Penn Students' Lawsuit Shows Campus Antisemitism Uproar Is A Manufactured Crisis

Vast majority of “incidents” are merely expressions of unwelcome political views

Pro-Palestinian protesters at the University of Pennsylvania (Ethan Young/The Daily Pennsylvanian)

Saturday’s resignation of University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill came after months of controversy — and a viral-video grilling of Magill in a congressional hearing — over allegations the school has become a hotbed of antisemitism.

While those allegations have been given widespread credence, a Stark Realities analysis of dozens of claimed antisemitic incidents at Penn finds that, apart from a small handful of cases, the great majority are merely instances in which Penn students, professors and guest speakers engage in political expression that proponents of the State of Israel strongly disagree with.

Conveniently, a catalogue of supposed examples of anti-Jew bigotry at Penn is laid out in a federal lawsuit filed last week against the school by two Jewish students who allege it “has transformed itself into an incubation lab for virulent anti-Jewish hatred, harassment, and discrimination.” In the suit, dual American-Israeli citizen Eyal Yakoby and American Jordan Davis seek “substantial damages in an amount to be determined at trial.”

For those wanting to look beyond what’s been said about Penn by grandstanding politicians, click-seeking news outlets and sensationalist social media posters, the 84-page complaint is a valuable resource. Unlike the sloppy court of public opinion, real courts demand a detailed presentation of specific allegations.

However, scrutiny of the Penn complaint — prepared by Philadelphia lawyer and Penn law grad Eric Shore and New York City law firm Kasowitz Benson Torres — confirms the campaign against the Philadelphia school is just the latest component a broader, long-running drive to censor political expression that’s critical of the State of Israel and sympathetic to Palestinians.

In support of that drive, conservatives who’d previously and rightfully bashed campus viewpoint censorship and crackdowns on flexibly-defined “hate speech” are among the most vocal advocates of installing a new censorship regime to keep students “safe” from anti-Israel rhetoric.

Political Views Wrongly Labelled as Antisemitic

Objective readers of the complaint will quickly note a number of red flags, starting with strident, vitriolic language referring to “rabidly antisemitic professors” and “Jew-hating” speakers who “spew antisemitic venom” by “bellowing into bullhorns to express their hatred for Israel.”

However, the complaint’s foremost flaw is its repeated assumption that various political concepts, views and slogans promoted by critics of Israel are inherently antisemitic or genocidal. This kind of attack isn’t unique to the Penn complaint; it’s constantly used by Israel’s advocates to silence the opposition. Among the forbidden ideas:

• Anti-Zionism. A philosophy embraced by many Jews, anti-Zionism opposes the idea of a Jewish nation-state. Opposing the concept of such a Jewish state doesn’t automatically make someone a bigot any more than opposing a white state or a Christian state does. The Chavurah, a progressive Jewish group at Penn, recently rejected this charge, saying that “continual conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-semitism undermines any chance for productive dialogue at Penn concerning Israel.”

• Questioning Israel’s “right to exist.” No country has a right to exist. Countries are mere political arrangements. There’s nothing inherently bigoted about campaigning for a different political order between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The State of Israel has no more “right to exist” than did the Soviet Union or Czechoslovakia, or does North Korea or the United States.

• “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” As I wrote last month, “while any slogan will mean different things to different people, this one has been used for decades by Palestinians seeking the same liberties as Israeli Jews throughout the entire territory ruled by the State of Israel.” For most, it’s a call for the State of Israel to be replaced by a new governing arrangement. While some may be reasonably concerned about how that would play out, the idea isn’t inherently genocidal or antisemitic.

• The Palestinian “right of return.” This concept argues that Palestinians displaced by the 1948 creation of Israel should be allowed to return to their homes. It isn’t inherently embedded with bigotry, as the complaint suggests. Indeed, its advocates would argue the concept is a counter to Israeli ethnocentrism.

• “Singling out” Israel for criticism. This preposterous standard, routinely advanced by Zionists, suggests that it’s antisemitic to criticize policies of the Israeli government if you don’t simultaneously criticize other governments guilty of the same sins.

• Calling Israel an “apartheid state.” A great many Jews say Israel satisfies the definition of apartheid — for starters, Hebrew University Holocaust professor Amos Goldberg, former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo and Israeli human rights group B’Tselem.

