The University of California, Berkeley said bans on Zionists “can violate university rules,” and the bylaws of any student groups barring their inclusion must be rescinded, as part of a new settlement agreement in an antisemitism lawsuit.
The university further agreed to pay $1 million to the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, a legal group that sued the school on behalf of Jewish students. The Brandeis Center shared the agreement on Thursday.
The university’s official new policy, the agreement reads, would be that “bans on Zionists have historically been used by some individuals and institutions as a pretext for excluding Jews and that such pretextual, exclusionary bans can violate university rules.” It was similar to a policy enacted at New York University in 2024 that also said “Zionist” could function as a “code word,” potentially leading to violations of the school’s harassment policies.
“This is, I think, a major milestone,” Paul Eckles, senior litigation counsel at the Brandeis Center, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Eckles said a major goal of the group was “a recognition that anti-Zionism can, and really was, being used as a pretext for discrimination against Jews.”
The Berkeley case concerns incidents that date back to 2022: of law school student groups passing bylaws pledging not to invite “Zionist” speakers to campus.
The case had been the subject of considerable debate, with the Brandeis Center’s founder and chair Kenneth Marcus - a Berkeley Law alum - claiming that the students had created “Jew-free zones.” It was also the subject of a Biden-era Education Department civil rights investigation. The Brandeis Center sued in 2023, after the Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
“This settlement reflects UC Berkeley’s long-standing values and objectives when it comes to combatting abhorrent antisemitic expression, harassment, and discrimination when it occurs on the Berkeley campus,” a spokesperson for the school said in a statement. The statement pointed to the school’s rising grade on the Anti-Defamation League’s campus antisemitism report card.
UC Berkeley dean's position 'has not wavered'
The law school’s Jewish dean, Erwin Chemerinsky, told students in an email on Thursday that student groups could continue to have viewpoint-based policies regarding whom they invited, so long as those policies were not included in the group’s bylaws.
“My position since this issue emerged has not wavered,” he wrote. “I believe that student organizations have the First Amendment right to choose speakers based on their views, but I believe that these Bylaws are inconsistent with the Law School’s commitment to be a place where all ideas and views can be expressed.”
Chemerinsky has been critical both of the student groups’ actions against “Zionists” and of the Trump administration’s strong-arm approach to antisemitism on campuses such as Berkeley’s, where an Israeli speaker was also disrupted by student protesters in 2024. But the university’s own Jewish faculty have said the school has improved its response to antisemitism since then.