After years in which Jewish and Israeli students at University of California, Berkeley were told that their exclusion was merely the product of political disagreement, a Title VI case brought by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law has reached a settlement. It requires the university to end student group practices that excluded “Zionists,” and finally affirms that what Jewish students experienced was, in fact, discrimination.
The settlement forces the university to confront what it had long denied: that Jewish students’ experiences of discrimination and harassment were real. Though the problem accelerated after Hamas’s genocidal massacre on October 7, Kenneth L. Marcus—founder and chairman of the Louis D. Brandeis Center, which brought the suit—accused Berkeley law students in 2022 of having “institutionalized an ancient ideology of hate, incorporating it into the legal DNA of their major identity groups.” He listed clubs as diverse as women’s groups, Asian and Pacific Islander, African American, LGBTQ, and Middle Eastern student organizations, all of which had altered their bylaws to exclude “Zionist” members and speakers.