• Accusing Israel of genocide. While the suit is filled with accusations of genocidal intent on the part of pro-Palestinian activists, the plaintiffs would have us assume it’s antisemitic to argue that Israel’s bombardment of civilian areas in Gaza and displacement of Palestinians amounts to genocide.

• Urging boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel. In another display of double-standards, Israel’s backers cheer on economic warfare against Iran, but the BDS movement — which aims to achieve better treatment of Palestinians by using similar economic tactics — is supposedly a bigoted enterprise.

The most controversial term, “intifada,” has been chanted by pro-Palestinian protesters at Penn and around the world. Roughly translating to English as “shaking off,” intifada refers to an uprising against Israeli control of the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinians have engaged in two previous intifadas. While the tactics included suicide bombings targeting civilians, Palestinians also engaged in peaceful protests, rioting, and attacks on Israeli government targets ranging from mere stone-throwing to deadly rocket attacks.

“It is not a term against Jews, it is a term against the Israeli government,” said Glenn Greenwald last week on his show, System Update. “Just like you’re allowed to say ‘I think we should bomb Iran’ or go to war in Iraq or ‘flatten Gaza,’ people are allowed to say, allowed to opine...in the United States of America, that the repression by the Israeli government has become sufficiently severe that an uprising or even violence against the State of Israel is warranted.”

“Intifida” played a key role in last week’s Capitol Hill grilling of then-Penn president Magill, Harvard president Claudine Gay and MIT president Sally Kornbluth by New York Rep. Elise Stefanik. Video of the interrogation went viral, and precipitated the resignation of not only Penn’s Magill but also the school’s chairman of the board of trustees.

This interaction, which mirrors Stefanik’s questioning of all three presidents, shows how she used an assumption of genocidal intent by anyone chanting “intifada” to reinforce the mythology that calls for Jewish genocide are commonplace at Penn, Harvard and MIT:

Congresswoman Stefanik: Dr. Kornbluth, at MIT, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate MIT’s code of conduct or rules regarding bullying and harassment? Yes or no?  

President Kornbluth: If targeted at individuals not making public statements. 

Congresswoman Stefanik: Yes or no, calling for the genocide of Jews does not constitute bullying and harassment? 

President Kornbluth: I have not heard calling for the genocide for Jews on our campus.

Congresswoman Stefanik: But you've heard chants for Intifada. 

From intifada to anti-Zionism and BDS, all are political concepts that should be debated on their merits, not banned by those who are discomforted by them — and where better for such debates than college campuses?

It’s only by first wrongly defining this assortment of Israel-critical views as inherently antisemitic that one can declare antisemitism is rampant at the University of Pennsylvania or anywhere else in American academia.

Ironically, the lawsuit’s assumption that all Jews at Penn should be assumed to embrace Zionist political ideology or cherish the State of Israel and therefore be victimized by contrary views is itself a display of prejudice.

Quoting directly from the complaint, here are just several of countless supposed examples of antisemitic activity at Penn that are merely expressions of debatable political opinions:

• “The protesters chanted false and genocidal antisemitic slogans, such as ‘there is only one solution: intifada revolution,’ ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,’ ‘intifada intifada,’ and ‘Israel, Israel, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide’.”

• “Penn’s student-run newspaper, ran an article not only accusing Israel of ‘institutionalized racism and apartheid,’ but vilifying the Penn Jewish community as well, claiming that for many Jewish students, ‘the presentation of facts regarding oppression and state-sponsored violence can be hard to swallow’.”

• “Israeli Apartheid Week is an annual program organized by anti-Israel activists in cities across the globe, focused on support for the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement (“BDS”) and vociferous slander of Israel as a ‘racist,’ ‘apartheid’ state.”

• “[Students for Justice In Palestine]’s president emphasized that ‘[w]e make it very clear that we’re anti-Zionism, which is the political ideology of an ethnocentric…State of Israel’.”

• [In 2018], “a member of SJP authored a guest column in The Daily Pennsylvanian titled, ‘Israeli Apartheid: Real, Brutal and Deadly.’ The column baselessly accused Israel of ‘inhumane acts such as murder, forcible transfer, imprisonment, or persecution of an identifiable group on racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, or other grounds, committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination’.”

• “A group of Penn Law students published a letter…that demonized Israel and its supporters, claiming ‘[i]t is the influence of pro-Israel lobbying groups like AIPAC and bogus charges of anti-Semitism that are in reality hindering our ability to have a balanced discussion about Israel’.”

