A Cascade of Antisemitism on American College Campuses

In the world of virology, a communicable disease can become an epidemic as a virus is passed from one person to another and increases the number of affected individuals. A similar phenomenon, however, can take place outside of science. The term “cascade” describes a cognitive psychological process by which an idea, an attitude, a credo, a policy, or some comparable expression of knowledge or belief captures the mind of an increasing series of parties, multiplying the effect of the original thought through its endorsement by a large number of people regardless of its original merit.REF For example, individuals can hold a particular belief because of a large and growing number of other people who find it credible. Some scholars have used that model to describe the spread of antisocial conduct and crimes following a particularly noteworthy event.REF An example would be the widespread riots following the death of George Floyd while in the hands of the police in 2020.REF

It is important to keep two points in mind when thinking about cascades. One is that it is a mistake to conclude that a widely held proposition is correct simply because a large number of people endorse it. LeBron James might be seen as the GOAT (Greatest of All Time for non–sports fans) in professional basketball today, but that belief could merely reflect the fact that the number of people who remember the exploits of Michael Jordan, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, or Bill Russell grows smaller over time. A crowd effect also could be an example of the blind leading the blind.REF The second point is that a particular cascade can be harmless or pernicious. The 1970s “Pet Rock” phenomenon was an example of the former, and widespread, neighborhood racially exclusionary housing discrimination is an example of the latter.REF Unfortunately, we are in the midst of just such a malignant bias right now.

Antisemitism was thought to be an attitude without legitimate purchase in the United States. The text of the Constitution prohibits the adoption of a religious qualification as a prerequisite for holding federal office,REF and the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause bars the federal or state governments from denying anyone the ability to adopt whatever religious beliefs he or she chooses to treat as sacred.REF But culture can be upstream or downstream of the law. In the case of antisemitism, American society did not extirpate it; it merely drove antisemitism underground, where it lay in wait for a chance to return.REF Sadly, it’s back, as the events on America’s campuses have proved in the months since Hamas launched its brutal, murderous, and savage attack on Israel and its people on October 7, 2023.REF

Despite our best efforts to eliminate it, antisemitism, like crime, is the result of a human character defect that seems bent on challenging the cockroach for its ability to survive. Even before the October 7 attack, antisemitism had not disappeared, including from American institutions of higher learning, which should not have been a welcome site for its vile hatred.REF The raft of antisemitic words, chants, and actions—uttered and endorsed not only by college students who might be excused for their immaturity,REF but also by college faculty members who cannot claim that excuseREF—give evidence of a serious problem with many—fortunately, not all—of the nation’s institutions of higher education.REF What are ordinarily thought of as bastions of America’s higher learning are infected with a left-wing, identity-politics rot that posits a Manichean view of the world as divided into Oppressors and Oppressed, with Jews lumped into the former category, and spiced with more than a dollop of “hatred for the values of Western Civilization.”REF

Today, it is Jews who must be silenced, put in their place, and, if necessary, excluded from the benefits of American society by making university life so uncomfortable for them that they go elsewhere. Tomorrow, that elsewhere might be sheol or worse. Unless this poisonous value system is extirpated from American society, the dream of America as a melting pot will itself dissolve into a Hobbesian war of all against all as every race, religion, and social class treats every feature of American life as a zero-sum game demanding a fight to the death. We must stop it now. We must draw a line forbidding Leftist Marxists and Nihilists from further corrupting our colleges.

This Legal Memorandum is intended to help that process along. The opening parts will describe the necessary background: what happened in Israel on October 7, 2023, and what followed on America’s campuses during the 2023–2024 school year, activities that might reoccur this fall when universities commence a new academic year. This Legal Memorandum then goes on to identify some of the legal claims that could be brought against universities for sowing, watering, and feeding antisemitism in what should be one of the last places its despicable head should appear: America’s educational system.

