The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) has agreed to pay $6 million to settle a lawsuit brought by Jewish students and faculty members over the school’s handling of anti-Israel protests, including allowing protesters to ban Jews from a part of the campus known as a “Jew Exclusion Zone.”
The lawsuit was brought last year by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which accused UCLA of “aiding and abetting” an antisemitic culture, including “segregating Jewish students and preventing them from accessing the heart of campus.”
In a statement to Fox News Digital, Mary Osako, the UCLA vice chancellor for strategic communications, said the university has taken “concrete action to enhance campus safety by creating a new Office of Campus and Community Safety, instituting new policies to manage protests on campus and taking decisive action for conduct that violates our longstanding policies.”
Protesters gather outside an anti-Israel encampment on the campus of UCLA in Los Angeles May 1, 2024, in Los Angeles. (Keith Birmingham/MediaNews Group/Pasadena Star-News via Getty Images)
“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,” a federal court found at the time.
“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.”
Yitzchok Frankel, then a third-year law student at UCLA and father of four who said he faced antisemitic harassment for wearing a kippah, was forced to abandon his regular routes through campus because of the Jew Exclusion Zone.
“When antisemites were terrorizing Jews and excluding them from campus, UCLA chose to protect the thugs and help keep Jews out,” Frankel said in a statement provided to Fox News Digital by the Becket Fund. “That was shameful, and it is sad that my own school defended those actions for more than a year. But today’s court judgment brings justice back to our campus and ensures Jews will be safe and be treated equally once again.”
Mark Rienzi, president of Becket and an attorney for the students involved in the lawsuit, said campus administrators across the country bent their knees to antisemites as encampments spread across college campuses.
Graffiti at the Powell Library on the UCLA campus, where anti-Israel demonstrators erected an encampment April 29, 2024, in Los Angeles. (Getty Images)
“They are now on notice: Treating Jews like second-class citizens is wrong, illegal and very costly,” he said. “UCLA should be commended for accepting judgment against that misbehavior and setting the precedent that allowing mistreatment of Jews violates the Constitution and civil rights laws. Students across the country are safer for it.”