• “Penn’s Center and Program in Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies signed a statement asserting that Israel was engaging in ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘ethnonationalist violence’ against the Palestinian people.”

• “Penn Against the Occupation (PAO), a new anti-Israel student group, called on Penn to divest from Israeli companies, and terminate contracts with companies that ‘enable’ Israel. PAO asserted that Israel, which has ‘genocidal, racist foundations,’ was engaged in ‘ongoing ethnic cleansing’.”

Next, we’ll proceed to a broader survey of the plaintiffs’ complaint against Penn. Keeping this article to a reasonable length precludes addressing every single element, but I’ve endeavored to include the most-publicized situations and allegations that, if true, are most serious, while also using examples that are representative of multiple attacks.

A Palestine Literary “Hate-Fest”

Even before Oct. 7, there was already intense controversy about alleged antisemitism at Penn, much of it centering on the “Palestine Writes Literature Festival” held in September that hosted a variety of writers and poets whose topics range from politics to culture and cookbooks.

The Chavurah, a group for Penn’s progressive Jews, declared its “support of the festival, in solidarity with many of its speakers,” adding that “fear-mongering messages recently sent to administration and alumni are the latest of Penn Hillel’s attempts to silence Palestinian voices on campus, especially outspoken critics of Israel.”

The complaint calls it an “anti-Jewish hate-fest” that “creates a hostile environment for all Jewish students” — even if they don’t attend it. The supposed danger to Penn Jews sprang from the line-up of visiting speakers who’ve made Israel-critical statements of varying intensity.

The complaint presents a sampling of such prior comments. A few are objectionable, such as Aya Ghanameh tweeting that “‘Israeli civilians’ don’t exist…even if they’re not officially in the army.” (Note that Israel’s proponents often similarly say the entire Gaza population is guilty for the sins of Hamas.) Worse, Bethlehem University’s Wisam Rafeedie reportedly praised the 1972 Lod Airport Massacre in Tell Aviv. Perpetrated by Japanese terrorists recruited by a Palestinian group, the attack killed 26 and injured 80.

One outside speaker, literature professor and poet Rafaat Alareer, is condemned for replying on social media to a claim that Hamas baked a baby in an oven by asking, “With or without baking powder?”

Contrary to early claims that Hamas beheaded dozens of babies, only two Israeli infants in total were killed on Oct. 7, and the widely-shared tale of a baby killed in an oven sprang from pure speculation by a volunteer at a center for collecting the dead, who’d observed a corpse or body parts that arrived inside a bag. It seems clear that Alareer was ridiculing the dubious narrative, not mocking a real victim. (Note: On Dec. 6, the Israeli Defense Forces killed Alareer in Gaza.)

The majority of the supposedly disqualifying prior remarks are just particularly sharp-tongued criticism of Israel — for example:

• “Israel is a demonic, sick project, and I can’t wait for the day we commemorate its end.” “Israel is an abomination . . . [and] its core identity [is] a racist, Jewish supremacist, settler-colonial regime of hell” — Australian writer Randa Abdel-Fattah

• “If Israel is not the most hated nation in the world, there something deeply wrong with the world” — Stanford professor David Palumbo-Liu.

• “Calling Israel a Nazi state doesn’t quite capture the depths of their malevolence” — Palestine Writes executive director Susan Abulhawa

All those remarks were made independent of the festival. As for the actual Penn event, the lawyers apparently struggled to find anything anywhere near as controversial, and were left pointing to speakers “inveighing against ‘Jewish supremacism’ and the ‘messianic mindset’ of ‘religious Jews’ who are willing to ‘put up with anything to take over more land’.” Speakers are faulted for advocating a single, Palestinian state, and accused via questionable one-word quotes of advocating violence against Jews.

Following negative publicity, donor backlash and students claiming to be “terrified” by the mere presence of the festival, the besieged Magill distanced the university from the speakers, saying she recognized “how painful the presence of these speakers on Penn’s campus was for the Jewish community” — ignoring the fact that many of the most impassioned critics of Israel are themselves Jews.

Indeed, by implicitly asserting that every Jew on campus must be aligned with Israel and Zionism, Magill increased the chance that Jews will be wrongly confronted by the less-enlightened of Penn’s pro-Palestinian students. 