Hamas’s October 7, 2023, Attack on Israel

Hamas,REF a terrorist organization—so designated by the United States and the European UnionREF and whose “covenant…urges the slaughter of Jews ‘smitten with vileness wherever they are found’” and “obliteration of the state of Israel”REF—has controlled Gaza since 2007 when it wrested that status from the Palestinian Authority.REF Committed to the destruction of Israel and its residents, Hamas has committed acts of terrorism against Israel for years. As a defensive measure, Israel occupied Gaza from 1967 to 2005.REF Yet just as December 7, 1941, is “a date which will live in infamy” for the United States,REF October 7, 2024, the third deadliest terrorist attack since data started being kept in 1970, will have the same status for Israel.REF “The death toll exceeds the number of Israelis killed in all violence between Israelis and Palestinians over the prior 20 years.”REF A greater number of Jews were murdered on October 7—more than 1,300—than on any other day since the Holocaust. Considered proportionally, the number of people killed on October 7 was slightly more than one for every 10,000 Israelis. Compared to the 9/11 attacks, that ratio is commensurate with the death of 40,000 to 50,000 Americans.REF

At dawn on that day, the Jewish holy day of Sukkoth, Hamas launched an unannounced, organized, multipronged attack accompanied by 2,200 mortars and rockets fired as cover for the invasion.REF Hamas “infiltrated border communities and army bases, as well as an outdoor music festival, opening fire on men, women and children.”REF As the Office of the United Nations Secretary General concluded, “The complexity and modus operandi of the attacks appears to demonstrate a significant level of planning, coordination and detailed prior knowledge of the targets selected, including civilian ones.”REF The terrorists were well equipped with “high caliber and military grade weapons and equipment ranging from rocket propelled grenades, automatic rifles, often reported by witnesses as M16s or Kalashnikovs, ample ammunition, grenades, explosives, flammable substances, and restraints including zip ties.”REF

Hamas executed a sophisticated invasion up to 15 miles inside of Israel to catch unaware, ensnare, torture, and murder the civilian population and assault military targets.REF At nearly 30 points in the fence around Gaza, more than 1,000 Hamas fighters overcame Israel’s physical defenses—a nearly 40-mile-long, 20-foot-high barrier with cameras, radar and other sensors, and barbed wire coupled with observation towers every 500 feet using emplaced, automatic machine guns—by using a combination of tactics.REF Some terrorists broke through the barrier (using explosives and bulldozers) in technical vehicles; others went over it (using fan-powered paragliders) under cover of a rocket barrage.REF Once inside, Hamas wounded 3,300 people and massacred more than 1,300 others—sometimes in an especially grisly mannerREF—22 of whom were Americans, perhaps 87 percent of them civilians, before the Israel Defense Forces could prepare an organized counterattack.REF

Murder was not the only weapon that Hamas unleashed on Israel. Hamas kidnapped approximately 240 others, dragging them back to Gaza to serve as “bargaining chips” for Hamas or trophies to be displayed in Hamas’s underground tunnels.REF Most of the hostages were Israelis, but some were from elsewhere, including the United States. Some were women and children. Some were alive; others, dead. More than 100 of the people kidnapped have not yet been released, remaining hostages or worse.REF The hostages also have been victims of ongoing sexual violence.REF

Hamas denies itREF—the refusal to accept responsibility for its terrorist acts seems to be par for the course when it comes to HamasREF—but Hamas terrorists also used rape as a weapon of terror against Israeli women.REF Both the Office of the United Nations Secretary General and The New York Times so concluded.REF In fact, to illustrate the utterly cold-blooded and wicked nature of Hamas’s barbaric conduct, some terrorists actually filmed their own and their cohorts’ commission of human rights atrocities using body cameras and cellphones,REF conduct that Atlantic writer Graeme Wood called “pure, predatory sadism.”REF In short, as the U.N. Secretary General’s Office concluded:

[Hamas engaged in] an indiscriminate campaign to kill, inflict suffering and abduct the maximum number possible of men, women, and children, soldiers and civilians alike—in the minimum possible amount of time. People were shot, often at close range; burnt alive in their homes as they tried to hide in their safe rooms; gunned down or killed by grenades in bomb shelters where they sought refuge; and hunted down at the Nova music festival ground. Other violations included sexual violence, abduction of hostages and corpses, the public display of captives, both dead and alive, the mutilation of corpses, including decapitation, and the looting and destruction of civilian property.REF

American Campuses Are Rocked by Antisemitism

Before the spring semester ended in 2024, America’s campuses became the scene of large-scale protests reminiscent of the ones that took place late in the 1960s in opposition to the Vietnam War. College students—at least some of whom likely were either callow or ignorant of what happened on October 7REF—overtook American universities to utter antisemitic slogans and—inexplicably—blame Israel for Hamas’s attacks and horrific brutality.REF Yet students were not the only ones to spout them. Some college faculty,REF allied personnel,REF and professional rabble rousersREF—who do not have the excuse of immaturity that students can cling to—also blamed Israel for Hamas’s barbarity, spouted vile antisemitic chants, issued absurd demands, or possibly (because some number of protesters were masked) assaulted Jewish students and others.REF For example, a Cornell University professor claimed that the horrors were “exhilarating” and “energizing.”REF A Columbia University professor described the Hamas attacks as “awesome.”REF Apparently, neither one called for the release of the hostages held by Hamas or was disturbed by the sexual assaults on Israeli women by Hamas fighters.

