A subcommittee of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce heard emotional testimony last week from University of Californian college professors (and two others) about how Jew-hatred has affected their careers since the Hamas terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7.
The Committee heard from four witnesses: Mark Rienzi is the President and CEO of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty in Washington, D.C. Brian Keating is the Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University at UC San Diego. Melissa Emrey-Arras is the Director of the GAO’s Education, Workforce and Income Security Team in Washington, D.C. Professor Dafna Golden is a Geography professor at Mt. San Antonino College in Walnut, California.
Dafna Golden, testified that it would be unbearable to continue to do her job due to the antisemitism that she has experienced.
“Like so many of my Jewish colleagues at colleges across the country, the general antisemitic, hostile environment turned to focus on me directly because I am a Jew,” Golden told the subcommittee. “Because I won’t hide or reject my connection as a Jew to the Jewish state and the Jewish people.”
Due to the “toxic atmosphere and severe impact on my mental health and my professional standing, and the refusal of my employer to protect me in my workplace, I have decided to transition out of academia as soon as possible,” the professor testified.
The hearing is the latest round of the committee’s investigation into Jew-hatred on college campuses and in K-12 education since Oct. 7.
Students and faculty have launched a flurry of formal discrimination complaints and lawsuits alleging that school administrations fostered a hostile environment against Jews, amid the proliferation of anti-Israel and antisemitic protests on campuses.
Brian Keating, who is also Jewish, described what that environment was like for younger professors and students on his campus.
“Faculty members call their colleagues ‘colonizers,’” Keating testified. “During a tour of a lab and workspace environment where Israelis and Jews are working and pursuing their studies, they are confronted by calls for elimination of the one Jewish homeland.”
One of the most shocking parts of the hearing was when Keating reported that John Hildebrand, an oceanographer at UC San Diego who serves as that university’s chair for the University of California Academic Senate, who met with Students for Justice in Palestine, but refused on five separate occasions to meet with any Jewish students, citing various excuses, like lack of time, even as some of these students were feeling physically threatened. He also refused to meet with any Jewish professors outside of very limited circumstances.
Keating also described the role that the United Auto Workers labor union has played in organizing strikes and anti-Israel protests.
Despite its name, the union now represents more than 100,000 academic workers across the country, including 48,000 faculty and student employees in UAW local 4811 representing the University of California system.
“They are effectively forced to be members of the United Auto Workers union as part of their contract and their collective bargaining agreement,” Keating said, of his graduate student teaching assistants.
“They organize rolling strikes, they call them ‘day of action’ or ‘complicity tours,’ where they would organize shutdowns of campus or attempt to shut down campus,” he said.
UAW 4811’s website is almost entirely devoted to anti-Israel protest-related grievances.
“UAW members have chosen to participate in the nonviolent Palestine Solidarity Encampments to call attention to UC’s financial ties to Israel’s war effort and urge UC to divest from companies and industries currently profiting off of the suffering in Gaza,” the site said.
An Orange County superior court judge ruled in early June that UAW 4811’s strike violated its collective bargaining agreement with the University of California and issued a restraining order against it.
Additionally, Keating related testimony compiled from Jewish UCSD students. One graduate said, “I don’t know how much longer I can do this. I can’t work at UCSD, I can barely live here – and I have learned, brutally and painfully, where my life ranks for the people I’m surrounded by every day.”
Another, a professor of anthropology, said: “In October, anthropology professors canceled classes in solidarity with Hamas and used departmental listservs to urge others to follow suit. A Jewish professor was publicly called a hypocrite for not attending a meeting on Passover. The Director of Undergraduate Studies presented a letter demanding faculty take a public stand against the Chancellor and Israel, which she had coerced students into signing. Professors have also pushed for BDS, the Chancellor’s resignation, and actions against Israel while suppressing opposing viewpoints. They aim to sever research and teaching partnerships with Israeli scholars despite these scholars protesting against their government.”
Keating reported that despite multiple official complaints to the Office of Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination and appeals to the DEI Officer, no actions have been taken. The university has also ignored requests for an advisory committee on antisemitism and testimony given to lawyers investigating an open Title VI case.
