By Aldgra Fredly
Contributing Writer
A federal judge on Tuesday ordered UCLA to stop preventing Jewish students from traversing the campus amid pro-Palestinian protests.
The ruling was made after three Jewish students sued UCLA in June for allowing protesters to barricade the center of the campus and establish an encampment that obstructed passage to campus facilities.
The plaintiffs say they were blocked from certain areas of campus as “antisemitic activists” established checkpoints near their encampment, allowing only those who condemned Israel to pass through.
U.S. District Judge Mark C. Scarsi issued a preliminary injunction on Tuesday, prohibiting UCLA from providing programs and access to buildings if Jewish students were blocked.
In his 16-page ruling, Scarsi described the situation as “unimaginable” and “so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom.”
“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,” he stated.
Scarsi wrote that UCLA “does not dispute this” and that the university claims that it had “no responsibility to protect the religious freedom of its Jewish students because the exclusion was engineered by third-party protesters.”
“But under constitutional principles, UCLA may not allow services to some students when UCLA knows that other students are excluded on religious grounds, regardless of who engineered the exclusion,” he stated.
The judge ordered UCLA to instruct its student affairs and campus security teams by Thursday that “they are not to aid or participate in any obstruction of access for Jewish students to ordinarily available programs, activities and campus areas.”
This preliminary injunction marked the first time a court has ruled against a university for “allowing an antisemitic encampment,” according to Becket Law, which represents the students.
Becket Law President Mark Rienzi called on UCLA to start protecting the rights of its Jewish students.
“Shame on UCLA for letting antisemitic thugs terrorize Jews on campus,” Rienzi said in a statement. “Today’s ruling says that UCLA’s policy of helping antisemitic activists target Jews is not just morally wrong but a gross constitutional violation.”
Yitzchok Frankel, a law student at UCLA and one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, welcomed the judge’s decision.
“No student should ever have to fear being blocked from their campus because they are Jewish,” Frankel stated. “I am grateful that the court has ordered UCLA to put a stop to this shameful anti-Jewish conduct.”
UCLA has been among the many campuses in the United States where demonstrators set up encampments to protest the war in Gaza, which was Israel’s response to the Hamas terror attack on Oct. 7, 2023, that left about 1,200 people dead and more than 250 kidnapped.
Jewish students and faculty members at those schools have said that the protests often devolved into hateful, antisemitic rhetoric and even violence, making them feel unwelcome and unsafe.
Bill Pan contributed to this report.
