti-Israel sentiments in performances, videos and on social media.” 

The quick decisions from administrators at Yale and Cornell to shut down anti-Israel activity reflect something of a vibe shift on American campuses. One year ago, anti-Israel encampments were, for a few weeks, de rigueur on campus quads across the nation. University leaders seemed paralyzed, unsure of how to handle protests that in many cases explicitly excluded Jewish or Zionist students and at times became violent. That’s a markedly different environment from what’s happening at those same schools so far this spring. 

“In general, protest activity is way down this year as compared to last year,” Hillel International CEO Adam Lehman told Jewish Insider. 

There is no single reason that protests have subsided. Jewish students, campus Jewish leaders and professionals at Jewish advocacy organizations attribute the change to a mix of factors: stricter consequences from university leaders, fear of running afoul of President Donald Trump’s pledge to deport pro-Hamas foreign students and the issue generally losing steam and cachet among easily distracted students. 

Last spring, an encampment at The George Washington University was only dismantled after the university faced threats from Congress. Now, no such protest is taking place — which Daniel Schwartz, a Jewish history professor, said was likely due in part to the “sense that the university was going to be responding much more fiercely to anything resembling what happened last year.” 

“For the most part, the enforcement of rules, the understanding of what the rules are, what you can do, what you can’t do, requiring people to get permits for protests, has really calmed things down [from] the sort of violence that we saw last year,” said Jordan Acker, a member of the Board of Regents of the University of Michigan, who has faced antisemitic vandalism and targeted, personal protests from Michigan students.

Michael Simon, the executive director at Northwestern Hillel, came into the school year with a “big question mark” of how the school’s new policies, which provide strict guidance for student protests and the type of behavior allowed at them, would be applied. “I’m going to say it with a real hedging: at least up until now, I would say we’ve seen the lower end of what I would have expected,” he said of campus anti-Israel protests.

Many major universities like Northwestern spent last summer honing their campus codes of conduct and their regulations for student protests, making clear at the start of the school year that similar actions would not be tolerated again. In February, for instance, Barnard College expelled two students who loudly disrupted an Israeli history class at Columbia,. 

“For the most part, the enforcement of rules, the understanding of what the rules are, what you can do, what you can’t do, requiring people to get permits for protests, has really calmed things down [from] the sort of violence that we saw last year,” said Jordan Acker, a member of the Board of Regents of the University of Michigan, who has faced antisemitic vandalism and targeted, personal protests from Michigan students.

In recent weeks, the Trump administration has pressured top universities to crack down on antisemitic activity. The president’s threats to revoke federal funding if universities don’t get antisemitism under control has drawn pushback — Harvard is suing the Trump administration over its decision to withhold $2.2 billion in federal funds from the school — but it has also led universities to take action to address the problem. 

Sharon Nazarian, an adjunct professor at UCLA and the vice chair of the Anti-Defamation League’s board of directors, said there is “no question” that “the national atmosphere of fear among university administrators for castigation and targeting by the [Trump] administration is also present” at UCLA and other University of California campuses.

“My sense is that being anti-Israel is not as much of the popular thing anymore,” Evan Cohen, a senior at the University of Michigan, said at a Wednesday webinar hosted by Hillel International for Jewish high school seniors. “On my campus, there are other hot topic issues. There might be more focus on what’s happening with U.S. domestic politics.” 

Rule-breaking student activists also face a heightened risk of law enforcement action. A dozen anti-Israel student protesters were charged with felonies this month for vandalizing the Stanford University president’s office last June. On Wednesday, local, state and federal law enforcement officials in Michigan raided the homes of three people connected to anti-Israel protests at the University of Michigan. Protesters’ extreme tactics  have scared off some would-be allies.

“I think some of the most activist students went too far at the end of last year with the takeover of the president’s office and a lot of pretty intense graffiti in important places on campus,” said Rabbi Jessica Kirschner, the executive director of Hillel at Stanford. “I think a lot of other students looked at that and said, ‘Oh, this is perhaps not where we want to be.’”

Students’ priorities shift each year, and other issues beyond Israel are also vying for their attention. Trump’s policies targeting foreign students are drawing ire from students at liberal universities, many of which have large populations of international students.

“My sense is that being anti-Israel is not as much of the popular thing anymore,” Evan Cohen, a senior at the University of Michigan, said at a Wednesday webinar hosted by Hillel International for Jewish high school seniors. “On my campus, there are other hot topic issues. There might be more focus on what’s happening with U.S. domestic politics.” 

