Unsafe Space: Students Allege Two Years of Antisemitism at Yale University
Though the Israel-Hamas War is half a world away, the impact is being felt close to home for many Jewish students at Yale University. Since the onset of the war, on Oct. 7, 2023, Yale has been home to several pro-Palestinian protests, and some students say that they have been discriminated against.
Yale is currently being investigated by the federal Department of Education (DOE) for alleged failure to respond to antisemitism.
In a federal lawsuit, Jewish students at Yale claim they were harassed by fellow students and subject to disparate treatment from the University. They say that not only did Yale fail to protect them, but that some faculty members and administration facilitated a hostile environment.
The complaint was submitted to the DOE from the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights on behalf of Netanel Crispe, ’25, and Sahar Tartak, ’26, a former and current student at Yale University. The complaint alleges that the University permissively allowed pro-Palestinian protestors to break rules on campus and harass Jewish students, while holding Jewish and Israeli students to different standards.
Independent of the DOE investigation, in October 2024, the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Education and Workforce found that Yale “failed to impose meaningful discipline for those who engaged in antisemitic conduct.”
The lawsuit against Yale claims that, from the start of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023, University rules were applied differently to students advocating or sympathizing with Jews and Israelis, and those advocating for Palestinian causes.
One of the first events mentioned in the civil rights complaint is an incident that happened a week after Oct. 7. to Sahar Tartak, who had access to the College Council’s email listserv. In the past, this listserv had been used to advertise social events, including food drives and Halloween parties, but when Tartak sent an email about a Shabbat, or Jewish Sabbath, dinner being hosted by one of the campus Jewish organizations, Chabad at Yale, she was reprimanded.
In the email, Tartak wrote: “As many of you know, this has been a hard week for the Jewish community at Yale and across the world. The massacre of over 1,200 innocent lives in Israel has affected many Yalies directly, whether it means calling family across the world to check in or losing actual relatives and friends. So the Jewish community at Yale is choosing light over darkness and extending an invitation to all students, Jewish or not, to attend Shabbat dinner tonight.”
Hours after it went out, a Yale Dean Crystal Feimster reached out to Tartak and another senator representing Pierson College, and told them to stop using the listserv “to send out information that is unrelated to council business.” There is a rule, which is not written in any student handbook, that the listserv cannot be used for social events, but Tartak’s lawsuit claims it had never been enforced until then.
A few days after Tartak was reprimanded for using the listserv to advertise the Shabbat dinner, Crispe was told by his head of college, Julia Adams, that he had to take down an Israeli flag hanging from his dorm’s window, because of a school regulation. However, other students were allowed to hang Palestinian flags from their dorm windows in the same building, allegedly because they were “propped” and not “hung,” according to the complaint.
This alleged selective enforcement behavior has garnered attention from legal advocates concerned with free speech, including Jessie Appleby, an attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a nonprofit law firm offering free legal help to “defend and sustain the individual rights of all Americans to free speech and free thought.”
“If a reasonable content neutral policy is then applied in a discriminatory manner, so that, say, certain groups with particular views are the policy is not enforced against them, whereas others do have the policy enforced against them… That would be selective enforcement, and that’s not okay,” Appleby said. “So even if the policy itself is legitimate, it also has to be applied evenly.”
The civil rights complaint alleges the University would regularly take down posters expressing support for Israel but leave up ones expressing support for Palestine. The University did not respond to questions about this allegation.
An event called “Gaza Under Siege” took place in an academic building, with the sponsorship of multiple academic departments and official school clubs, on Nov. 6, 2023. Crispe claims that he and other “visibly Jewish” students were not allowed to enter the academic building. On his Instagram page, there is a short video where Professor Lisa Lowe tries to block his camera while he films students allegedly trying to prevent him from entering the event.
He tried to submit a complaint to the school, but Yale didn’t take any action, Crispe said. So he wrote an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal with Sahar Tartak, and the two of them filed a civil rights complaint.
“In the post-October 7 world of Yale on campus, Yale has repeatedly demonstrated a complete failure to address and in any way stop the rampant antisemitism that has emerged on their campus, driven and motivated both by the student body, by outside influence, and shockingly and perhaps, most importantly, by members of the faculty and administration,” Crispe said.
In 2023, the Jewish holiday of Sukkot took place from Sept. 29 through Oct. 6. This holiday requires observant Jews to symbolically live in sukkahs, a type of tent. Crispe asked to set up a sukkah in Beinecke Plaza, an area in the middle of campus, for Jewish students to observe the holiday, but his request was denied.
