With Jewish leaders poised to call for a restrained approach to the use of federal civil rights law for disputes on college campuses, one group is pushing the community to take a more aggressive role toward Jewish student complaints. The Jewish Community Relations Council of Northern New Jersey has submitted a proposal to the Jewish…
Do Jewish students deserve the same federal civil rights protections as African Americans, women and the disabled in the nation’s schools and universities? The official answer now is in the affirmative, and in principle, that seems only just and fair. After years of lobbying, Jewish groups led by the Zionist Organization of America managed to…
A year and a half after the federal government extended a landmark civil rights law to cover Jewish students, Jewish groups have yet to succeed in using this law against what they see as anti-Semitic anti-Israel activity on campus. A survey by the Forward has found that at least 10 anti-Semitism cases have been filed…
In this week’s podcast, host Josh Nathan-Kazis talks with Forward fellow Naomi Zeveloff about her profile of Ali Abunimah, a prominent pro-Palestinian activist who advocates for the boycott of Israel. Then, Forward Washington correspondent Nathan Guttman calls in to discuss the fallout from last week’s AIPAC conference and Netanyahu’s victory in changing the dialogue from…
A few weeks ago, we ran an op-ed by Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, a professor at the University of California Santa Cruz who has filed a Title VI complaint to the government’s office of civil rights. She cites a number of instances in which she believes Jewish students were discriminated against as the targets of anti-Israel advocacy….
A new, Washington DC-based organization will advocate for the rights of Jewish students under federal civil rights law. Led by Kenneth Marcus, the former staff director at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the Louis D. Brandeis Center, Inc. will focus on research, advocacy, and education on anti-Semitism and the law, and will also litigate…
Mark Yudof, president of the University of California, claims that two federal complaints against his university, alleging a hostile environment for Jewish students, are without merit. While expressing general support for the recent extension of the provisions of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to include Jewish students, Yudof does not believe that…
The U.S. Department of Education has rejected a civil rights complaint alleging unfair treatment of a Jewish student at Barnard College, which is affiliated with Columbia University. Federal authorities cited insufficient evidence as the reason for rejecting the claim, which stemmed from an Orthodox student’s claim that Barnard Professor Rachel McDermott warned her against taking…
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