California Watch

The Anti-Defamation League and several other organizations penned a letter to the U.S. secretary of education this week, urging him to use the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to protect Jewish students who are harassed on campus because of their religion or ethnic identity.

The March 16 letter references incidents at UC Irvine and UC Santa Cruz as evidence that the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights needs to focus on protecting Jewish students from anti-Semitism on campus.

The letter comes as UC Davis police are investigating anti-Semitic incidents at that campus. Just this week, a swastika was found carved into a bulletin board in a residence hall. Five other swastikas have been found at UC Davis in recent weeks.

The letter's authors take aim at the Office of Civil Rights' approach to enforcing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The law prohibits racial or ethnic discrimination at institutions that receive federal financial aid.

Specifically, the organizations want the education department's civil rights office to enforce the law to ensure that Jewish students are protected against anti-Semitic harassment "that holds Jewish students responsible for the acts of other Jews, or of Israel."

In a 2006 letter, the Department of Education's then-assistant secretary for the Office of Civil Rights, Stephanie Monroe, stated that her office has jurisdiction to investigate complaints about religious discrimination or anti-Semitic harassment only if the allegations also include discrimination over which the office has subject matter jurisdiction, such as race or national origin.

The Department of Education launched an investigation at UC Irvine in 2004 after several Jewish students filed complaints alleging harassment, "including reports of swastikas on campus and destruction of a Holocaust memorial display," the Orange County Register reported.

Investigators with the Office of Civil Rights visited the campus 11 times to interview students and staff and monitor the situation, but the office ultimately found it could not substantiate any claims that the campus "had ignored or downplayed anti-Semitic behavior," the Register reported.  

According to a story in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Office of Civil Rights did not view incidents in the complaint as national-origin discrimination. Investigators "acknowledged that much of the speech at the events was offensive to Jewish students, but said such speech was aimed at Israel's policies, and not Jewish students' national origin."

The authors of the March 16 letter argue that anti-Semitism is alive and well on college campuses, citing an incident at UC Santa Cruz in 2008, when officials found anti-Semitic graffiti on a wall that showed a Star of David between the World Trade Towers.