But the lack of protests does not mean that campus life has returned to normal for Jewish students, many of whom still fear — and face — opprobrium for their pro-Israel views.

“It’s easy to avoid the protests but if you are an Israeli student or a Jewish student perceived to be a Zionist, you should expect to be discriminated against in social spaces at the university,” Rabbi Jason Rubenstein, executive director of Harvard Hillel, told JI. “That is the most powerful way students are impacted by all of this.”

Ken Marcus, founder and chairman of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, which since Oct. 7 has represented dozens of Jewish students in Title VI civil rights cases against their universities, said that campus-related lawsuits are only faintly slowing down this semester. 

“A lot of the staff and the administration think that, ‘OK, since there’s no protest outside, all the Jewish students must feel OK, and let’s put all this stuff that happened in the spring behind us.’ It’s really not the case,” said Or Yahalom, a senior at Northwestern University who was born in Israel. “That doesn’t mean that it’s all better for students. Jewish students are increasingly afraid to speak openly about their identity or connection to Israel, except in private, safe Jewish spaces.”

“Some campuses have been less intense than during last year’s historically awful period, but others have been bad enough,” Marcus told JI. “I believe that the federal crackdown, coupled with the impact of lawsuits and Title VI cases, has had a favorable impact at many campuses, but the problems have hardly gone away.”

Or Yahalom, a senior at Northwestern University who was born in Israel, recently attended a dinner with Northwestern President Michael Schill, who has faced criticism from Jewish Northwestern affiliates — including several members of its antisemitism advisory committee — for what they saw as the administration’s failure to adequately address antisemitism. 

“A lot of the staff and the administration think that, ‘OK, since there’s no protest outside, all the Jewish students must feel OK, and let’s put all this stuff that happened in the spring behind us.’ It’s really not the case,” said Yahalom. “That doesn’t mean that it’s all better for students. Jewish students are increasingly afraid to speak openly about their identity or connection to Israel, except in private, safe Jewish spaces.” 

Even without massive encampments, disruptive anti-Israel protests and campus actions have not gone away entirely, though they have been more infrequent this academic year. A Northwestern academic building housing the school’s Holocaust center was vandalized with “DEATH TO ISRAEL” graffiti last week. The office of Joseph Pelzman, an economist at The George Washington University who authored a plan calling for the U.S. to relocate Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and redevelop the enclave, was vandalized in February. The Georgetown University Student Government Association is slated to hold a campus-wide referendum on university divestment from companies and academic institutions with ties to Israel at the end of the month. Smaller-scale protests continue at Columbia, with students chaining themselves to the Manhattan university’s main gate this week to protest the ICE detention of ​​Mohsen Mahdawi and Mahmoud Khalil, two foreign students who had led protests last year. 

Leaders of the University of Michigan’s anti-Israel coalition held a sham trial for the university president and Board of Regents members in the middle of the Diag, the main campus quad, this week. The event took place without issue, and the activists left when it ended. 

“I wouldn’t want to say that it’s perfect,” said Acker, the Board of Regents member. “But it’s certainly much better than a year ago.” 

The school year isn’t over. Some students at Columbia are planning to erect another encampment this month, NBC News reported on Wednesday. 

But they’ll be doing so at an institution with new leadership, weeks after Columbia reached an agreement with the Trump administration, where the Ivy League university pledged to take stronger action against antisemitism to avoid a massive funding cut. The pressure on Columbia to crack down on any encampment will be massive.

Several University of California campuses on Friday became the latest targets of the Trump administration’s ongoing terminations of international student visas. 

The University of California said in a statement that it “is aware that international students across several of our campuses have been impacted by recent SEVIS [Student and Exchange Visitor Information System] terminations.”

The UC system, which is comprised of 10 campuses, called the situation “fluid,” noting that it continues “to monitor and assess its implications for the UC community and the students affected. We are committed to doing what we can to support all members of our community as they exercise their rights under the law. In doing that, the University will continue to follow all applicable state and federal laws.”

UCLA, UC San Diego, UC Berkeley, UC Davis and UC Irvine confirmed that their campuses have been impacted by visa cancellations, noting that the federal government has not offered explanations for the terminations. A Berkeley spokesperson confirmed that two students and two recent graduates have had their visas revoked. 

