Rutgers University Settles Antisemitism Complaint

Rutgers University has settled a civil rights complaint in which a student accused school officials of failing to respond adequately to several antisemitic incidents, the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced on Thursday.

According to the agency, the incidents it investigated included calling for violence against an Israeli student — going as far as posting their address on social media — graffitiing a Jewish student’s door with a swastika and desecrating a mezuzah that was affixed to it, and a series of threats made against the predominantly Jewish Alpha Epsilon Pi (AEPi) fraternity.

“OCR identified Title VI compliance concerns regarding both different treatment of students based on their shared ancestry as well as the university’s response to reports of alleged harassment and possible hostile environments for students based on students’ national origin,” OCR said in a statement. “The evidence the university has produced during OCR’s investigation so far reflects that the university likely operated a hostile environment … without redress as required under [Title VI of the US Civil Rights Act] and that the university subjected some students to discriminatory different treatment.”

Rutgers University has been a hotbed of campus antisemitism, as previously reported by The Algemeiner.

In the past few years, the school’s AEPi fraternity house has been vandalized at least three times. In one incident, in April 2022, on the last day of the Jewish holiday of Passover, a caravan of participants from a Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) rally drove there, shouting antisemitic slurs and spitting in the direction of fraternity members. Four days later, before Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel, the house was egged during a 24-hour reading of the names of Holocaust victims.

SJP has been a wellspring of antisemitic rhetoric at Rutgers. It was one of dozens of SJP chapters that cheered Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel, an attack that resulted in hundreds of civilian deaths and numerous rapes of Israeli women. As video footage of the terrorist group’s atrocities circled the web, Rutgers SJP shared on its Instagram pages memes that said “Glory to resistance” and “the clock started running when the majority of the Palestinian population was expelled from their land by Zionists during the Nakba.” It added, “You are watching an occupied people rise up against an apartheid nuclear power that has been occupying them and making their life unlivable since 1948.”

The milieu of extremism at the school resulted in at least one death threat against the life of a Jewish student since last Oct. 7. In November 2023, a local news outlet reported, freshman Matthew Skorny, 19, called for the murder of a fraternity member he identified as an Israeli, saying on the popular social media forum YikYak, “To all the pro-Palestinian ralliers [sic] … Go kill him.”

In March, the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce launched an investigation of Rutgers’ handling of antisemitism, responding to complaints that it has, for years, allowed an open season of hate against Jewish students. In notifying school officials of the probe, committee chairwoman Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) denounced the university for having stood out “for the intensity and pervasiveness of antisemitism on its campuses.”

By settling with OCR, Rutgers University “committed” itself to forging a better future, the agency’s assistant secretary Catherine E. Lhamon said in a statement. The terms of the agreement include training employees to handle complaints of antisemitism, issuing a non-discrimination statement, and conducting a “climate survey” in which students report their opinions on discrimination at the school and the administration’s handling of it.

“Rutgers University has committed to resolution terms that will address serious Title VI noncompliance indicated in their records regarding different treatment of students based on stereotypes about the countries students and their families come from as well as unredressed harassment of students and faculty that appear to have created a hostile environment,” Lhamon continued. “OCR looks forward to the change that will come for Rutgers University as a result of this agreement and to ongoing work with the university to ensure its compliance.”

Other universities have recently settled civil rights complaints alleging antisemitism. Temple University in Philadelphia did so in December, agreeing to address what OCR described as several reports of discrimination and harassment, including “incidents of antisemitic, anti-Muslim, and anti-Palestinian conduct.”

As part of the resolution of the case, Temple University agreed, for example, to enact “remedial” policies for past, inadequately managed investigations of discrimination and to apprise OCR of every discrimination complaint it receives until the conclusion of the 2025-2026 academic year. The university will also conduct a “climate” survey to measure students’ opinions on the severity of discrimination on campus, the results of which will be used to “create an action plan” which OCR did not define but insisted on its being “subject to OCR approval.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

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