UCLA to pay $6M to settle discrimination complaints including campus ‘Jew Exclusion Zone’

WASHINGTON — The University of California, Los Angeles, will pay more than $6 million to settle discrimination complaints brought by Jewish faculty and students against the school in 2024 — which included letting antisemitic protesters build a “Jew Exclusion Zone” to block them from campus.

The university agreed early Tuesday to enter into a consent judgment and fork over $6.13 million mostly to the plaintiffs who brought the case, apparently the largest private settlement of its kind.

More than $2 million will also be donated to organizations combating antisemitism on campus and in America’s second-largest city, including the campus Hillel chapter, the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish Federation Los Angeles, the Jewish Graduate Organization and the Orthodox Union.

If the settlement receives final approval from a federal judge, it will be in effect for the next 15 years.

The lawsuit was filed last year after the Board of Regents and Chancellor Gene Block admitted in congressional testimony that the Westwood school had taken no action against demonstrators who blockaded campus.

Asked during a House Education and Workforce Committee hearing in May 2024 about viral video footage showing keffiyeh-clad demonstrators stopping a Jewish undergrad from entering the campus, Block said that preventing students’ access to university grounds based on their race, religion or ethnicity “could be” an expellable offense.

Block also told “Squad” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) in the same hearing that “any part of campus is open to students, so blocking him was really inappropriate.”

“This encampment was against policy, this violated time, place, and manner,” he added.

The encampment was one of several that popped up at US universities and colleges in spring 2024 — and descended into a violent clash between anti-Israel demonstrators and law enforcement.

More than 200 were arrested after cops declared an unlawful assembly.

Yitzchok Frankel, a third-year law student at UCLA, was one of several plaintiffs represented by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty in the complaint, having faced antisemitic harassment for wearing his kippah.

A Jewish professor and other students also signed on, including Eden Shemuelian, who wasn’t able to attend law school orientation events because of the hatred on campus.

Security officers were stationed around the tent city, barred Jewish UCLA community members from entering without “an approved wristband” and allowed bike racks to be used to seal the demonstrators off from the rest of campus, noted Becket president Mark Rienzi.

“The plaintiffs brought this suit because they were victims of abhorrent and unimaginably bad antisemitism on a public university campus,” Rienzi told The Post. “That kind of bending the knee to the antisemites is impermissible … We should never see that again in America, and I hope we never will.”

Last August, a Los Angeles federal judge tore into UCLA’s Board of Regents for denying it had a responsibility to protect Jewish students, granting Frankel and other plaintiffs a preliminary injunction to maintain equal access to the school’s programs and activities.

“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,” wrote US District Judge Mark Scarsi in a scathing, 16-page order (italics original).

“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,” the judge added.

A subsequent report released by UCLA’s interim chancellor in October 2024 confirmed that antisemitism had been allowed to fester on campus.

Tuesday’s consent judgment echoes Scarsi’s order last year in stating: “For purposes of this order, all references to the exclusion of Jewish students, faculty, and/or staff shall include exclusion of Jewish students, faculty, and/or staff based on religious beliefs concerning the Jewish state of Israel.”

President Trump’s Department of Justice issued a statement of interest in the case this past March after UCLA moved to dismiss the complaint.

The US Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights also investigated discrimination complaints against UCLA last year, while the Anti-Defamation League gave the school a “D” letter grade for its handling of antisemitism on campus.

“Antisemitism has no place at UCLA and we remain steadfast in our commitment to eradicating it from our community,” said Mary Osako, UCLA Vice Chancellor for Strategic Communications, in a statement.

“We have reflected candidly on our progress and are working to expunge antisemitism from our community in its entirety,” Osako added. “We have 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.

“These efforts have been supplemented by our continuing work to eliminate antisemitism completely and definitively through our Initiative to Combat Antisemitism,” she also said. “This work, and today’s settlement, represent an important next step as we build upon our past efforts and stride toward fulfilling our promise of being an exemplary university.”

Hillel at UCLA Executive Director Daniel Gold called the settlement “an important and meaningful step forward in addressing the very serious challenges that Jewish students have faced at UCLA.”

“There is still much more work left to be done to build a safer, more welcoming, and more supportive campus that is free from antisemitic harassment and intimidation, and we look forward to working closely with the university and the UC system to counter antisemitism and bias at every turn,” Gold said.

“As the central address for Jewish life on campus, Hillel at UCLA works tirelessly every day to nurture our vibrant Jewish community. The settlement’s resources for Hillel and other Jewish organizations will support our efforts to make UCLA a great environment for Jewish Bruins, and all Bruins.”