UCSD said in a statement that five students had their F-1 visas terminated “without warning” and that a sixth student “was detained at the border, denied entry and deported to their home country.”   

The crackdown comes days after the UC system announced a systemwide hiring freeze. 

Student visa cancellations have swept the country since President Donald Trump returned to the White House earlier this year. On Jan. 29, Trump signed an executive order described as an effort to “marshall all federal resources” to “combat the explosion of antisemitism on our campuses and in our streets since Oct. 7, 2023.”

The order calls for the deportation of foreign nationals living in the U.S. and foreign students who broke the law in the course of anti-Israel protests on American campuses. “To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you,” Trump said in the fact sheet. “I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.” 

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a March 27 press conference that 300 student visas had been revoked at schools including Columbia University, Tufts University and The Ohio State University. Several of the cases, such as the high-profile detention of Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, have raised questions about due process and First Amendment rights. Asked whether the visa cancellations at UC schools were related to anti-Israel campus demonstrations, Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin told The Los Angeles Times, “We’d have to look on a case by case basis.”

After an annual conference on combating antisemitism in law featured speakers affiliated with anti-Zionist organizations last week, the Anti-Defamation League, one of the event’s sponsors, announced a policy shift on Wednesday. 

The antisemitism watchdog’s future participation and sponsorship in the conference “will be contingent on our ability to exclude such extraordinarily inappropriate speakers,” the group told Jewish Insider. 

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. Attendees told JI that several of the speakers used the event to promote anti-Israel and antisemitic rhetoric — including a panel where Fadel “defined Zionism as an ideology of Jewish ethnic supremacy.” 

When JI originally reported on the event on Tuesday, a spokesperson for the ADL declined to weigh in on any of the controversial speakers, 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 the following day the ADL — which did not have a role in selecting speakers — suggested there will be a change of course going forward in its sponsorship of the event, which it has helped fund since the inaugural conference in 2021. 

“It’s deeply troubling that the organizers of this conference invited a former JVP coordinator and other problematic speakers without consulting us,” the ADL said. “JVP is despicable and too far outside the mainstream to be a credible participant. Our future sponsorship and participation in an otherwise important conference will be contingent on our ability to exclude such extraordinarily inappropriate speakers.”

Miriam Elman, executive director of the Academic Engagement Network, which works to combat antisemitism within universities and also sponsored the conference, told JI earlier this week that 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.” 

Other Jewish sponsors of the event — UCLA Hillel, UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies and Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law (which is slated to host next year’s conference) — did not respond to requests for comment from JI about the speaker selection.

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.

The Justice Department’s newly formed Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism filed a statement of interest in court on Monday night supporting Jewish students and a professor in their case alleging that the University of California Los Angeles permitted antisemitism on campus. 

According to the suit, in the spring of 2024 UCLA violated Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act by knowingly allowed members of an anti-Israel protest encampment to physically prevent students and faculty from accessing portions of the campus if they were wearing items that identified them as Jewish if they refused to denounce Israel. The filing comes as the task force is separately investigating the University of California system for Title VI violations. 

The brief filed on Monday marks the first time the federal government has filed a statement of interest in court to argue that a university should be held accountable for the campus antisemitism that has skyrocketed across the country since the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks in Israel.  

Leo Terrell, head of the antisemitism task force, said in a statement that “the President, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and the Task Force know that every student must be free to attend school without being discriminated against on the basis of their race, religion or national origin.” 

The Trump administration’s new multi-agency task force to combat antisemitism announced earlier this month that it would visit 10 university campuses that have experienced an increase of antisemitic incidents. 

The task force already announced it will cut $400 million from Columbia University’s federal funding due to antisemitic demonstrations unless the university agrees to a number of conditions by Thursday. At the time, Terrell said that was “only the beginning” of university funding cuts.

A federal judge in California ruled on Tuesday that UCLA must permit Jewish students equal access to campus spaces and events, finding that Jewish students who refused to denounce Israel were barred from accessing certain parts of campus by activists who erected a large anti-Israel encampment in the spring. 

The ruling is set to have an immediate impact at UCLA, with campus administrators given just two days to adopt a policy that requires them to shut down access for all students to any part of campus where Jewish students are not allowed to enter. Beyond Los Angeles, advocates and experts argue the preliminary ruling’s impact may be much broader than simply affecting the policy of a single university. 