“It was a very friendly email, just to clarify, highlight that, unfortunately, the space is not allowed to be used for construction of any form of building or set up, and that cannot be reserved for any such event and any space.”
“Which was… understandable at the time,” Crispe said. “But then to see, five months later, multiple encampments being set up with very similar type structures, violating that exact same policy… We saw a very clear distinction where it was not going to be tolerated if Jews put up a sukkah, but these students could put up dozens of dozens of tents, build a wall, and take over that entire space, causing a lot of damage, and that was totally permitted.”
Crispe said he was not allowed in the encampments, even though they were in public areas. For Crispe, being blocked from parts of campus wasn’t just a minor inconvenience. He was a tour guide at Yale, which was a paid position.
His routes would take him directly through areas on campus where these encampments were. He heard stories from other guides about tours being interrupted, so, at first, he changed his routes to avoid them. Eventually, he decided to stop giving tours during the peak of these protests.
The first Yale encampment was erected on Friday, April 19. The encampment was taken down by school safety officers and officers from the New Haven Police Department (NHPD) on April 22, and around 47 people were arrested, most of whom were students.
Of the students who were arrested, one was put on academic probation and 23 were formally reprimanded. Disciplinary cases were opened against another 22 students involved in the encampment. No students were punished for the protest.
Although the encampments were run by students, those students received support from faculty. After they were disbanded, Medical School Professor Sakena Abedin wrote a play about the encampments and the students, whom she called “inspiring.” The Yale Cabaret Theater performed the play in March of this year.
These encampments were not passive entities. In addition to setting up borders, blocking certain students from entering, and enforcing ideological oaths to “Palestine liberation”, the students at the encampment vandalized the surrounding areas, blasted loud music and chants during finals weeks and at night—in violation of Yale’s policies—and in at least one incident, allegedly attacked Tartak when she tried to enter the space during a day-time rally.
A criminal investigation was opened against the student who allegedly attacked Tartak by hitting her in the eye with a Palestinian flag, after a group of students encircled and taunted her. School officials said they would wait until the criminal proceedings were done to take any disciplinary action against the student, according to the House Committee report.
One of the incidents referenced in the House Committee on Education and Workforce’s report was Yale’s decision to put a student who the school itself claimed used “language deemed to incite violence” on probation, as opposed to giving them a harsher punishment. At a student protest on April 12, 2024, protestors held a “press conference” and one of the speakers said, “To the people who financed, encouraged, and facilitated this mass killing against us. May death follow you wherever you go. And when it does, I hope you will not be prepared.”
While the attacks were unfolding in Israel, Associate Professor of American Studies and of Ethnicity, Race and Migration, and of Religious Studies, Zareena Grewal said in two of the multiple posts she made that day, “Israel is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle, solidarity #FreePalestine” and “It’s been such an extraordinary day!”
There was an online petition to remove Grewal from her position because of these statements, which garnered over 30,000 signatures in a matter of days.
Overall, the 2024-2025 academic year was a mixed bag, according to Crispe, who graduated in May.
“For the most part, public demonstrations have decreased… On the other side of the spectrum, though, I would argue it’s in many ways gotten worse, in the sense that the degree to which these types of radical views have been normalized, and the kind of extreme nature of them has only increased.”
Crispe cited the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies as an example of a radicalized department. In October, Sireen Sawalha was invited to speak about her brother, Iyad Sawalha, who was the former head of the terrorist organization Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in the West Bank/Judea and Samaria. Iyad was the mastermind behind two bus bombings that killed 31 people.
Crispe says that during her talk, and in her book, Sireen expressed admiration for her brother’s terrorism.
“We’re seeing now a significant increase in the incorporation of these types of things within Yale spaces, whether it’s within cultural houses or Yale clubs, or, most egregiously, within Yale classrooms,” Crispe said.
And, he says, even though the protests were not as common as they were last year, they still existed, and the rhetoric and symbols used have gotten more extreme.
On April 24, on Yom HaShoah, or the Jewish Holocaust Remembrance Day, students protested an off-campus speech from the far-right Israeli politician, Itamar Ben-Gvir. They threw water bottles at students who attended the talk.
The Federal Department of Education has threatened to withhold funds from schools because of inaction against antisemitism. The DOE is setting out a list of conditions that vary from school to school on how universities can earn this money back.
If Yale is found guilty of discriminating against its Jewish students, then its federal contracts could be cancelled, and officials will have to negotiate with the DOE to get them reinstated.