In her written testimony, Golden noted that the campus (her workplace) became increasingly hostile after she confronted a colleague about showing an antisemitic video – “The Occupation of the American Mind,” narrated by the notorious antisemite Roger Waters – in his classroom just weeks after Oct. 7. The film’s central thesis is that “leaders of major Jewish organizations” have conspired to use their power to control and thus “occupy” the minds of innocent Americans so that they would support Israel. Golden wrote, “The movie is basically a screen version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and serves no academic function.”
After her complaint, the movie was not screened campus-wide, but the professor continued to show this film in his classes on U.S. History, Mexican American History and Native American History.
In retaliation, the professor began a campaign of harassment against Golden, calling her a “violent Zionist” and a “former soldier in the IDF” (she was never in the IDF) in an email sent to his entire class. He told students “to stand up” to her. A Jewish student in one of the professor’s classes documented these actions, including a disturbing incident where the professor mimicked a Nazi salute in class.
Then “individuals associated with a notorious antisemitic organization on campus, Shut It Down 4 Palestine, vandalized the bulletin board outside my office by removing my Israeli flag and pro-Israel articles, and replacing them with anti-Israel propaganda, including a flyer with demands to ‘Renounce the Pro-Zionist,’ ‘Remove the Pro-Zionist library display,’ and ‘Declare support for Palestine,’” Golden wrote.
Additionally, Golden testified that she had installed “a perfectly normal, non-ideological, academic display at the school library on Israel’s changing borders from prior to the establishment of the state until the present time” which featured books such as Coexistence & Reconciliation in Israel and both the Israeli and Palestinian flags. But due to student complaints and “division in the community,” the library removed the display.
Golden’s RateMyProfessors.com profile was also bombarded with fake negative reviews. “Students making public comments at the open meeting of the Mt. SAC Board of Trustees demanded that I be fired and declared a boycott of my classes.”
Golden’s spring semester on-campus class was canceled due to low enrollment, limiting her teaching to online only. “My lack of on-campus presence has deteriorated crucial collaborative relationships, essential for the multi-disciplinary program I manage. My colleagues’ reactions during virtual meetings and their reluctance to engage with me professionally underscore the prevalent hostility. My attempts to engage with key faculty and administration, including the head of the Ethnic Studies department, the President of the Faculty Academic Senate and the President of Mt. SAC, have been ignored, leaving the pervasive anti-Semitism on campus unaddressed.”
A few days before the hearing, three Jewish students at the University of California, Los Angeles – two law students and an undergraduate – asked a federal court on Monday to force UCLA to protect their safety when they return to the public school’s campus on Aug. 15.
“UCLA allowed a group of extremist students and outside agitators to set up an encampment where they stopped Jewish students from accessing classes, the library and other critical parts of campus,” stated the Becket Fund, which is representing the students.
The public school “allowed and reinforced these zones, breaking the law and hurting its Jewish students,” Becket added, noting the students are “asking a federal court to prevent UCLA from ever allowing such exclusion of Jewish students again.”
“No student should have to fear for their safety or pass a religious test to walk freely at a public university,” said Mark Rienzi, president of Becket, who is representing the students along with the firm Clement & Murphy.
“UCLA’s behavior on this issue has been shameful, and the students need a court order to allow them to return to campus safely this fall,” Rienzi said.
The law students are Yitzchok Frankel – a father of four, who “faced antisemitic harassment simply for wearing a kippah and was forced to abandon his regular routes through campus because of the Jew Exclusion Zone” – and Eden Shemuelian, who had to walk around the encampment and hear its antisemitic chants, “severely” compromising her studies for final exams, per Becket.
An undergraduate history major, Joshua Ghayoum “was repeatedly blocked from accessing the library and other public spaces.” He also heard chants of “death to Jews” from the encampment, Becket said.
“It’s appalling that an elite American university would actively support and encourage masked mobs of antisemites,” Rienzi stated. “UCLA’s Jewish community needs to know that they’ll be safe on campus before the start of the fall semester.”