“While this decision might only affect UCLA, it should reverberate across the country,” said James Pasch, senior director of national litigation at the Anti-Defamation League. “It is crucial for every university to know that their students cannot be banned from areas of campus or from organizations on campus for who they are, full stop. The decision by the judge doesn’t just hold weight in the UCLA case, but should set precedent for other similar fact patterns and cases where Jewish students are protected.”

Judge Mark Scarsi, a federal district judge appointed to the Central District of California by former President Donald Trump, began his ruling with a gut-punch to UCLA that struck many Jewish advocates concerned about antisemitism on American campuses as an example of clear-eyed truth-telling about the challenges facing Jewish students after the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks.

“In the year 2024, in the United States of America, in the State of California, in the City of Los Angeles, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith. This fact is so unimaginable and so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom that it bears repeating,” Scarsi wrote.

He continued by accusing UCLA of abandoning its responsibility to treat all of its students equally.

“UCLA does not dispute this. Instead, UCLA claims that it has no responsibility to protect the religious freedom of its Jewish students because the exclusion was engineered by third-party protesters,” Scarsi wrote. “But under constitutional principles, UCLA may not allow services to some students when UCLA knows that other students are excluded on religious grounds, regardless of who engineered the exclusion.” 

Scarsi’s ruling is a preliminary injunction, issued before the case has concluded, but it reveals that he finds the Jewish students’ arguments persuasive. It doesn’t hold direct precedent for other universities. But it may still make its way into the hands of university general counsels.

“It is possible that some general counsels might say, Well, it’s just a district court opinion on a motion for injunctive relief, and so we’ll ignore it. That would be very unwise legal advice to give to a university,” said Mark Rotenberg, a former general counsel at the University of Minnesota and Johns Hopkins University. 

“How would I advise the university?” asked Rotenberg, who is now a vice president and general counsel at Hillel International. “It seems to me that the best view of the law taking into account this decision is that universities, both public and private — meaning both under the Constitution and under Title VI — must take steps this fall to assure that Jewish students are not discriminated against in any program or opportunity afforded by the university to students.” (Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 requires institutions that receive federal funding, including most private universities, not to discriminate against anyone.)

“I think a ruling like this is going to give a lot of general counsels of universities pause to say, ‘We can’t tolerate this. This will land us in court. Students will prevail, and it won’t be the time of our choosing,’” said Miriam Elman, executive director of the Academic Engagement Network, which organizes university professors who support Israel. 

The UCLA case is one of several being litigated in federal court regarding universities’ handling of antisemitism and campus protests over the past year. Earlier this month, another U.S. district judge in Massachusetts denied a motion by Harvard to dismiss a lawsuit filed by six Jewish students who claim the university ignored “severe and pervasive” antisemitism at the Ivy League university. The same judge dismissed a class-action lawsuit against Massachusetts Institute of Technology that said the university had reacted with “deliberate indifference” to antisemitism on campus.

Jewish communal leaders are hopeful that the preliminary ruling in the UCLA case, coupled with the Massachusetts judge’s refusal to dismiss the suit against Harvard, will remind universities that they need to more seriously address protests and antisemitic discrimination than they did in the 2023-24 school year, when the aftermath of Oct. 7 upended campus politics.

“I think that it’s a clear line in the sand, and it says you as a university need to, at the minimum, ensure the safety and access for all students, including Jewish students,” said Rabbi Noah Farkas, president and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles. 

A UCLA spokesperson declined to comment. A representative of the university told The Los Angeles Times that the ruling would “improperly hamstring our ability to respond to events on the ground and to meet the needs of the Bruin community. We’re closely reviewing the judge’s ruling and considering all our options moving forward.” The university has indicated it will appeal the injunction.

Northwestern University President Michael Schill found himself on the defensive on Thursday throughout a House Education and Workforce Committee hearing on campus antisemitism, repeatedly providing nonspecific answers, in some cases refusing to answer specific questions and occasionally becoming combative.

Schill said that he had made a deal with an anti-Israel encampment — which he acknowledged was dangerous and engaged in antisemitic activity — in the interest of protecting Jewish students. By the end of the hearing, he faced calls from Republicans for his resignation or ouster.

He declined to answer various specific questions about incidents on campus, including whether Jewish students were assaulted, harassed, stalked or spat on, citing ongoing investigations; when those investigations might be completed; whether it was acceptable for faculty to obstruct police officers; and whether he would have made a similar deal with an encampment of Ku Klux Klan members.

