More Than 1,000% Rise in Anti-Zionist Activities by University of California Faculty Post-10/7 Revealed in AMCHA Initiative Study

A new report published by the AMCHA Initiative revealed there has been a more than 1,000% surge in anti-Zionist activities by University of California faculty members and graduate students in the aftermath of the October 7th Hamas massacre in Israel and detailed how this has fueled rising campus antisemitism.

Read the full study “Academic Agitators: The Role of Anti-Zionist Faculty Activism in Escalating Antisemitism at the University of California After October 7, 2023” HERE.

Incidents highlighted in the report include:

• A UC Irvine professor cancelled classes so that students could participate in anti-Israel “civil disobedience, boycotts… and protests.”
• A UC Berkeley graduate student teacher offered extra credit to students who attended a walkout “against the settler-colonial occupation of Gaza” or emailed their “local California representative” in support of Palestine.
• UC Santa Cruz’s Critical Race and Ethnic Studies used its departmental website to justify Hamas’ October 7th massacre, rape, torture and kidnapping of Israeli civilians, falsely claiming that Israel was wholly to blame because of “75 years of settler colonial displacement.”
• The UC Berkeley Black Studies Graduate Students called for a boycott of the school’s study abroad programs in Israel, and called for the murder of Israeli Jews, declaring that “the Zionist Israeli state must end.”

“The explosion of anti-Zionist faculty activism since October 7, 2023, with a significant part of it linked to a nationally-coordinated campaign to rid U.S. campuses of Zionism and Zionists, is key to understanding why UC campuses are rapidly devolving into places where Jewish students are not only unwelcome, they are threatened, verbally and physically abused, and actively excluded from campus life,” the report noted.

“Although the University of California has policies prohibiting faculty and graduate students from using their academic positions and university resources to engage in political indoctrination and activism, campus administrators are simply not enforcing these regulations,” it added. “Moreover, after years of not enforcing these policies, anti-Zionist faculty are emboldened to continue peddling their hatred of the Jewish state and efforts to destroy it in their classrooms, conference halls, departmental websites and other educational spaces, knowing they can do so with impunity.”

The report concluded, “Given the dire consequences of allowing faculty to substitute anti-Zionist activism for education, we recommend that the UC Regents establish robust enforcement procedures for ensuring that faculty are prohibited from using their University positions and resources to engage in political indoctrination and activism. These procedures must include administrative accountability, for example, obligating each chancellor to provide an annual report with comprehensive documentation of faculty and graduate instructors who violate relevant policies and how these infractions are handled by campus administrators. Unless and until such robust enforcement procedures are put in place, University of California campuses will not be safe for their Jewish members.”

For more information about the AMCHA Initiative, please visit: amchainitiative.org