FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Monday, September 28, 2026

Contact: National Campus Jewish Alliance, campusjewishalliance@gmail.com 

National Campus Jewish Alliance Welcomes Bipartisan Federal Commission’s Campus Antisemitism Report 

The National Campus Jewish Alliance (NCJA) welcomes the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR) report The Federal Response to Antisemitism on American College and University Campuses, which was issued on Monday, September 28, 2026. 

This report represents the first in-depth, rigorous, and bipartisan investigation of campus antisemitism by a federal government body since October 7, 2023. As USCCR Vice Chair Victoria Nourse writes, the report represents “a rare moment of bipartisan cooperation” in times “when many say America is hopelessly divided” (189). Its findings also substantiate several key points made in a statement by NCJA and its chapters last spring. 

NCJA members and allies welcomed the USCCR’s report on Monday. Said Ariela Gross, Distinguished Professor of Law and History at UCLA School of Law, “The USCCR’s recognition that Zionism, a political belief, is not a facet of Jewish ancestry, is extremely important, not only for the interpretation of Title VI civil rights law, but for the protection of Jewish students on campus. At UCLA in Spring 2024, peaceful protestors, many of whom were Jewish, were attacked by a violent mob that equated Zionism with Jewish identity.”

NCJA urges higher education administrators to study the report’s extensive legal and procedural analyses. Although the commission as a whole makes no explicit recommendations, its findings shed a critical light on the response to allegations of antisemitism at some universities. 

As Benjamin Eidelson, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, wrote on Bluesky, “This restatement of the law of Title VI & the First Amendment—offered unanimously by a bipartisan commission created by Congress—should offer a legal roadmap for schools and universities facing pressure to suppress student speech for fear of litigation. As the report makes clear, current law does not support most of the threats being made based on alleged tolerance for anti-Israel protests and the like, and the First Amendment offers robust protection for schools & universities willing to invoke it.” 

NCJA stands ready to work with elected officials and education leaders to protect the civil rights of students, faculty, and staff—Jewish and non-Jewish—in American higher education. The report makes clear that antisemitism, including in higher education, is a significant civil rights issue that warrants serious attention. Yet the USCCR report details how the Trump Administration’s unprecedented, reckless, and repressive actions have degraded the academic freedom and civil rights of all members of campus communities—including those of the Jewish faculty, staff, and students on whose behalf it has claimed to act. 

The report, unanimously endorsed by the Commission’s four Democratic and four Republican members, is based on case studies of nine sample college campuses and draws as well on a thoughtful review of evidence from Jewish advocacy organizations, legal scholarship, and testimony reflecting the diversity of views and experiences of Jewish Americans. The Commission studied Jewish community members’ experiences of, and institutional responses to, concerns about antisemitism at these nine universities both before and after October 7, 2023, engaging deeply with various perspectives on anti-Zionism and antisemitism and probing the relationship between civil rights enforcement and First Amendment rights.

The USCCR’s thorough analysis yields many important conclusions: 

First, it clarifies the distinction between conduct motivated by hostility toward Jewish ancestry or Israeli background on the one hand, and speech criticizing “ideas or institutions” such as Israel or Zionism, on the other (69). While the former can constitute discrimination under the Civil Rights Act, the latter is not considered discrimination under current law. 

The report also carefully considers arguments about whether Zionism should be treated as a protected characteristic of Jewish ancestry, concluding that “reluctance to treat Zionism as a protected facet of Jewish ancestry appears to align with current law,” and citing survey data showing that “that only 37% of American Jews identify with the term ‘Zionist’” (66). 

The report explains that rallies, chants, and protests directed at a campus community as a whole also generally do not constitute the type of targeted discrimination or harassment that is actionable under civil rights laws. It emphasizes both the difficulty and the importance of protecting academic freedom and free expression in the unique context of university life, where courts recognize that “students reasonably expect open expression of offensive ideas” and where judges therefore apply First Amendment protections “with particular vigilance” (70).

The report also details how the federal government’s recent actions depart sharply from the law in ways that undermine civil rights for all. The government’s abrupt termination of federal funding from entire universities and its failure to engage in conciliation efforts, the report suggests, violate statutory and constitutional law. 

As University of Pennsylvania legal scholars Amanda Shanor and Serena Mayeri testified to the USCCR last spring: 

“Antisemitism is real and urgent. Students deserve campuses where they can learn, speak, associate, worship, and participate fully in university life without discrimination or harrassment. However, the administration is using allegations of discrimination—including antisemitism—as a pretext for coercive strategies that are plainly unlawful and unconstitutional, and that undermine both civil rights–including the civil rights of Jewish Americans—and our constitutional democracy.”

These actions endanger rather than protect the safety of Jewish and non-Jewish students, faculty, and staff. As the commissioners wrote in their cover statement, 

“Federal actions intended to protect Jewish students may produce unintended harm. Students and experts testified that sweeping funding cuts and institutional penalties did not necessarily make them feel safer and could disrupt research, harm uninvolved students and programs, chill lawful speech, and generate resentment toward Jewish students.” 

The report quotes Harvard College student Tova Kaplan’s testimony: 

“[R]ather than working with Jewish students and faculty to identify the specific changes needed to ensure our safety, the federal government was coming in from the outside to demand sweeping changes to Harvard’s culture and governance while using threats that put students, research, and campus stability at risk. That didn’t feel like a strategy focused on combatting antisemitism, but felt like leverage for broader ideological goals…Using Jewish students as a pretext to cut federal support for universities, limit student speech, or target international students doesn’t make us feel safe, it makes us feel instrumentalized, it turns us into symbols in someone else’s political fight.” (196, 200). 

Along with the punitive federal measures that have damaged universities, the report also shows that the federal government’s funding and personnel cuts have left the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) severely understaffed, even as its caseloads have steadily increased. Between 2015 and 2025, the report highlights, discrimination complaints have increased nearly 120 percent; OCR staff currently carry caseloads four times greater than those recommended for conducting thorough investigations and providing effective responses to every complaint. 

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The National Campus Jewish Alliance (NCJA) is a national network of diverse groups of Jewish higher education workers – led by faculty, PhD students, and staff – united by our commitments to critical inquiry, freedom of expression, and multiracial democracy on our campuses and beyond. We organize against the misuse of Jewish history, memory, and identity to erode higher education, silence dissent, and advance authoritarian projects locally, nationally, and internationally and work in solidarity with others to defend and strengthen higher education and multiracial democracy, and to protect academic freedom and civil rights for all.. NCJA is a member of the Emergency Campaign to Support Higher Ed  and a fiscally sponsored project of JFREJ Community, Inc. Learn more at nationalcampusjewishalliance.org.