Asked whether it’s acceptable for students or faculty to express support for terrorism, Schill responded, “are you saying, OK meaning, is it something that I would do?… Our professors and our faculty have all of the rights of free speech.”

He said that there have so far been no students suspended or expelled in connection with antisemitic activity but that investigations are ongoing and that some staff had been fired.

The Northwestern president, who is Jewish, indicated he’s proud of the university’s deal with protesters, which has been widely condemned in the Jewish community, describing it as a “hard decision” with a “good result.”

“The danger posed grew every day it stayed up,” he said. “Every day brought new reports of intimidation and harassment,” as well as “antisemitic behavior that was making our Jewish students feel unsafe.”

He said that he saw three options for dealing with the encampment: allowing it to remain indefinitely, which was not an option; sending in police and staff to make arrests, which he said was impractical because of a lack of personnel and “too high a risk to our students, staff and police officers”; or negotiating with demonstrators.

He downplayed the nature of the concessions the university had made to the demonstrators, claiming that many of the agreements made had already been in the works before the encampment or were connected to preexisting programs. He claimed the university had not actually conceded to any of the demonstrators’ demands.

Pressed on details, Schill downplayed the deal as “just a framework of an agreement that was reached with the students at 4 o’clock in the morning” and at one point told committee members to consult Northwestern’s website for specifics. 

And he said that “nothing in the agreement… specifically addressed the interests of Jewish students, other than getting rid of that encampment.” He claimed that the deal “gave them the ability to feel safe on campus.”

Local and national Jewish groups have said that the deal instead normalized and rewarded those engaging in hateful activity, without any support for the Jewish community.

Schill acknowledged that no Jewish or Israeli students, nor the university’s antisemitism task force, nor the full university Board of Trustees, were consulted before he made the agreement, claiming that would have been “impractical.” But a professor who is an outspoken promoter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement was consulted.

Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), the committee chair, argued that Schill’s deal had created a poor precedent for other university chairs, in effect encouraging them to also make concessions.

“President Schill’s testimony today clarified his leadership imperils Jewish students and that he has failed at virtually every turn to take antisemitism on Northwestern University’s campus seriously,” the Anti-Defamation League Midwest said in a statement.

Northwestern’s antisemitism task force collapsed, with the resignations of seven members, after Schill’s agreement, though he said the school plans to implement a new task force.

Lawmakers highlighted a series of concerns about the initial task force, including the fact that it had no members who were experts on antisemitism, and some who were openly anti-Israel and supported antisemitic slogans. 

Schill responded that the task force’s focus was intended to be broader than antisemitism, a mission he concluded was “impossible.” He also claimed the members had resigned in part because the task force was “unable to reach a consensus on what antisemitism was.”

The Northwestern president downplayed the significance of the hundreds of millions in funding Northwestern has received from the Qatar Foundation, saying that all of that funding went to support the Northwestern campus in Qatar.

He said he was unaware until recently that Northwestern’s journalism school had partnered with the Qatari state-run media outlet Al Jazeera, that he was “concerned” about it and would review the partnership.

Schill appeared at the hearing alongside Rutgers University President Jonathan Holloway and University of California, Los Angeles Chancellor Gene Block; Schill took the brunt of the questioning, but the other two presidents also came under the committee’s microscope.

Holloway, who also struck a deal with protesters, offered a similar justification as Schill, characterizing his decision as a quick and proactive move to prevent disruptions to exams.

“We made a choice. That choice was to engage our students in dialogue as a first option, instead of police action,” he said. “If ever there was a time to dialogue and focus on civil discourse, it is now… It was made clear that we were going to allow the encampment and consider it a speech act in the spirit of First Amendment free expression” unless it disrupted university business.

Holloway was also pressed on Rutgers’ Center for Security, Race and Rights, whose leader and featured speakers praised Hamas and spread Oct. 7 denialism; the center also hosted a speaker convicted of providing material support for terrorism.

Holloway described the activity as “wildly offensive” and said “there is very little I find easy about the center. I personally disagree deeply with a lot of the ideas that come from that center.” But he said that there are many events on campus of which he is not aware and that he has no plans to shutter the center.

He was also pressed on Rutgers’ relationship with Birzeit University in the West Bank; the school has glorified terrorists, Hamas won a recent student election, several students were arrested for planning terrorist attacks and Jews are banned from the campus.

