It is – or should be – incontrovertible that Jewish education is one of the essential tools for creating Jews who will be knowledgeable about their heritage, proud to belong to their ancient/modern people, secure and joyful in expressing their belonging, and unwavering in standing with the Jewish people.
Such Jews – allied with all peoples who care for and are willing to protect democracy and law-based freedoms – are required to take up the fight against the forces that are intent on negating Jews and the State of Israel. This is the true light in which the current, hateful campaign against Israel being waged by the hard-core anti-Semites and their unwitting, uninformed confederates must be seen. The pro-Hamas crowd has a multiple overlapping target: The State of Israel, Jews, America and democratic rule.
It is in this context that a report in JNS on August 13 of an interim decision by a judge in California adjudicating upon a lawsuit by three aggrieved Jewish students against UCLA, is like a bolt of electricity restoring the recent power outages in moral behaviour by established figures and institutions throughout the western world. GAJE publishes excerpts from the report because of its exceptional and very important nature.
The facts of the UCLA case will sound familiar.
Pro-Hamas demonstrators sent up an encampment on the campus and prevented Jews and other supporters of Israel from having access to parts of the campus which should have been accessible to all students. The university sought an injunction to prevent the lawsuit from proceeding.
Judge Mark Scarsi, of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, rejected the university’s argument. He began his judgment with the following statement of moral astonishment.
“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.”
“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,” Scarsi continued. “UCLA does not dispute this. Instead, UCLA claims that it has no responsibility to protect the religious freedom of its Jewish students because the exclusion was engineered by third-party protesters.”
Under principles of the Constitution, the University of California, Los Angeles — a public school — “may not allow services to some students when UCLA knows that other students are excluded on religious grounds, regardless of who engineered the exclusion,” the judge continued.
Judge Scarsi issued a preliminary injunction that requires UCLA to stop providing “ordinarily available programs, activities and campus areas” to the entire student body if they become unavailable to certain Jewish students. “How best to make any unavailable programs, activities and campus areas available again is left to UCLA’s discretion,” he wrote.
The judge wrote that because of the encampments, Jewish students—including the three plaintiffs—felt that they had to “disavow” their religious beliefs to move freely on campus and that they “were excluded based of their genuinely held religious beliefs,” in support of the Jewish state, per the judge’s order. (Our emphasis)
The comparison begs to be made with the decision in the U of T encampment case.
The judge decided that the encampment had to be dismantled on the basis of the narrow principles of property law and trespass. In a lengthy, troubling aside however, relying upon questionable authorities, he determined that the slogans, phrases and language of intimidation emanating from the encampment participants aimed primarily at supporters of Israel and other passersby were not necessarily antisemitic. He wrote: “I do not have to determine how these phrases and symbols are being used. I review this history and analysis merely to point out that the automatic conclusion that those phrases are antisemitic is not justified; especially not on an interlocutory injunction.” (Our emphasis)
This statement by the judge in the U of T case is simply unreconcilable with reality and truth.
What we felt then about the encampments and feel still today was succinctly summarized by Mark Rienzi, a lawyer representing the Jewish students in the UCLA case. “Shame on UCLA for letting antisemitic thugs terrorize Jews on campus. Today’s ruling says that UCLA’s policy of helping antisemitic activists target Jews is not just morally wrong but a gross constitutional violation. UCLA should stop fighting the Constitution and start protecting Jews on campus.”
With university resuming in two weeks, it is incumbent upon the community to prepare for what will surely be a resumption of vile anti-Israel and anti-Jewish activities. In age-appropriate ways, schools must prepare their students. Parents must prepare their children, to know and to celebrate their Jewishness.
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The appeal by the Government of Ontario of Judge Eugenia Papageorgiou’s refusal last summer to throw out GAJE’s application for fairness in educational funding, was heard in early June by a panel of three judges. The court reserved its decision.
GAJE will publish the court’s decision as soon as it is known to us.
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If you wish to contribute to GAJE’s lawsuit for fairness in educational funding, please click here.
For further information, please contact Israel Mida at: imida1818@gmail.com
Charitable receipts for donations for income tax purposes will be issued by Mizrachi Canada. Your donations will be used for the sole purpose of underwriting the costs of the lawsuit.
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Shabbat shalom
Am Yisrael Chai
Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education (GAJE)
August 16, 2024
Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education 