The Elephant on Bruin Walk: UCLA Can’t Curb Campus Antisemitism While Ignoring Faculty-Led Anti-Zionism

At UCLA, faculty and departments have moved anti-Zionist activism from the margins into university life, becoming a core engine of campus antisemitism.

On Thursday, UCLA’s Consortium for Palestine Studies will host a lecture entitled “Revisiting Zionism as a Form of Racism and Racial Discrimination” given by Rutgers professor Noura Erakat, an outspoken anti-Zionist who compares Zionism to Nazism and white supremacy. 

The event is co-sponsored by a wide roster of UCLA academic units, most led by faculty who have publicly endorsed the academic boycott of Israel — a campaign that seeks to delegitimize Israel and turn the country and its supporters into pariahs within academic life.

Last month, on the two-year anniversary of the October 7th attack, UCLA’s Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP) chapter co-hosted an on-campus rally celebrating Hamas’ massacre as “the people of Palestine righteously engaged in decolonial struggle” and demanded that the university “END [its] academic and financial complicity,” explicitly tying protest goals to academic-boycott demands.

These are not isolated incidents.

At UCLA, faculty and departments have moved anti-Zionist activism from the margins into university life, becoming a core engine of campus antisemitism. At least 115 faculty have publicly endorsed academic BDS, many while holding administrative roles. Dozens of departments and programs issued statements praising or defending last year’s illegal encampment and endorsing protester demands — including academic boycott and divestment — under official banners that signal institutional approval. From late 2023 through spring 2025, more than 20 Israel/Palestine events co-sponsored by numerous academic departments featured only BDS-supporting speakers; none offered a balancing view.

Making matters worse, UCLA’s Faculty for Justice in Palestine, formed shortly after the October 2023 Hamas massacre for the express purpose of advancing academic BDS’s anti-normalization goals on campus, has organized teach-ins and events like the recent rally celebrating the Hamas massacre, and pursued legal efforts that marginalize Zionist students and deny Jewish identity.

Even more troubling, FJP’s anti-Zionist mobilization is now being formalized through the faculty-initiated Consortium for Palestine Studies, founded in fall 2024 by five FJP-affiliated supporters of academic BDS. Branded as “at UCLA” but not approved by the Academic Senate, the Consortium uses UCLA’s name and infrastructure to legitimize anti-Zionist research and teaching and to co-sponsor events, including the upcoming “Zionism is Racism” lecture, effectively institutionalizing anti-Zionism without academic oversight.

As these faculty- and department-led anti-normalization campaigns rapidly expanded, antisemitism surged: from July 2023 through June 2025, incidents at UCLA targeting Jewish members of the campus community for harm — including assaults, vandalism, and bullying – rose by nearly 3,000% compared with the prior two years. 

In the same period, rhetoric glorifying violence against Israel or Jews, and calling for or justifying the elimination of the Jewish state, increased by nearly 1,000%.

This surge in antisemitic incidents is what triggered federal scrutiny. Earlier this year, the Department of Justice pursued a civil‑rights probe of UCLA, found the university in violation of federal law and transmitted to the UC Regents a proposed Resolution Agreement that was publicly released last week. 

While that proposal carries sweeping requirements and major financial exposure, it does not address the real institutional driver of the problem: faculty and academic units using official university channels to delegitimize Zionism and advance academic‑boycott anti‑normalization campaigns that incite antisemitic harassment and curtail Jewish and Zionist students’ participation in campus life.

This is not a question of academic freedom; it is about institutional conduct and professional standards. When departments and faculty initiatives use UCLA’s name and platforms to label Zionism as racism or to praise Hamas’s October 7 attack as “righteous,” they weaponize academic authority, delegitimize a core part of many Jewish students’ identity, and incite hostility and harm towards them on campus. The message to Jewish and Zionist students is unmistakable: you are unwelcome and unsafe.

If UCLA is serious about addressing campus antisemitism, it must bar faculty from using official titles and university resources for political advocacy and activism. It must end departmental partnerships with faculty advocacy groups that promote discriminatory boycotts and bar those groups from receiving university funds or using university facilities. And it must restructure or discipline departments that have materially contributed to a hostile environment for students.

Even under DOJ’s sweeping proposal, UCLA can satisfy new requirements and still miss the heart of the problem if it refuses to acknowledge and address how faculty and departments use the university’s name and platforms for political ends. Jewish and Zionist students deserve to learn without fear. If UCLA declines to act, campus antisemitism will continue, and no fines or compliance plans will fix it.

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Tammi Rossman-Benjamin serves as executive director of AMCHA Initiative, a non-profit antisemitism watchdog, and was a University of California faculty member for twenty years.