Reposted by Ben Eidelson
🧵My new column for @justiaverdict.bsky.social praises the US Civil Rights Comm'n report on campus antisemitism for calling out illegal & unhelpful Trump admin actions. I also rebut a claim that the Comm'n should have endorsed a definition of antisemitism, following up on my earlier testimony. /1
verdict.justia.com
The U.S. Civil Rights Commission Tackles Campus Antisemitism with Justified Nuance
Cornell Law professor Michael C. Dorf discusses the U.S. Civil Rights Commission’s final report on the federal response to campus antisemitism, examining both its bipartisan findings and the separate....
![Title VI’s restriction to ancestry-based harassment also means that the Government’s allegations about the intensity of anti-Israel or “anti-Zionist” sentiment on campus are mostly beside
the point. E.g., AC ¶¶ 9, 19–21, 51, 54, 56, 68, 79, 97. Drawing on the same Harvard report, for
example, the Government stresses that many Jewish survey respondents “indicated they had experienced some form of discrimination, stereotyping, or negative bias on campus due to their views
on current events.” Id. ¶ 85 (emphasis added). Those experiences certainly matter for a university
that aims to foster respectful engagement amid profound disagreements. But under Stand With Us,
the Government must allege facts suggesting that the hostility felt by these students was not simply
“due to their views on current events”—even if those views were despised by many of their peers—
but rather owed to their Jewish or Israeli birth. Assuming arguendo that many Harvard students
reject the legitimacy of a specifically Jewish state in the historic Land of Israel—and that many of
those anti-Zionist students exhibited intolerance toward everyone who disagreed with them—those
hostile students still would not have engaged in discrimination covered by Title VI. See, e.g., Kestenbaum v. President & Fellows of Harvard College, 743 F. Supp. 3d 297, 311 (D. Mass. 2024)
(“[V]iewpoint discrimination . . . is not actionable under Title VI.”).](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:tb2bwzxom5qv4542ru3zqcgu/bafkreie2f337gnqfn3vjul6n2vijue3zjnnluhdtg2xu4wuncv5ejie7iq)
