OPINION:
When University of California, Los Angeles, Chancellor Julio Frenk looks back at German universities in the 1930s, he sees a warning for American campuses today. Nazi-era antisemitism, he argues, didn’t just destroy lives; it also corroded universities from within, turned scholarship into pseudoscience and helped permanently diminish what was the world’s greatest higher education system.
American universities that ignore this history, he warns, risk a similar fate. If we take that warning seriously, the first place it must be applied is UCLA itself.
Today, the most significant threat to Jewish life, and to the integrity of UCLA, comes from faculty and departments that embrace the academic arm of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, or “academic BDS.” This international campaign urges scholars to boycott Israeli academic institutions and delegitimize Israel and its supporters in academic life. Increasingly, that agenda is used to mark as unwelcome on campus Jews who identify with Israel, much as Nazi-era scholars used antisemitic “scholarship” to justify driving Jews out of German universities.
At least 115 UCLA faculty have endorsed academic BDS. Dozens of departments and programs have issued statements praising the anti-Israel encampment and endorsing protesters’ boycott and divestment demands under their departmental banners. Over the past two years, more than 20 Israel-related campus events co-sponsored by academic units featured only BDS-supporting speakers and no balancing perspectives.
Alongside these departmental actions is UCLA’s Faculty for Justice in Palestine, a radical faculty advocacy group working to intensify and institutionalize anti-Israel activism on campus. Its objective is to transform UCLA’s academic environment into a platform for anti-Israel propaganda, branding Israel as “racist,” “colonial” and “oppressive.” Founded after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist massacre, UCLA’s Faculty for Justice in Palestine has shamefully celebrated the attacks as righteous “resistance” and has targeted Jewish students and faculty who support Israel’s right to exist.
Faculty for Justice in Palestine also launched the Consortium for Palestine Studies, an unauthorized group that exploits UCLA’s name and taxpayer-funded infrastructure to push the narrative that Israel is inherently racist and illegitimate. The group hosts inflammatory events under the UCLA banner, including “Revisiting Zionism as a Form of Racism and Racial Discrimination,” co-sponsored by UCLA departments and featuring speakers who equate Israel with Nazism and White supremacy.
As these faculty- and department-led campaigns have expanded, antisemitic incidents at UCLA have surged. From July 2023 through June 2025, incidents targeting Jewish members of the campus community — including assault, vandalism and harassment — rose by nearly 3,000%, according to AMCHA’s data. Rhetoric glorifying violence against Israel or calling for its elimination increased by almost 1,000%. These aren’t just the results of unruly protests; they are the downstream effects of allowing politicized scholarship and faculty activism to turn one group of students and faculty into pariahs.
Every UCLA faculty and staff member shares responsibility for upholding academic norms and preventing teaching, research and department platforms from being weaponized for political ends. When departments brand Zionism as racism and faculty groups praise the Hamas massacre as “righteous” while working to exclude Zionist Jews, they abandon scholarship and misuse the university’s authority to foster hostility toward their own students and colleagues. All faculty have a duty to help repair this breach of professional standards.
This unchecked departmental politicization is precisely the internal corrosion Mr. Frenk warns about. Fortunately, there is a straightforward way to apply his historical lesson:
• Keep academic units out of politics. Departments, centers and programs must remain neutral and not use their names or resources to run political campaigns or issue one-sided declarations on contested issues.
• Ban the use of university platforms for boycott or exclusion campaigns. Faculty shouldn’t use official titles, departmental platforms or university funds to organize academic boycotts or “de-normalization” efforts against any group, including Zionist Jews.
• Enforce these policies consistently, with real consequences. The Academic Senate and campus leadership must make it clear that misusing courses, official titles or departmental platforms for political activism constitutes professional misconduct, subject to meaningful sanctions.
These steps would not suppress scholarly debate about any political issue. They would restore a basic boundary: Universities are for research and teaching, not faculty-run political campaigns targeting specific groups. By reestablishing that line, UCLA can avoid repeating German universities’ disastrous mistake of allowing the academy’s prestige and infrastructure to be conscripted into demonizing and excluding Jews.
As Mr. Frenk acknowledges, antisemitism not only endangers Jews but also corrodes the university’s moral and intellectual foundations. At UCLA, that corrosion is no longer abstract. Anti-Zionist faculty embedded in departments across the university are using their positions to marginalize Jewish and Zionist students and faculty.
Preventing Jews from being driven out of American universities will require more than historical analogies. University leaders and faculty must expose and dismantle the campaign that seeks to make Zionism and those who embrace it unthinkable in the academy.
• Leila Beckwith is professor emeritus of pediatrics at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the co-founder of AMCHA Initiative. Tammi Rossman-Benjamin is the co-founder and executive director of AMCHA Initiative and has been a faculty member at the University of California, Santa Cruz, for nearly two decades.
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