Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Swastikas painted in front of California campus’ Jewish fraternity house

(JTA) — Police in California are investigating after a Jewish fraternity at the California Polytechnic State University reported finding swastikas and other anti-Semitic graffiti painted outside its house.

The symbols were scrawled in front of the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity house in California’s San Luis Obispo County on Friday night, campus authorities said.

“We awoke to multiple swastikas and antisemitic statements spray-painted on and in front of our house,” the fraternity wrote in an Instagram post on Saturday. The post did not show images of the graffiti described in the post.

University President Jeffrey Armstrong and other officials Saturday evening said in a statement that the incident was reported to the San Luis Obispo Police Department and an investigation is underway, according to The Tribune of San Luis Obispo County, which is located about halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

“Let us be perfectly clear: behavior that promotes any form of hate and seeks to make members of our community feel unsafe and unwelcome – especially in their own home – has absolutely no place in our community,” the university president’s message said.

In 2018, Cal Poly made the news because of a push to increase funding to all student groups except those with a “Zionist ideology.”

A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.