Penn Faulted For Not Banning Documentary Films

Further endeavoring to block criticism of Israel at Penn, the plaintiffs condemn the university for simply allowing various documentaries to be screened on campus.

For example, they say “The Occupation of the American Mind” should be forbidden because it “accus[es] ‘the Israel lobby’ of ‘shap[ing] American perceptions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” and interviews people who “falsely accuse the Israeli government of ‘terror[ism]’ and calls Israeli soldiers’ actions ‘inhumane’ and ‘brutal’.”

Likewise, they suggest the film “Israelism” should be censored merely because it argues that American Jews tend to “raise their children with pro-Israel indoctrination while omitting discussion of Palestinians’ situation.”

Complaint Ignores Facts About Restaurant Protest

Generating headlines and a social media firestorm, a Penn student protest march on Dec. 3 proceeded into Center City Philadelphia and a restaurant called Goldie, where students put pro-Palestinian stickers on the door and chanted “Goldie, Goldie, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide.”

Either out of ignorance or an attempt to mislead, the complaint falsely says they did so “solely because it is owned by an Israeli Jew.” That was the narrative that prevailed in the protest’s aftermath, with politicians like Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro carelessly racing to call it a “blatant act of antisemitism…reminiscent of a dark time in history.”

However, Goldie and other restaurants owned by the same man, Michael Solomonov, had already been the subject of calls for boycotts, due to his pro-Israel political involvements.

Earlier in October, Solomonov announced he would donate all the store’s profits for a day to a non-profit that outfits the Israel Defense Forces with protective and medical gear. He also hosted a political fundraiser attended by various pro-Israel lobbyists and officials, and is affiliated with the Israel Ministry of Tourism. Former employees say they were fired for wearing Palestinian flag pins that breached store policy against non-Goldie flair on their clothes.

Vilifying Professors Who Criticize Israel

The complaint attacks several Penn professors for expressing political opinions about Israel, or for actions like ending a class early so students could participate in a walkout in support of Palestine.

Several paragraphs are used to target political science and economics professor Anne Norton. Among her supposed sins:

• In response to a tweet saying “Israel has a right to defend herself,” Norton wrote that “Palestinians have a right to defend themselves.” She has elsewhere said, “I condemn the October 7th attacks and hostage holding.”

• Particularly in the first days of the war, unsourced videos circulated on social media purporting to capture Hamas atrocities — for example, videos said to show Hamas killing a pregnant woman and cutting out her fetus while she was still alive, and others showing kidnapped Israeli children being kept in cages. Norton reposted a tweet describing those two allegations as “a circus.” She was right to do so: Even the Anti-Defamation League includes both claims on its page of “Myths and False Narratives About the Israel-Hamas War.”

• Responding to an Instagram poster who repeated the dubious claim that Hamas had baked a baby in an oven, Norton replied “ceasefire.”

• Norton agreed with a social media post that said “propaganda about Jewish Zionist students feeling unsafe on US college campuses” is “absurd,” and “pro-Palestine students and faculty are being punished regularly for their speech. Nobody else.”

Putting a fine point on the lawsuit’s general assault on the free exchange of ideas and open debate about Israel and Palestine, Penn professor Harun Küçük is condemned for having invited Jewish students who said they were terrified of the literature festival to attend and see it for themselves, assuring them it “will prove to be an enriching or perhaps even liberating experience.”

Random Graffiti Assumed To Target Jews

Drawing a link out of thin air, the complaint says that, following the 2023 Palestine Writes festival, the Penn Chabad house, a center for Jewish activities, was “predictably…vandalized with graffiti.” Revealingly, the complaint omits any description of the graffiti. Take a look and you’ll see why the lawyers thought it better to leave things up to the reader’s imagination:

Graffiti on a structure at Penn’s Chabad House (Anna Vazhaeparambil / Daily Pennsylvanian)

As you can tell, there’s nothing antisemitic about it. It’s just a garden-variety “tag” — graffiti that identifies its creator — no different from what you’d see on any other building or boxcar in Philadelphia. Penn’s Division of Public Safety said it “worked with with multiple law enforcement partners to review the graphic…no connections to any antisemitic meaning or group have been identified.”

“Missing Cow” Posters Said To Mock Israeli Hostages

In mid-November, “missing cow” posters were placed around campus, showing the silhouette of a cow and offering a “box of chalk and a can of beer” as a reward for locating it. The posters bear some resemblance to those widely hung to spotlight Israelis kidnapped by Gaza. Notably, the cow posters said “missing,” not “kidnapped.”