Holloway said Rutgers “partner[s] with institutions all around the world” and said he was unaware of the details about the university and would look into the issue further.

Holloway said that four students have been suspended and 19 others received other forms of discipline.

Block, unlike the other two presidents, did not make a deal and ultimately called in police assistance to clear the encampment after a violent clash between encampment members and counterprotesters.

He struck a somewhat different tone than the other presidents, acknowledging that the school had mishandled the situation and acted too slowly.

“With the benefit of hindsight, we should have been prepared to immediately remove the encampment if and when the safety of our community was put at risk,” he said.

Yet, as Block was testifying to the committee, demonstrators reestablished an encampment on UCLA’s campus.

Block said no UCLA students have been suspended or expelled, but that more than 100 investigations into antisemitism and islamophobia are ongoing, in addition to police probes into the violence.

In another notable moment, Block pushed back on Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D-MN) attempts to downplay the severity of anti-Israel activity on campus. 

Omar described the encampment as “peaceful” and protected by the First Amendment, characterized the encampment members as the ones being harassed and ultimately blamed Block for the attack on the encampment by counter protesters. She also brushed aside an incident in which a Jewish student was blocked from walking down a public pathway on campus to a class building.

“This encampment was against policy, it violated time, place, manner [restrictions],” he said, before being cut off. He also said it’s “really inappropriate” for students to be blocked from any part of campus, regardless of whether other pathways were available.

Congressional Republicans are vowing action to address antisemitism on college campuses nationwide, with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) launching “a House-wide effort” this week to crack down on universities unable to control anti-Israel protests that on some occasions have grown violent. 

Johnson said at a press conference on Tuesday that House Republicans would expand the ongoing efforts to tackle antisemitism beyond the House Education and Workforce Committee, which has investigations into six universities underway. 

The chairs of the House Energy and Commerce; Oversight; Judiciary; Ways and Means; and Science, Space, and Technology Committees will separately investigate “the billions of federal taxpayer dollars that go to these universities,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) said at the press conference. 

“Antisemitism is a virus and because the administration and woke university presidents aren’t stepping in, we’re seeing it spread,” Johnson said. “We must act, and House Republicans will speak to this fateful moment with moral clarity. We really wish those in the White House would do the same. We will not allow antisemitism to thrive on campus and we will hold these universities accountable for their failure to protect Jewish students on campus.”

“That’s why today we’re here to announce a House-wide effort to crack down on antisemitism on college campuses,” he continued. “Nearly every committee here has a role to play in these efforts to stop the madness that has ensued. The federal government plays a critical role in higher education, and we will use all the tools available to us to address this scourge.”

Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), who chairs the Education and Workforce Committee, revealed that in addition to her ongoing probes, she will have the presidents of three other schools testify next month on their responses to protests and instances of antisemitism on their campuses. The presidents of the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of Michigan; and Yale University will be brought in to testify before Foxx’s committee on May 23. 

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee, noted that her panel “oversees agencies that dole out massive amounts of taxpayer funded research grants… We will be increasing our oversight of institutions that have received public funding and cracking down on those who are in violation of the Civil Rights Act.”

“Imagine being a Jewish American, knowing that part of your hard-earned paycheck is going to fund an antisemitic professor’s research, while they threaten students and actively indoctrinate and radicalize the next generation,” McMorris Rodgers said. 

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) said that his panel was reaching out to the State Department and Homeland Security Department to find out “how many students on a visa have engaged in the radical activity we’ve seen now day after day on college campuses.”

“The overriding question is real simple: Are individuals advocating for the destruction of our dearest and closest ally, the State of Israel, and engaged in this antisemitic behavior, is that a national security threat? We think it is,” Jordan said. 

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) hasn’t directly addressed the expanded GOP investigations, but is pushing for the House to consider a bipartisan antisemitism bill in response to the campus incidents.

Jeffries said Wednesday he has no current plans to visit colleges that have been plagued by unrest and anti-Israel encampments. He said he also hasn’t looked at proposals for cutting funding to colleges that are not cracking down on antisemitism, but slammed Republicans for pushing to cut funding to the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, which investigates antisemitism accusations on campuses.

“Ultimately, it was House Democrats led by [Rep.] Rosa DeLauro [D-CT], that were able to restore the proposed extreme MAGA Republican cut that would have adversely impacted the ability of the Department of Education to combat antisemitism and all other forms of hatred on college campuses,” Jeffries said. “We don’t need rhetoric from some of my Republican colleagues, we need real action.”

