FAFAA CALLS OUT A CRISIS OF ANTISEMITISM

AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS URBANA-CHAMPAIGN

Reprinted from The News Gazette

Saturday July 25, 2026, page A10

Antisemitism on the UIUC campus has gotten much worse over the last three years. The UI administration has done little or nothing to address the problem. We represent a voluntary UI faculty membership group with nearly 100 members at Chicago and Champaign— Faculty For Academic Freedom and Against Antisemitism (FAFAA)—that urges action now.

A HISTORY OF NEGOTIATION DELAYING TACTICS WHILE ANTISEMITISM SURGES

Negotiations over the increasing crisis of antisemitism at the University of Illinois Urbana- Champaign began with a March 2020 letter from the law firm Arnold & Porter listing antisemitic incidents reported by the Jewish United Fund of Chicago, Hillel International, and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law. The extended negotiations concluded in September 2024 with agreements with the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) and the NGOs represented by A&P. Since then, meaningful compliance with the agreements has been largely nonexistent. An April 1, 2026, letter from a law firm representing JUF, Hillel, and the Brandeis Center details that history of noncompliance. The redacted copy we obtained through a FOIA request is available here: https://937d4603-4a81-4006-9048- dfa7e6ece863.usrfiles.com/ugd/937d46_c9800d0baa0742cda32c3d2f09ff7fac.pdf.

It is now two years further in this process and, meanwhile, the problem of antisemitism at UIUC still has not been resolved. Antisemitism had its most dramatic manifestation in the Spring 2024 anti-Zionist campus demonstrations (https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/student-protests- pro-palestinian-encampments/) and encampments here, mirroring those across the country. The UIUC demonstrations were facilitated by Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP), established at UIUC at the outset of 2024 and highly organized across many American campuses. Members of FJP introduced anti-Zionist lessons into their scheduled classes in courses having nothing to do with the Middle East, with instruction often divorced from facts, and with professors encouraging their students to support the 2024 campus occupation of the central quad, including through violent means, indeed with some professors emailing that they would be away from their professorial duties so as to participate on the quad.

In 2024, FJP posted a memo that mocked “democratic values” and urged that members refuse to serve on any university committee that includes a Zionist faculty member. FJP has continued its political action campaign through today, including an effort to gain substantial power over faculty governance. It should be noted that professors do mandatory ethnics training in which several scenarios explicitly describe inappropriate political action.

Many Jewish students, staff, and faculty at UIUC now face an increasingly hostile environment at work. Some academic programs have formally adopted anti-Zionist mission statements, which deny the right of the Jewish people to self-determination and self-defense, without administration reaction. Untenured faculty now face the real possibility they will lose their positions if they disclose personal support for the world’s only Jewish state. FAFAA is on record regarding a Zionist faculty member denied tenure by review committees compromised by the inclusion of overtly anti-Zionist faculty: https://www.fafaa.net/benjamin-bross. The UIUC Administration has ignored its own rules for managing apparent conflicts of interest by allowing publicly declared anti-Zionist faculty to serve on tenure review or on the promotion committees of public pro- Israel supporters.

WEAK UIUC RESPONSES

While the U.S. Constitution prohibits government sanctions against almost all acts of individual speech, the First Amendment does not protect harassment and intimidation or actions that violate regulations of a State or a university concerning time, place, and manner of expression. The First Amendment does not bar university administrations from condemning the cumulative effect of hate speech that creates hostile environments. The University is free to engage in counter-speech, as many peer universities have done when confronted with crowds calling to “globalize the intifada” or erase the Jewish state “from the river to the sea.” UIUC misapplies the First Amendment to justify its inaction.

UIUC consistently evaluates each antisemitic statement or action in terms of whether it alone creates a hostile environment according to the university’s or office’s criteria. But hostile environments overall are most often created by an accumulation of statements and actions. UIUC’s Title VI office should use a “totality of circumstances” standard, which would identify patterns that create hostile environments – patterns that the Jewish members of the UIUC community have witnessed and have identified to the Administration.

ANTISEMITISM AWARENESS TRAINING

Six years after the original 2020 letter of complaint referenced above, UIUC is about to distribute video modules offering basic antisemitism awareness training to students and faculty. Unlike the University sexual harassment and ethical conduct training videos which are mandatory viewing, the antisemitism training is optional. Of course, we recognize that viewing compliance with all mandatory training modules can be perfunctory so as to fulfil the requirement without actually

processing the information communicated. The training videos need to be supplemented with public events offering further educational opportunities.

We are concerned that neither the affected Jewish community nor FAFAA had the opportunity to review any proposed text for training against antisemitism. FAFAA leaders were able to get unofficial access to the actual videos in July 2026. The videos identify rightwing antisemitism and its “great replacement theory” as major problems but fail to address the leftwing antisemitism that is by far the more powerful force on campus.