The complaint says the “shameful” posters “mock Israeli hostage posters,” but when Penn’s student newspaper contacted the email address on the posters, the anonymous creator said they were meant as “a joke to promote veganism.” The reply acknowledged that “the format of the poster was an unintentional mistake that we now realize could be misconstrued.”

While we’re discussing flyers, the complaint notes that a Penn law library staffer was recorded tearing down Israeli hostage posters. Underscoring the fact that hostage-poster-destruction can reasonably be interpreted as a political act rather than an antisemitic one, when someone objected by saying “innocent people were kidnapped,” he replied, “innocent people were killed in the hospital bombing.” He was referring to an explosion at a Gaza hospital that killed hundreds; it’s been varyingly attributed to an IDF attack and to a misfired Hamas rocket.

Blaming Penn for Non-Student’s Speech at Off-Campus Rally Hosted by Non-Penn Group

According to the complaint, the group Penn Against the Occupation (PAO) encouraged students to attend a pro-Palestine “Emergency Solidarity Rally.”

The rally wasn’t organized by any Penn organization and it took place away from Penn’s campus. The complaint quotes some deplorable remarks from a speaker who isn’t a Penn student as somehow proving antisemitism thrives at Penn.

Video of those remarks — praising Hamas for terrorist acts — shows them coming from a man who appears to be 50 to 60 years old. The plaintiffs fault PAO for failing to formally condemn the remarks at a rally the group didn’t control.

Student Who Was Happy To See Gaza Fence Breached Is Arrested for Flag Theft

At a pro-Palestine rally, Penn student Tara Tarawneh expressed feeling “empowered and happy” at the site of Hamas bulldozers on Oct. 7 breaking through the border fence surrounding Gaza — a territory widely characterized as the world’s largest open-air prison.

Hamas engaged both military and civilian targets that day. There are no quotes suggesting Tarawneh endorsed the terrorist acts on Oct. 7, yet the complaint claims her joy about the fence-breaching is emblematic of students “revel[ing] in Hamas’s October 7 slaughter and call[ing] for violence against Jews.”

Later that day, Tarawneh was arrested for stealing an Israeli flag from the home of Penn students. Later, a second flag was stolen from the same home. Those property thefts are worthy of punishment. However — given any country’s flag is at its core a political symbol — the thefts are not self-evidently antisemitic.

Controversial “Solidarity” Statement Seen As Endorsing Terrorism

Turning to more substantial allegations, the plaintiffs write that, in a statement of solidarity with Palestine issued soon after Oct. 7, 11 Penn clubs “referr[ed] to Hamas’s mass murder, rape, torture, beheading, and kidnapping of innocent civilians as a ‘dignified fight’.”

Nowhere does the solidarity statement mention explicitly endorse harming civilians, much less specifically endorse “mass murder, rape, torture, beheading, and kidnapping,” as the plaintiffs claim.

The words “dignified fight” appear in this concluding sentence of the lengthy statement: “We reiterate our support for Palestinians leading the dignified fight towards the liberation and reclamation of their lands.” Standing alone, that sentence isn’t inherently menacing. However, echoing Malcolm X, the statement elsewhere says Palestinians are within their rights to use “any means necessary” to “resist their oppressors.”

Since “any means necessary” could reasonably be interpreted by some as an endorsement of terror tactics — particularly given the statement was a response to ongoing events — the statement’s lack of an explicit condemnation of terrorism is disconcerting. That said, the plaintiffs overstep by stating the worst interpretation as a fact tied to a two-word, out-of-context quote.

In the wake of controversy over the language, at least six of the 11 clubs who associated themselves with the letter have withdrawn from it.

Student Says She Was Called “Dirty Little Jew”

The ugliest and most straightforward allegation of antisemitism comes from plaintiff Jordan Davis, whom the complaint describes as having come to Penn “eager” to “identify as…an Israel supporter.”

Davis claims that, as she walked by a group of pro-Palestinian protestors on campus on Oct. 9, other students called her a “dirty little Jew” and said “you deserve to die” and that “the Jews deserve everything that is happening to them.” In the same incident, she says she and another student who was wearing a Star of David necklace were called “kikes.”