The opposition, begun after the October 7 attacks, reached a crescendo this springREF as schools like Columbia University, Harvard University, MIT, New York University, Northwestern University, the University of Pennsylvania, and others saw in-person classes halted, buildings occupied and damaged, student life roiled, and graduations disrupted by rabid antisemitism.REF Students and associated parties created encampments on campuses that ultimately often had to be cleared by police officers in riot gear.REF Protesters issued demands—again, which apparently did not include releasing the Hamas-held hostages—that were sometimes nonsensical and therefore were more likely an exercise in virtue signaling than a serious call to alleviate any alleged suffering by Palestinians.REF In any event, the protests, along with the universities’ passive response, displayed a troubling, antisemitic image of American higher education.

At their core, according to one commentator, was “an unholy alliance of radical Islamists, rabid antisemites, and revolutionary Marxists” who “hate the Jews,” both as members of that faith and “as avatars of everything they hate about the West,” and also “hate Israel as a colonial outpost of the United States in the Middle East.”REF Protesters shouted slogans like “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” a thinly veiled endorsement of slaughtering the 9.6 million people living in Israel. Chants like “October 7 will be every day,” “Globalize the intifada,”REF “Death to the Zionist state,” “Burn Tel Aviv to the ground,” and “Go Hamas, we love you, we support your rockets, too” are among the “routine calls for their execution” that Jewish students have been made to endure.REF Atop that, Cornell saw an outbreak of threats to ‘shoot up’ a building and rape and slash the throats of Jewish students on campus by pseudonymous harassers calling themselves “‘hamas,’ ‘jew evil,’ ‘jew jenocide,’ ‘hamas warrior’ and ‘kill jews.’”REF One person made that point Kristallnacht-clear by saying that, like Nazis, “Zionists don’t deserve to live.”REF The Times of Israel reported that “anonymous antisemitic posts on a Greek life website” at Cornell contained these statements from an antisemitic erstwhile e.e. cummings: “‘If i see a pig male jew i will stab you and slit your throat,’” and “‘If i see another pig female jew i will drag you away and rape you and throw you off a cliff. if i see another pig baby jew i will behead you in front of your parents.’”REF That is what hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition and other costs buys a student at an Ivy League school these days.

The lunacy and odiousness were not limited to students who might be forgiven for lacking maturity and being blinded by a desire to belong to something that gives them a purpose in life.REF Much of the universities’ responses took the form of malign neglect or willful blindness to what was happening on campus.REF Some went further, capitulating to the protesters’ demands. Northwestern University is an example of the latter.REF It agreed to support visiting Palestinian faculty and students for two years and establish five full scholarships for Palestinian undergraduates.REF Apparently, no one at Northwestern ever camped out West. The National Park Service tells campers never to feed bears, because feeding the beasts only encourages them to come back for more.

But that is not all. When testifying before Congress, the presidents of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania refused to condemn the endorsement of the genocide of the Jewish people as a violation of their college’s codes of conduct.REF “When the president of a university refuses to condemn genocide without first considering the ‘context’ of a call for the extermination of millions of people, it is easy to see how numbskull students might believe that anything goes.”REF Part of Columbia University became a tent city to protest—in truth, to protest the right of Israel and Jews to exist. The George Washington University Law School chose to treat its students like jurors in a Mafia trial by moving final exams to an undisclosed location.REF The University of Southern California cancelled its graduation ceremonies, possibly in part because of the fear that it could not restrain the disruptive Hamas supporters whom the school thought would show up just to torpedo a celebratory event.REF

The phenomenon of avowed, widespread antisemitism on America’s campuses—once thought to be a movement that could not possibly arise in this nation—has several parents. Hamas has generated both sympathy for its murderous terrorist members and worldwide outrage at Israel’s efforts to prevent the reoccurrence of the rapes and murders that Hamas willfully inflicted on innocent people in Israel on October 7, 2023. Certain elements of the media have also displayed slavish affection for “The Squad,” a small group of members of the U.S. House of Representatives who have ignored Hamas’s vile conduct on that day. And all that without the media demanding that Hamas release the hostages taken on October 7—people who did not provoke the attack, let alone the resulting barbarity, by doing anything other than being Jewish or being in the company of Jews.

