A recent event hosted by students at UC Berkeley’s law school drew national criticism after featuring Israa Jaabis, a failed Palestinian suicide bomber released from Israeli prison in November 2023 as part of the hostage-prisoner exchange following Hamas’s October 7 attack.
Berkeley’s response was to invoke free speech, insisting that the university must remain content-neutral toward protected expression.
But the deeper threat to academic freedom at Berkeley is not a single student-sponsored event. It is the conduct of faculty who are using departments, speaker series, official academic programming, and university authority to turn anti-Israel activism into institutional practice.
That conduct was recently on display in UC Berkeley’s Rhetoric Department, which sponsored a talk titled “Anti-Zionism Is Not a Luxury.” The event was promoted as one that “articulates and embraces an affirmative anti-Zionism,” calls for “the end of a Zionist world,” and presents anti-Zionism as “a vital necessity of existence.”
Nor was it a one-off for the Rhetoric Department. Since October 7, 2023, it has sponsored or co-sponsored more than a dozen similarly one-sided anti-Israel events, raising an obvious question: Why would a rhetoric department become a reliable sponsor of activist programming?
The answer lies in the political commitments of the department’s members. Half of Berkeley Rhetoric’s faculty, including the chair and other senior leaders, signed a statement issued just days after Hamas’ attack on Israel that openly took sides in the war — declaring solidarity “without hesitation” with those “who fight for justice in Palestine,” endorsing an academic boycott of Israeli universities, and omitting any mention of Hamas’ massacre of Israeli civilians.
The Rhetoric Department is far from unique. According to recent research, from fall 2023 through spring 2025, 34 Berkeley departments sponsored or co-sponsored 40 Israel-related events with an anti-Israel bias, and none without.
The pattern is unmistakable: the ten Berkeley departments that sponsored the most anti-Israel events were all led by faculty who had publicly backed an academic boycott of Israel.
These aren’t random student groups organizing protests. These are professors using their institutional authority to advance a political agenda.
That alignment reflects exactly what academic BDS (“boycott, divestment, sanctions”), the movement to implement an academic boycott of Israel, urges faculty to do.
Academic BDS brings boycott politics onto campus — into research, teaching, speaker invitations, study abroad, academic partnerships, and programming. It does so through two linked principles: boycott, which seeks to sever scholarly ties with Israeli institutions and Israel-related academic activity, and anti-normalization, which seeks to ensure that Israel, Zionism, and engagement with either are not treated as normal or legitimate parts of academic life.
When faculty embrace these principles, they shape the entire intellectual environment students encounter. The result is the abandonment of open inquiry in favor of the one-sided anti-Israel departmental programming Berkeley has seen repeatedly since October 7.
Because most Jewish students identify with Zionism, academic BDS also fuels antisemitism by recasting Jewish identity, ties, and concerns as politically illegitimate and morally tainted.
At Berkeley, documented incidents targeting Jewish members of the campus community for harm increased by 531% in the two academic years after October 7. More than 40% of those incidents involved faculty or departments — as perpetrators, public defenders, or institutional enablers.
Student activists come and go. Faculty members stay. Unlike undergraduates who cycle through in four years, tenured professors are a permanent presence — shaping curricula, mentoring students, controlling departmental resources, and setting the intellectual tone for decades.
When they weaponize that authority to enforce ideological conformity, the damage outlasts any single protest or controversy.
Berkeley Rhetoric and the dozens of departments that have sponsored a steady stream of wholly one-sided anti-Israel events are symptoms of a much larger failure of governance: the university itself has allowed faculty to turn departments and official academic programming into vehicles for organized political advocacy.
That failure is especially concerning at Berkeley, where approximately 170 faculty members publicly support an academic boycott of Israel — the largest documented concentration at any U.S. university.
If those commitments remained extramural, that would be one thing. But the departmental record shows otherwise: many boycott-supporting faculty, especially when they hold institutional authority, are putting those commitments into practice across academic life, and no one has stopped them.
Under the University of California’s system of shared governance, the Academic Senate bears primary responsibility for safeguarding the university’s academic mission and preventing departments from turning themselves into instruments of organized political advocacy. It has plainly failed to do so.
That is why the Regents must now act — by barring academic units from serving as vehicles for academic boycott campaigns or other organized political causes.
If they do not, UC will keep enabling the antisemitism, exclusion, and collapse of public trust that follow when departments become instruments of political activism.
Tammi Rossman-Benjamin is the director of AMCHA Initiative, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to combating antisemitism at colleges and universities in the United States. She was a faculty member at the University of California for 20 years.
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