The New York congressman expressed support for Columbia University and the New York Police Department’s response to anti-Israel demonstrators who broke into and took over an administrative building on campus.

“As far as I can tell, the efforts by the NYPD were thorough, professional, and they exercised a degree of calm in a very tense situation that should be commended,” he said during a press conference, adding that he did not see any incidents of excessive force.

The Democratic leader said that peaceful protest and civil disobedience are “an important part of the fabric of America” but that protests that threaten others or engage in antisemitism or other bigotry are unacceptable.

He said he had no comment on Democratic lawmakers who have visited the encampments at Columbia to offer support. He also declined to comment on remarks by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) accusing some Jewish students of being “pro-genocide,” noting that he hadn’t spoken to Omar directly.

On the Senate side, where Democrats are in the majority, Republicans have been largely unified in calling for consequences for schools that cannot get their campuses under control, but otherwise lack the power to force any action. 

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) organized a press conference on Wednesday for a group of GOP senators to condemn the encampments, which he referred to as “Little Gazas.”

“These ‘Little Gazas’ are disgusting cesspools of antisemitic hate full of pro-Hamas sympathizers, fanatics, and freaks,” Cotton said. “President Biden needs to denounce Hamas’s campus sympathizers without equivocating about Israelis fighting a righteous war of survival.”

“The State Department needs to yank the visas of foreign students in these ‘Little Gazas’ and DHS needs to deport them,” he added. “The Justice Department should investigate the funding sources behind these ‘Little Gazas,’ and the Department of Education needs to withhold funding for colleges that won’t protect the civil rights of their Jewish students.”

Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY), the No. 3 Senate Republican, similarly called for revoking federal support for universities that fail to uphold civil rights laws.

“We have laws in this country to protect against violence, to protect students. Students have a right to be protected. Jewish students, all students on campus, from harassment, from discrimination,” Barrasso said at the weekly leadership press conference. “If not, those colleges should lose their federal funding.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) delivered two floor speeches on the matter within two days. His Tuesday speech likened Columbia protesters to ‘student Nazis of Weimar Germany’ in a call to restore order on the university’s campus, while his Wednesday remarks urged the Biden administration to not focus “on virtue-signaling and political theater to appease the leftist agitators of their base.”

While Republicans have generally been more vocal about their concerns on the matter, there have been some bipartisan calls for action in the upper chamber. 

Sens. Jacky Rosen (D-NV) and James Lankford (R-OK) have asked Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) to hold a hearing on antisemitism on college campuses in his capacity as chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), the top Republican on the committee, has requested the same.

Asked by JI in the Capitol on Wednesday about organizing a hearing about antisemitism on college campuses, Sanders replied, “Well, the issue of bigotry on campus is something that we are concerned about,” before abruptly entering a senators-only elevator. 

Cassidy told JI in November that Sanders had declined to call a hearing on campus antisemitism. Sanders delivered a Senate floor speech on Wednesday largely expressing support for anti-Israel protests on college campuses and rejecting many of the accusations of antisemitism leveled at anti-Israel demonstrators.

Sanders’s office did not respond to JI’s subsequent request for comment on the matter, nor did a spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY).

When Sharon Nazarian started teaching a new class on Oct. 4 at the University of California Los Angeles, designed to look at antisemitism from a global lens, she couldn’t have known just how timely the topic was about to become. Three days after the class began, Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel and launched a massive terror attack that killed more than 1,200 Israelis. In the wake of the war that followed, rates of antisemitism skyrocketed on college campuses around the U.S.

“I have to admit that when I designed the class, ‘The Globalization of Antisemitism: A Survey of Transnational Trends,’ largely based on my Anti-Defamation League experience, I had no idea what Oct. 7 would bring,” Nazarian, the former senior vice president of international affairs and current board member of the ADL, told Jewish Insider. 

“Everything that you have read about in terms of the challenges on U.S. campuses showed up directly in my class and with my students,” she said, calling the class, made up of 25 students from diverse backgrounds (an estimated 30% of whom are Jewish), a “wake-up call” about today’s students. 

The class ran in the global studies department – which Nazarian, a former adjunct professor at UCLA from 2005-2017, said provided a more diverse group of students than doing so through the Jewish or Israel studies departments would have. 