The Available Remedies

Several lawsuits have been filed against universities for fostering a campus environment hostile to Jewish students.REF To date, the lawsuits have been filed in federal court, but plaintiffs could bring suit in state court as well. As a legal basis for challenging the universities’ hostile environments, Jewish plaintiffs could invoke the First Amendment Free Exercise Clause,REF the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause,REF the Civil Rights Act of 1866,REF Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,REF and potential state law claims as well. The two constitutional provisions prohibit state universities from discriminating on the basis of religion, and the two statutes impose the same duties on private schools that receive federal funds.REF

Consider the allegation made in one of those lawsuits.

On November 29, 2023, the Louis D. Brandeis Center and Jewish Americans for Fairness in Education (JAFE), on behalf of the organization and its members who are undergraduate, graduate, and law students, and faculty, at Berkeley, filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California against, among other parties, the Regents of the University of California.REF The plaintiffs alleged that there has been a long-standing and still enduring practice on the California state university to overlook “on-campus displays of hatred, antisemitism, and physical violence against Jews,”REF as well as antizionism, which is a form of antisemitism.REF As an example of that hostility, at least 23 Berkeley law student organizations “have enacted policies to discriminate against and exclude Jewish students, faculty, and scholars.”REF Under the policies adopted by those organizations, “Jewish students, faculty, and guest speakers must deny a central part of their cultural, ancestral heritage and a fundamental tenet of their faith in order to be eligible for the same opportunities Berkeley accords to others.”REF The dean of the Berkeley Law School acknowledges that anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism but has not interceded on behalf of the school’s Jewish students.REF “Conditioning a Jew’s ability to participate in a student group on his or her renunciation of a core component of Jewish identity is no less pernicious than demanding the renunciation of some other core element of a student’s identity—whether based on race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual identity,” something that would never be demanded of other identifiable student groups.REF “By abdicating responsibility and failing to act as required by UC rules and U.S. law, the University has enabled the normalization of anti-Jewish hatred on campus. Jewish students feel compelled to hide their identities.”REF Those insults have continued since the October 7 attacks on Israel.REF “Jewish students at UC Berkeley have been the targets of harassment and physical violence.” As an example, the complaint states that (1) “[a] Jewish student draped in an Israeli flag was attacked by two protestors who struck him in the head with a metal water bottle;” (2) “Jews on campus have been receiving hate e-mails calling for their gassing and murder;” and (3) “Jewish students have reported being afraid to go to class, which would require them to pass through the pro-Hamas rallies taking place in Berkeley’s main thoroughfares.”REF If proved, the plaintiffs argue, these allegations constitute a violation of the Equal Protection and Free Exercise Clauses, as well as the federal civil rights laws.REF The plaintiffs are seeking declaratory and injunctive relief as well as an award of attorneys’ fees.REF

A complaint is not itself proof; it consists of allegations that the plaintiffs intend to show to establish a violation of law that injures them and entitles them to a judicial remedy of some type. The allegations here are quite serious, even greatly disturbing. They reflect a division of rights and responsibilities that is not impartially applied regardless of a student’s creed. It is the educational equivalent of a hostile work environment.REF Indeed, the allegations are precisely the type of conduct that we would expect to see if Group A intended to ostracize, separate, and isolate—not just subtly, but openly and blatantly—Group B from the educational opportunity that universities contract with Jewish students to provide them.REF No college includes in its online campus life descriptions or printed brochures joyous descriptions of how Jews can expect to be treated like second-class students—and people—if they decide to enroll in their schools. Yet what we saw across public and social media this past spring is scarily reminiscent of what Jews faced in Germany early in the 1930s. In fact, on-campus assaults up the ante. American law does not allow a government entity to pick among religions for the purpose of allowing one group of students—aided and abetted by faculty, administrators, or outsiders—to oppress another group because the latter holds religious beliefs that make others uncomfortably or firmly reject. If the plaintiffs can prove their claims, American law allows them to obtain relief under one or more of the legal doctrines that they have invoked.

