The scenes of Jewish students experiencing anti-Semitism on campus are chilling. But colleges are also workplaces, and the anti-Semitism experienced by Jewish staff and faculty is no less frightening because of its intensity, their inability to avoid it and their greater and more specific fear of retaliation.
The agency charged with enforcing federal anti-discrimination laws in defense of university employees, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and similar state and local human rights commissions must rise to the occasion to protect Jewish employees and faculty on college campuses, and indeed all Jews. Workers in every work environment.
On college campuses, college employees, especially faculty, are exposed to more anti-Semitic abuse than students because they teach and maintain desks and work hours at specific places and times. Their social media presence is an important part of their work, not just a hobby or extension of their social life that can be discontinued. Their studies – publications and lectures – require them to put themselves out there for the world to see. They cannot “keep their heads down” as easily as Jewish students can (a repugnant solution to anti-Semitism in itself).
When university employees are victims of anti-Semitism, they, like all workers, must balance their demands for protection and fairness with the real threat of retaliation for their careers and livelihoods. The faculty and staff recruitment ecosystem is a small one. Most university employees lack tenure, and even tenure is a weak defense against ostracism in a profession in which rewards and punishments—faculty leadership appointments, publishing and conference opportunities, academic collaborations—are largely subjectively distributed.
Every campus where Jewish students have suffered frightening and insulting public expressions of anti-Semitism — the sermons, symbolism, and class action supporting Jewish genocide and glorifying Jews being raped, kidnapped, and murdered — is also a workplace where Jewish staff and faculty have suffered the same. And worse. Since the October 7 pogrom in Israel, I have counseled Jewish staff and faculty who have had their offices defaced, their classroom lectures disrupted, their online assessments manipulated, their once-popular scholarship attacked, their academic presentations deleted and their online spaces overrun by anti-Semitism.
One Jewish professor was called out by name and falsely “accused” of having served in the Israel Defense Forces in a rant given by another professor in the latter’s class; Shortly thereafter, the bulletin board outside her office was vandalized. Israeli staff and faculty working at American universities endure some of the worst instances of workplace anti-Semitism. Some have taken leave or left their positions immediately.
There is no workplace in America where such anti-Semitism should be tolerated, including when that workplace is a college campus. But normal standards for combating workplace discrimination are not enforced at colleges, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has not adopted the same widely accepted definition of anti-Semitism as is used when the victim is a student, not an employee. Simply put, the EEOC must join this fight immediately.
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is the primary federal law that protects Jewish college students from anti-Semitism and is administratively enforced by the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Education. OCR has opened investigations on more than a dozen college campuses in defense of the students. Federal law, in the form of a presidential executive order, requires OCR in evaluating anti-Semitism complaints to consider the definition of anti-Semitism established by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, a consortium of 35 national governments representing nearly the entire world’s Jewish population. The IHRA definition is widely adopted by the American Jewish community and hundreds of governments and nonprofit organizations in the United States and around the world, including in the US National Strategy to Combat Anti-Semitism recently released by the White House.
The IHRA definition focuses attention on some historically anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish control and manipulation of the media, the economy, and government; Holocaust denial; and the demonization, delegitimization, and application of double standards to the Jewish State of Israel (for example, “delegitimizing the State of Israel and thus depriving the Jewish people of their equal right to self-determination”).
But the next section of the Civil Rights Act — Title VII — is the main federal anti-discrimination law that protects Jewish employees based on their religious beliefs, their ethnicity, and whether those Jews are Israeli citizens or their national origin. Title VII is implemented by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the EEOC has not yet explicitly adopted the IHRA. Should – quickly.
However, Title VII is a powerful law that gives the EEOC important tools to protect Jewish employees on college campuses. For example, to its great credit, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has proposed guidance on enforcing Title VII’s prohibition on workplace harassment that recognizes, as many courts have already done, that certain symbols and expressions are highly shocking — highly offensive and incite hatred and violence – So much so that even a single instance of their use in the workplace can create an unlawfully discriminatory hostile environment. The EEOC’s guidelines give the noose, the swastika, and the “n” word as examples.
Isn’t the Hamas flag and the depiction of Hamas terrorists parachuting into southern Israel on their way to kill Jewish children the swastika of our times? The chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” is a call for the elimination of the Jewish state (and the Jews living there, if necessary) and the degradation of Jewish identity, freedom and equality, if not an outright call for their destruction. Genocide?
The EEOC needs to act. It needs to embrace all the tools at its disposal—including the IHRA and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s current understanding of the federal anti-discrimination law it is charged with enforcing—and protect Jewish employees, on campus and elsewhere, from the wave of anti-Semitism that is making their professional lives unbearable.
Colleges are workplaces too.
Rory Lankman is director of corporate initiatives and senior advisor at the Louis D. Brandeis Human Rights Under Law. He served as a Democratic councilman in New York City from 2014 to 2020 and as a member of the New York State Assembly from 2007 to 2012.
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As the prevalence of anti-Semitism continues to grow on college campuses, it is important to remember that these institutions are not solely centers for education and student life. Colleges and universities are also workplaces for faculty and staff, and the impact of anti-Semitic sentiment can have far-reaching effects within these professional environments. It is crucial to acknowledge and address the issue of anti-Semitism within the context of the workplace, and to consider how these attitudes and behaviors can create a hostile and discriminatory environment for employees of Jewish faith.