“Students are unwilling to hear theses that challenge their own worldview. Students today have far less knowledge of history and analytical thinking skills than previous generations, and this becomes a huge challenge when teaching critical issues such as antisemitism,” Nazarian said, noting that social media — TikTok in particular — has contributed to “the relativism trap.” 

“I asked students which figure personified pure evil to their generation as Osama bin Laden did to ours; they mentioned President Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan,” Nazarian said. “I listed Hitler, Stalin, Mao. You get the point.” 

When Israel responded to Hamas’ attack by launching a ground invasion of Gaza, “the tone of students in class shifted – they questioned my perspective,” Nazarian said, adding that after Oct. 7, students wanted “to hear me constantly speak to Israel’s killing of innocent Palestinians and complained to administrators that I did not offer a safe space for them to do so.”

“The idea of Jewish victimhood is one [students] are not willing to accept. They are so entrenched in the narrative of Palestinian victimhood that there is no space for the concept of Jews as victims,” Nazarian added.

UCLA’s administration responded by disciplining Nazarian about keeping the focus of the class on the Jewish experience around the globe, she said. “They tried (unsuccessfully) [to have me] stay away from thorny policy issues in the Israel/Gaza dynamic, but nevertheless I was trapped.” In spite of this, Nazarian said it is important to make clear that “UCLA welcomed my class. They didn’t have to allow me to teach this, it was a privilege.” 

A senior majoring in global studies who was a student of Nazarian’s, who asked not to be named due to the campus climate, also noted a “significant” shift in the class after the Israel-Hamas war started. “Before, the class was about everyone being curious. After Oct. 7 there were a lot of heightened emotions,” she said. As protests around campus were held during class, the environment became “really charged,” she said, adding that “a lot of people just stopped coming.” 

The student said she came into the class with “quite a bit [of knowledge] on U.S. foreign policy and Middle Eastern diplomacy.”

“[Other classes taught that] Israel is an ally, but I never before studied how Israel is internally,” the student, who is not Jewish and “leans pro-Israel,” said. 

She said that pro-Palestinian students in the class appeared comfortable to speak up, while most Jewish students did not, which she said mirrors the overall climate on campus. “It’s been really hard [for Jewish students],” she said. “The other day there was a big banner on campus that said Israel is committing Nazi-style occupation. It’s difficult for me to see so many pro-Palestinian rallies taking over and getting so boisterous. Everything is a little bit scarier.” 

Nazarian echoed that the Jewish students in her class generally did not engage. “But [they] told me privately that it felt it was useless to try to challenge what was being said by their classmates,” she added. 

Nazarian said the end of the semester was particularly fraught, when some students requested from the head of the department to miss the final lectures and asked to not be penalized for missing class despite 20% of their grade being for class attendance. 

“The UCLA administrator strongly suggested that I offer them other ways to make up for those lost points, meaning allowing them not to show up to class,” Nazarian said, which she found “utterly shocking.” According to Nazarian, the administration said that policy was to accommodate students not only given the stresses on them post-COVID, but also due to mental health issues. “Of course, this was not the case; they simply didn’t want to hear my narrative,” she said. 

The UCLA administration did not immediately respond to JI’s request for comment about the course. 

The views Nazarian observed in her classroom echo a new narrative that has spread in the Middle East and beyond, recasting Jews as oppressors. That radical view is prevalent among Americans between the ages of 18-29, who sympathize with Palestinians over Israelis, recent polls show. 

Still, Nazarian said some of the students had a genuine interest in learning and kept an open mind. One student was active in Students for Justice in Palestine and said he signed up to hear another perspective. Another student expressed that most of his high school class had become alt-right and neo-Nazis; he wanted tools to counter those extremist ideologies. 

Nazarian, who was born in Iran, noted that a design flaw was that only about a quarter of the students had any formal Middle East education. She said that if the class runs again, a prerequisite needs to be required for such courses “since any discussion of ‘anti-Zionism is antisemitism’ demands a more in-depth understanding of Middle East history and politics.” 

While Nazarian does not know if she personally would offer the course again, she said she would like to see similar ones — looking at the threats of global antisemitism and how that leads to an array of global challenges — at universities worldwide. “This information should encourage universities and administrators to do more,” she said. 

“We need more of what I’ve done,” Nazarian continued. “I tell donors not to push away from universities, just repurpose your dollars and invest in antisemitism education.”