The videos insist on pairing antisemitism with Islamophobia, a balancing act that never occurs in discussions of racism targeting non-Jewish minorities. Like anti-Black racism, antisemitism merits separate treatment and is a far graver and more frequent issue on the UIUC campus than is Islamophobia or abuses of other minorities.

The training videos claim antisemitism is hard to define, but in fact most concise definitions of antisemitism are very similar and roughly interchangeable. The training videos also incorrectly claim that Zionism is subject to many different interpretations, when in reality all mainstream Jewish organizations agree that it is an integral part of Judaism that advocates for Jewish sovereignty in its ancestral homeland of the Land of Israel after centuries of expulsion from the land, persecution, and massacres. There are disputes over what qualifies as antisemitic. It is not de facto antisemitic to criticize Israeli government policies. Language demanding the elimination of the world’s only Jewish state, thereby denying the right of the Jewish people to self- determination is antisemitic. Students who watch the videos earnestly and in good faith may have no idea that common signs on university campuses such as “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free,” “Globalize the Intifada,” “Clean the World of Jews,” “Zionists are not welcome here,” or “Israel is committing genocide” are widely recognized as having antisemitic impact. Mainstream Jewish organizations agree. But that does not mean people who proclaim these slogans, who are often uninformed, are themselves antisemitic. Furthermore, support for Hamas as a Palestinian “resistance” movement is both antisemitic and immoral in a campus culture where the atrocities of October 7 are ignored, justified, or even denied.

SAMPLE INCIDENTS

The UIUC campus has a disturbing record of not addressing what reasonably could be regarded as obvious antisemitic incidents. The University defended its Title VI office’s finding that writing “Das Reich” in front of Alpha Epsilon Phi, a Jewish sorority, did not contribute to a hostile environment for Jews, even though this slogan is meant to equate Jews with their Nazi tormentors. The administration decided that throwing bricks through the windows of two Jewish fraternities did not merit a campus massmail condemning the antisemitic intimidation, despite massmails for other incidents of harassment against other minorities. No other minority on the

diverse UIUC campus has been subjected to the degree of verbal, physical and psychological hatred as has the Jewish university community. The double standard is glaring.

A tenured faculty member who repeatedly used the campus email system to urge students and colleagues to support the Spring 2024 anti-Zionist encampment on the quad was never criticized by the Administration. A faculty member who repeatedly used his engineering classroom to proclaim his anti-Zionist political views was allowed to continue the practice in violation of national standards and despite complaints raised to the Administration.

On May 6, 2025, the documentary film Saturday October 7 was shown on campus. This heartbreaking film includes the Palestinian terrorists’ own footage captured from their own GoPro cameras showing them firing semi-automatic weapons in kibbutzim and massacring hiding civilians and pets. The documentary includes cell phone footage bravely shot by kibbutz and Nova Festival attendees while under attack from the terrorists. More than a dozen masked, hooting University students repeatedly interrupted the showing. Despite video evidence submitted by members of the audience to the University, their complaints about those students were dismissed.

In 2025 posters were put up on (and off) campus in which the University of Illinois Chabad Rabbi was personally targeted with accusations of supporting war crimes and other antisemitic language. The university took no punitive action. The university similarly took no action to punish a student who sent a threatening letter to the campus Hillel executive director.

CONCLUSIONS

Most of our senior administrators interact cordially with concerned Jewish members of the campus community but then take no action. When they do condemn antisemitism, they routinely do so only while also making sure to condemn “hatreds of all kinds” and Islamophobia, thus attempting to dilute the Jewish experience which far outnumbers and outweighs other incidents on campus in frequency and intensity today. It seems that the University will do nothing to correct its permissive record unless the Federal government steps in. FAFAA hopes that these issues of campus antisemitism can be resolved internally. FAFAA seeks fairness so that the Jewish and Zionist members of the community who are under constant attack receive due Administrative action to generate a truly safe and inclusive campus.

We do not seek to punish our colleagues who are exercising their rights to free speech, however misguided or hateful they may be. We only ask that the University condemn them publicly when their speech veers into Jew-hatred and denies or distorts historical facts about Israel and Jewish history, particularly in the classroom. We want the Administration to act as quickly and clearly in defense of the Jewish and Zionist minority on campus as it does for the many other minority groups when incidents occur. We should be treated like all other American minorities on this

university campus: free to express our views, free from harassment, and free from career retribution.

FROM THE FAFAA EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE ON BEHALF OF OUR MEMBERS. SEE OUR WEBSITE FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT OUR STRUCTURE AND ACTIVITIES: https://www.fafaa.net.

PAID FOR BY FAFAA