(JTA) The University of California, Los Angeles, must take more decisive action to protect its Jewish students from any obstacles they encounter from pro-Palestinian protesters and encampments, a judge ruled on August 13th.
The temporary injunction, from U.S. District Judge Mark Scarsi, is one of the most significant legal rulings to follow the spread of pro-Palestinian encampments, which protesters organized on campuses across the country last spring. It comes in response to a handful of Jewish students suing UCLA, alleging that they were briefly barred from entering a campus space that had been occupied this spring by people protesting Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.
In his comments, the judge wrote that he was appalled at the state of campus affairs for Jewish students.
“In the year 2024, in the United States of America, in the State of California, in the City of Los Angeles, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith,” Scarsi wrote.
“This fact is so unimaginable and so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom that it bears repeating, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith,” he added, with emphasis.
UCLA’s encampments attracted particular scrutiny in April after campus police failed to promptly intervene when protesters erected physical barricades on campus, preventing pro-Israel students from crossing. School security instead instructed Jewish students to avoid the encampments. Pro-Israel counterprotesters attacked the encampment soon afterward, leading to violent clashes and arrests and to Congressional testimony from the school’s Jewish outgoing chancellor, Gene Block.
The judge said the fact that a public university’s staff was aiding any behavior that excluded Jewish students, instead of stopping it, violated the First Amendment. Without specifying what steps UCLA should take to rectify the problem, he said the school needs to ensure that all campus locations and activities are open to all students.
The ruling was praised by Jewish plaintiff Yitzchok Frankel, a rising third-year UCLA law student, and by Becket, a law firm specializing in religious liberty that sued the school on Frankel’s behalf.
“I am grateful that the court has ordered UCLA to put a stop to this shameful anti-Jewish conduct,” Frankel said in a press release. Attorney Mark Rienzi said in the release, “Today’s ruling says that UCLA’s policy of helping antisemitic activists target Jews is not just morally wrong but a gross constitutional violation.”
A spokesperson for UCLA criticized the ruling to the Los Angeles Times, saying it would “improperly hamstring our ability to respond to events on the ground.” They added that the school is “considering all options moving forward”; the university had previously indicated it could appeal. UCLA’s fall semester for law students begins this month.
Lawyers for the university had argued during a hearing that UCLA wasn’t at fault for the protesters’ behavior, and that the school had sought to non-violently de-escalate the encampments without involving police. Campus police instead took a strategy of enforcing “neutral zones” once the encampments formed, as a way of preventing altercations, the attorneys said. Other schools had faced criticism from some corners for sending in law enforcement to immediately break up encampments and make arrests.
The injunction is “a significant decision, one that has legal consequences,” Michael Helfand, a professor of law and religion at Pepperdine University’s law school and a legal advisor for education matters with the Orthodox Union, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
He noted that, unlike many of the most prominent schools that have dealt with encampments, UCLA is a public university and subject to the First Amendment — including the right to free religious expression. Pro-Palestinian protesters at some other public universities, including Portland State University and Cal Poly Humboldt, took over school buildings and similarly prevented others on campus from accessing them.
As more universities are facing — and settling — lawsuits from Jewish students over their handling of the encampments, Helfand said the UCLA case could have “spillover effects” even at private schools like Harvard (where a judge ruled last week that a lawsuit alleging it failed to protect Jewish students can go to trial).
“The opinion is written in a way that really lays down the gauntlet,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to be a university that says, ‘I’m not abiding by what the judge in the UCLA case said.’”
Scarsi also wrote that he accepted the Jewish students’ claim that “supporting the state of Israel is their sincerely held religious belief,” negating one of the key arguments pro-Palestinian groups have made in favor of the encampments — that protesting the state of Israel is not the same as targeting Jews. Many encampments, including at UCLA, have included anti-Zionist Jews. Helfand said the judge’s views on the question were significant as well.
“It doesn’t matter if there are Jewish students in the encampment or if there are other people who don’t believe these things,” he said. “The only question is, what do the plaintiffs believe?”
Earlier this summer UCLA announced it was appointing Julio Frenk, a descendant of Jewish immigrants who fled to Mexico in the 1930s, as its next permanent chancellor. Frenk, currently president of the University of Miami, was previously a Harvard dean.
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