Update, March 19: A congressional committee has demanded years’ worth of records and documentation from UC Berkeley, accusing the school of failing to stamp out antisemitic behavior and certain professors of “political indoctrination.”
U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx, a Republican from North Carolina and chair of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, wrote Tuesday to Chancellor Carol Christ, University of California President Michael V. Drake and Board of Regents Chair Richard Leib, advising them that her committee was investigating Cal for an alleged “failure to protect Jewish students.”
Foxx’s letter referenced a demonstration by Graduate Students for Justice in Palestine that included regular displays of banners across Sather Gate, the topic of a march by Jewish students last week. Foxx also referred several alleged instances of antisemitic graffiti and attacks targeting Jewish students and other Jewish community members.
In addition to documentation of any antisemitic incidents since the beginning of 2021, Foxx demanded information on Cal’s disciplinary and personnel policies for handling them, including findings against students, faculty and staff who have been investigated, as well as records on university funding and funding for certain student organizations.
Dan Mogulof, a spokesperson for the university, said it would “provide a comprehensive response to the committee’s questions and concerns.”
Mogulof said the university “has long been committed to confronting antisemitism, and to supporting the needs and interests of its Jewish students, faculty and staff,” citing the 2015 establishment of the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on Jewish Student Life and Campus Climate and the school’s 2019 Antisemitism Education Initiative.
Foxx’s letter came the day after Ran Bar-Yoshafat, an attorney and leader in a conservative and politically influential Israeli think tank, was scheduled to give a talk on “Israel’s position in the international community and international law during times of war,” at 6:30 p.m. Monday, according to a post on the Instagram page of Berkeley Tikvah, which bills itself as “the Zionist voice at Berkeley.”
Bar-Yoshafat was originally scheduled to speak Feb. 26, but the talk was called off after a crowd of roughly 200 protesters gathered at the Zellerbach Playhouse, the venue for the talk, breaking down a door and smashing a window, university officials said at the time. University police are investigating several reported instances of battery from the confrontation as possible hate crimes.
Original story, March 11: About 300 people, including graduate and undergraduate UC Berkeley students, faculty members and city residents marched from Zellerbach Playhouse to California Hall on Monday, demanding the university do more to protect Jewish students and faculty members two weeks after a violent demonstration led to the cancellation of an event with an Israeli think tank leader.
That Feb. 26 demonstration, organized in part by Bears for Palestine, devolved into some protesters breaking down a door and smashing a window at the playhouse. University police and anti-discrimination officials have opened a hate crimes investigation after several people reported being victims of battery during the incident.
The federal Department of Education also opened an investigation into allegations of shared ancestry discrimination March 5, according to their website, but officials with that agency have not confirmed whether it is connected to the Feb. 26 incident.
One goal of the march Monday was to press the university to clear the Sather Gate, which for much of the last month has been obstructed by demonstrations against Israel’s military action in Gaza. More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces following a deadly attack on Oct. 7 by Hamas in southern Israel that killed 1,200 people and ended with Hamas taking hundreds of hostages, according to The Associated Press.
Marchers Monday said that the university allowing the protests to continue to block the gate had emboldened some groups into violent behavior Feb. 26, and hoped the university would temporarily suspend any student groups that were under investigation from that incident.
Hannah Schlacter, an MBA student at Cal’s Haas School of Business, said that there had been a “known hostility and discrimination of Jews” on campus since before she began her studies in 2022. Schlacter, who is Jewish, helped organize Monday’s march.
She said the administration had not called out hate speech and acts against Jewish students, even when two Jewish students were attacked while holding an Israeli flag on campus in the most recent fall semester or when someone broke into a Jewish graduate student’s home and left a note that read “F*** Jews, Free Palestine from the river to the sea.”
“All of those incidents, the university administration did not identify that as explicit anti-Jewish hate, so then we see a riot happen that’s violent, attacking Jews, because people on this campus learn it’s OK to harass and be violent towards Jews,” Schlacter told Berkeleyside. “So the university permitted all these violations for a while, and that led two weeks ago to the violent mob, where a speaker was forced to essentially abandon the premises, escorted by police.”
