In Frankel v. UCLA, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty is suing UCLA for giving an antisemitic encampment special privileges that made its campus a hostile territory for some Jewish students. It is seeking to hold college administrators personally accountable for enabling discrimination. It says, “We hope this approach will send shockwaves through higher education, deterring similar incidents nationwide.”
On June 24, it filed its motion for preliminary injunction asking a federal district court to ban antisemitic encampments on UCLA’s campus by August 15 before the fall semester begins. UCLA had one week to respond.
After the terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, anti-Jewish protests emerged on college campuses nationwide. At UCLA, activists set up an encampment in the heart of campus where they enforced what was effectively a “Jew Exclusion Zone,” segregating Jewish students and faculty and preventing them from going to their classes, accessing the library, or participating in routine campus social life. Meanwhile, UCLA’s administration ordered police to stand down and step aside and even assigned security officers to keep those who would not agree to disavow Israel’s right to exist away from the area. Three Jewish UCLA students are now asking a federal court to hold UCLA accountable for allowing the antisemitic encampment checkpoints, in a lawsuit filed by the Becket Fund.
In the months following the terrorist attacks on Israel in October of 2023, pro-Hamas, anti-Jewish protests emerged throughout the country, most notably on college campuses. In spring 2024, extremist students and outside agitators at UCLA set up barricades in the most popular area of campus and established an encampment in violation of the school’s policies.
Those agitators refused to let students through unless they disavowed Israel’s right to exist. The effect of this encampment was to segregate Jewish students and faculty with religious and ethnic obligations not to condemn Israel, preventing them from accessing the encampment and other parts of campus, including the campus’s most popular undergraduate library and classroom buildings. The activists used checkpoints, built barriers, and often locked arms to prevent Jews from walking through the encampment. They also created an identification system, giving wristbands to those who had passed their anti-Israel ideological test and preventing those without one from entering.
For a full week, UCLA’s administration failed to clear the Jew Exclusion Zone and instead ordered campus police to stand down and allow the illegal encampment to stay. The administration even stationed security staff around the encampment to keep students unapproved by the protestors out of the area.
Agitators within the encampment viciously targeted Jewish students. Yitzchok Frankel, a law student and father of four, faced antisemitic harassment and was forced to abandon his regular routes through campus because of the Jew Exclusion Zone. Joshua Ghayoum, a sophomore and history major, was repeatedly blocked from attending classes, meetings, and study sessions. He also heard chants at the encampment like “death to Israel” and “death to Jews.” Eden Shemuelian, another law student, had her final exam studies severely compromised when she was forced to walk around the encampment to access the law school and forced to endure antisemitic chants rising from the Jew Exclusion Zone as she studied. These students were hardly alone; many other Jewish students and faculty were assaulted by antisemitic agitators.
The lawsuit alleges that UCLA violated the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause as well as other constitutional and statutory provisions, such as freedom of speech, equal protection, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, and California’s Ralph Civil Rights Act and Tom Bane Civil Rights Act.
As Becket attorney Mark Rienzi explains, ““If masked agitators had excluded any other marginalized group at UCLA, Gov. Gavin Newsom rightly would have sent in the National Guard immediately. 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.”
The lawsuit is pending in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.
