dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

Cal State University System Caves on Anti-Semitism Lawsuit

In Spring 2016, San Francisco State University’s Hillel invited Jerusalem mayor Nir Barkat to speak on campus. All hell broke loose.

According to Hillel student president Jake Mandel, Barkat’s speech was disrupted and eventually shut down by, as recounted by Amanda Berman, the woman who would eventually lead the effort to fight back, “a mob of near-violent activists screaming antisemitic epithets through megaphones.”

Mandel described to Berman “a decades-long history of pervasive antisemitism at SFSU, a campus where Jewish students hide their Jewish stars and yarmulkes and where the quad is regularly plastered with chalkings saying ‘Fuck Zionists,’ a campus where antisemitism has been institutionalized and perpetuated from both the top down, at the highest levels of the administration, and the bottom up.”

The complicated case featured many twists and turns. The San Francisco Superior Court judge, Richard B. Ulmer, Jr., earned praise as “a former journalist, a real ‘sunlight’ guy.” But some involved in the case expressed exasperation with the Federal judge, Obama appointee William Orrick. One lawyer on the plaintiffs’ side told the Globe, “Judge Orrick screwed us by ignoring binding 9th circuit precedent. We had an appeal going up to the 9th circuit next month, but the settlement includes a dismissal of that appeal as well.” Orrick, who had been a prolific bundler for Obama before being appointed by him, was also faulted for “just ignor[ing] clear standards and 9th circuit precedent on the amended complaint. [He] didn’t really seem to get what was going on, had his own views of what was and wasn’t actionable under the First Amendment. He had no problem giving into the heckler’s veto and assigning events for Jews to shitty and expensive peripheral locations based on concerns about protest activity.”

https://californiaglobe.com/legal/cal-state-system-caves-on-anti-semitism-lawsuit/

https://www.thelawfareproject.org/releases/2019/3/20/sfsu-settlement