The central claim of the lawsuit is that Penn has failed to respond to antisemitic acts and threats, and is therefore liable for discrimination and breach of contract and other wrongs. However, Davis’s lawyers say she “decided not to report the incident” for eight days because she feared “retaliat[ion]” by “Penn administrators, faculty and students.” When she finally did report it, she did so anonymously, impairing Penn’s ability to investigate her claim.

The complaint also says “an Oct 18 rally included a march to the Lauder College House, Davis’s dormitory, known to be a dormitory where a large number of Jewish students live.” Without direct quotation, the complaint alleges they chanted a call for “Israel’s annihilation.” That’s how Israel’s proponents typically describe the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

Antisemitic Graffiti and Email Threats

The complaint references recent antisemitic graffiti: A swastika was painted on a campus building on Sept. 13, “Jews R Nazis” was found on a building next to a Jewish fraternity on Oct 20, and “90% of Pigs are Gas Chambered” was chalked on a central campus walkway in November.

Update Dec 26: In a piece at The Grayzone profiling the law firm leading the Penn suit and similar ones elsewhere, Wyatt Reed writes, “The most likely explanation for the appearance of [the “gas chambered’] phrase on UPenn’s Locust Walk was not the presence of chalk-wielding neo-Nazis but rather, that of animal welfare advocates, who were presumably calling attention to the fact that most pigs are killed by slaughterhouses which employ a grotesque method of gas inhalation exposed by activists in late 2022.”

On November 6, then-president Magill alerted the campus community that “a small number of Penn staff members received vile, disturbing antisemitic emails threatening violence against members of our Jewish community.” She didn’t provide any quotes from the email. Police conducted safety sweeps of buildings mentioned in the email, and concluded the threats were not credible. No perpetrator on- or off-campus has been identified.

More Incidents That May Not Have Been the Work of Penn Students

Like some other incidents in the complaint, these three don’t clearly involve Penn students as perpetrators, making their inclusion questionable in a document seeking to prove the Penn community is itself a hotbed of antisemitism.

Reaching back more than six years, the complaint points to an April 2017 incident in which neo-Nazi recruitment posters were posted on Penn’s campus. The university concluded they were distributed by “off-campus groups.” According to the complaint, the school came under fire for not requiring the posters to be removed, pointing to a campus code provision saying “[n]o posters shall be prohibited or restricted solely on the basis of their content, except when they may violate other applicable laws or regulations.”

On Sept. 21, a man broke into the building housing the Jewish campus group Hillel. In a one-minute intrusion, he smashed items, scattered papers, flipped over a folding table and a trash can and yelled “fuck the Jews,” “Jesus is king,” and “[the Jews] killed JC” (Jesus Christ). Campus police said the man had been “experiencing a crisis” and was flipping trash cans on a city street before entering the building. He was transported for evaluation. The intruder hasn’t been named, and a witness said he looked too old to be a student.

The complaint says an unidentified Jewish student wearing a yarmulke was recently attacked and his assailant arrested. Plaintiff Yakoby says the same man had on a previous occasion (Oct. 17) snarled “fuck you” at him as he hung posters of kidnapped Israelis. The complaint doesn’t say the arrestee was a student — something the lawyers would surely want to include if that were the case. It therefore seems likely the attacker was one of Philadelphia’s 1.6 million other residents, and the apparent lack of any antisemitic remarks from the attacker in either confrontation leaves his motive uncertain.

16% Jewish Enrollment Said To Evidence Discrimination in Penn Admissions

Finally, in what may be the complaint’s “jump the shark” moment, the plaintiffs accuse Penn of discriminating against Jews “by intentionally reducing its Jewish enrollment.” Jews represent about 2.4% of the US population, but occupy 16% of Penn’s prized enrollment slots.

The complaint decries the fact that the Jewish share has fallen from about a third of students in 2000, a trend they say the school has “intentionally engineered.” The plaintiffs don’t specify which non-Jewish populations are now over-represented at Jews’ expense.

Verdict: No Epidemic of Antisemitism at Penn

Offering only a small handful of allegations of truly antisemitic incidents — some of the most significant of which have yet to be substantiated and/or properly attributed to Penn students or faculty — the legal complaint filed against Penn accomplishes the opposite of its aim.

Rather than proving that Penn is “among the most perilous” places for Jewish students in America, the plaintiffs have proven that charges of rampant antisemitism at the University of Pennsylvania are empty, and largely aimed at keeping students “safe” from unwelcome political views.

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