Israel is now at war with Hamas, having invaded Gaza after October 7 to find and eliminate every terrorist hiding there.REF Among the countless items that bring sadness, one is the effete hypocrisy of many in the United States toward Israel’s efforts to protect its people against another round of massacres.REF “A large and expanding corner of the West refuses to accept that Israel’s war in Gaza is a response to evil, or that Israelis might be victims in any way,” Bret Stephens has written for The New York Times.REF Why? “It disturbs the narrative of the war in Gaza as a case of strong against weak, the settler-colonialist Israelis against righteous and indigenous victims.”REF

Conclusion

America has seen political protests that destroyed property before. The Boston Tea Party, for example, was one of the series of events that set the Thirteen Colonies on a path to become the United States of America, a nation that has been the source of far, far more good for the world than anything or everything it has ever done wrong. America is also familiar with revolution, having come into being by virtue of the one that we declared on July 4, 1776. So Americans have sympathy for others who also yearn to have their own homeland free from outside control.

But the Colonists who rebelled against the British did not commit the horrors that Hamas committed on October 7—and, in the case of the hostages it took, have continued to commit since then. Sometimes, American Presidents have drawn a so-called red line past which no one may cross, but when precisely that happened, our Presidents lacked the stomach to enforce it. Remember President Barack Obama’s red line on Syria’s use of chemical weapons. This time, however, we need to do just that.

The protests that have taken over many of America’s sites of higher education bring familiar images to mind, not all of them good. I could explain why that is so, but the editors of The Spectator World have already made that point more eloquently than I can in words that bear repetition here:

Campus protests are nothing new in America. They’ve been a feature of university life since at least the Vietnam War. And beyond. And sure, it’s fun to get wrapped up in a romantic cause you only just learned about and of which you have only a surface-level knowledge. It might give your life meaning at a time when you’re trying to figure out what the point of all this is. Like you’re part of something greater than yourself. Plus, it used to be a great way to meet girls. (Nowadays, these girls are all enbies.[REF] Ask your teenager.)

But a more worrying kind of activism is rearing its head on campuses across America. These new protests all tend to carry the same characteristics—encampments, silly demands, militant checkpoints stopping students from moving freely about campus, violent chants and buildings being taken over. But these eruptions have a distinguishing characteristic: the protesters don’t seem to be very fond of Jews. If you attend protests to meet girls, these may not be the types you want to meet your parents. Unless your parents happen to be actual Nazis—then, boy, these are the protests for you.

These encampments are remarkable not by their tactics—we’ve seen this sort since the WTO protests in the Nineties and Occupy Wall Street in 2011—but by what’s being said. Calls for intifada are the norm, and chants of “From the river to the sea,” a call to wipe Israel off the map, are de rigueur. Jewish students are being targeted, and in some cases attacked. Calls for genocide against Israelis and Zionists run rampant. The antisemitism on display is startling, even for those of us used to stumbling on the worst segments of the internet: it’s like 4chan messageboard come to life. Maybe more surprising—to people who only started paying attention to politics last year, anyway—is that it’s coming from the political left….

[W]hat’s spreading across the country doesn’t just amount to protests. These are militant acts, carried out by Hamas sympathizers, that put Jews and gentiles alike in danger. As a student, when you can’t walk through your campus unmolested and free without attesting your support for an ideology you disagree with, then we’ve lost the plot. If left to their guerilla gambit on campus, it’s only a matter of time before their gestapo tactics spread elsewhere as well. Administrators, elected officials and police need to enforce our laws and protect the citizenry. Not from speech, but from true, actual violence. Please, go protest—wear a sandwich board in Times Square declaring your hatred of Zionists, hire a skywriter and tell everyone of your odious views. But when you cross the line from free speech and protest to violence, there should be consequences. Otherwise, soon enough, the rest of the country will start to look a lot like the campuses—protestor and counter-protestor alike.REF

If we’re lucky, our elected officials nationwide are subscribers.

Paul J. Larkin is the John, Barbara, and Victoria Rumpel Senior Legal Research Fellow in the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation. I want to thank John G. Malcolm and Bill Poole for valuable comments on an earlier version of this Legal Memorandum. I also want to thank Cat Schumacher for valuable research assistance. Any mistakes are mine.