Another organizer, Noah Cohen, a law student who is also Jewish, said the events that precipitated Monday’s march “were in some ways avoidable by the university,” and that the near-constant presence of banners across the main Sather Gate walkway was a violation of university policy.
“It’s a slippery slope, and we feel that the university should be enforcing its policies and showing … that there’s someone home,” said Rabbi Gil Leeds, co-director of the Rohr Chabad Jewish Student Center at Cal and himself a university alum. “It’s kind of hard to continue to be trusting in the university and their enforcement of policies and their stewardship of our students’ academic experience when they just let things be trampled on time and time again.”
Ethan Katz, a history professor who specializes in Jewish history and late modern Europe, spoke to the marchers before they left Zellerbach. “Today we march to reclaim our place as rightful members of the community,” Katz said.
The marchers, many clad in blue trousers and white shirts, marched arm-in-arm in a column three people wide from the Zellerbach Playhouse, up a set of stairs onto Upper Sproul Plaza and then toward Sather Gate, turning north to cross Strawberry Creek rather than walk through the smaller gateways to either side of the main one.
Cohen said that many Jewish students were afraid to walk through Sather Gate because of the regular demonstrations there, opting instead to take the creek crossing.
They continued north back on Sather Road to California Hall, where there were more speeches.
UCPD officers and guards from APEX Security Group stood along the march route, but the march proceeded peacefully and mostly without heckling from outside groups.
Ken Goldberg, an engineering professor, condemned violence against Jewish students on campus but also acknowledged the cause that Graduate Students for Justice in Palestine and other groups were advocating for. “We share your anguish and anger,” Goldberg said. “We also respect your determination and right to free speech.”
Danielle Sobkin, a third-year undergraduate, said she could not walk to class without fear of harassment, nor speak her mind for fear of her grades being lowered. She traveled to Israel recently and said she had felt safer there than she does on Cal’s campus.
City Councilmember Sophie Hahn, who is Jewish, walked in Monday’s march, and told Berkeleyside that she had been subjected to antisemitic harassment as well.
“I have heard the word ‘kike,’ I have been called a dirty Jew,” Hahn said. “We’ve all heard the things that are said in the (council) chambers that are very hostile, not just related to the conflict, which I think everyone is anguished about including myself … we have received mailings, we have antisemitic Zoom bombers on a regular basis.”
She said she wanted campus administrators “to do more to make sure that Jewish students, and all students, feel safe and feel free to be themselves, to circulate freely on campus and to learn and grow free of intimidation and hatred.”
A representative for Graduate Students for Justice in Palestine, who did not want to be named, said the group was entering its fifth week of demonstrating at the Sather Gate.
The representative pointed out that the Muslim holiday of Ramadan had just begun and many of the students demonstrating on behalf of Palestine were fasting.
“Our message today, as it is every day, is that there are people in Gaza who are dying, who are not just dying — are being murdered because of a genocidal campaign, and we fund it,” the representative said.
There has been harassment of Muslim and Palestinian students on campus, the representative said, but “no one has heard of the Muslim students that have been called ISIS, no one has heard about the Muslim students and the pro-Palestinian students that have been called rapists, Hamas supporters … all they hear about is that there are claims to antisemitic attacks.”
Monday’s protest is the latest in a series of actions taken by Jewish students and faculty and other Berkeley residents to protest what they say is antisemitism. Last week, UC Berkeley professor Ron Hassner began a “sit-in protest” in his office because of the university’s failure to protect Jewish students, according to the J Weekly.
In a statement, university officials said they were trying to “reduce tensions” while honoring students’ and others’ First Amendment rights.
“While we support the exercise of free speech rights, the campus also seeks to enforce its time, place and manner restrictions,” said university spokesperson Dan Mogulof. “For that reason, we have been making efforts to end those aspects of the nonviolent protest at Sather Gate that violate those restrictions.”
