As antisemitism spikes on campuses, remember that colleges are also workplaces

The scenes of Jewish students experiencing antisemitism on college campuses are frightening. But colleges are also workplaces, and the antisemitism that Jewish staff and faculty are experiencing is no less frightening for its intensity, their inability to avoid it and their greater and more particularized fear of retaliation.

The agency charged with enforcing federal antidiscrimination laws in defense of college employees, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and similar human rights commissions in the states and localities, must rise to the occasion to protect Jewish staff and faculty on college campuses, and indeed all Jewish workers in every employment setting.

On campuses, college staff, particularly faculty, are more exposed to antisemitic abuse than students because they teach and maintain offices and office hours at fixed places and times. Their social media presence is an important part of their job, not just a hobby or extension of their social lives that can be turned off. Their scholarship — publications and speaking engagements — requires them to put themselves out there for the world to see. They cannot just “keep their heads down” as easily as Jewish students can (an odious solution to antisemitism as it is).

And when college employees are victims of antisemitism, they, like all workers, must balance their demands for protection and redress with the very real threat of retaliation against their careers and livelihoods. The college staff and faculty employment ecosystem is a small one. Most college employees lack tenure, and even tenure is a tenuous defense against ostracization in a profession where rewards and punishments — faculty leadership appointments, publishing and conferencing opportunities, and academic collaboration — are doled out largely subjectively.

Every college campus where Jewish students have endured frightening and degrading public expressions of rank antisemitism — speeches and symbolism and collective action supporting Jewish genocide and glorifying Jews being raped, kidnapped and murdered — is also a workplace where Jewish staff and faculty have endured the same. And worse. Since the October 7 massacre in Israel, I have counseled Jewish staff and faculty who’ve had their offices defaced, their classroom lectures disrupted, their online evaluations rigged, their previously renowned scholarship attacked, their academic displays taken down and their online spaces overrun with antisemitic invective.

One Jewish professor was called out by name and falsely “accused” of having served in the Israel Defense Forces in a rant delivered by another professor in the latter’s class; shortly thereafter the bulletin board outside her office was vandalized. And Israeli staff and faculty working on American campuses are bearing some of the worst instances of workplace antisemitism. Some have taken a leave of absence or quit their positions outright.

There is no workplace in America where such antisemitism should be tolerated, including when that workplace is a college campus. But normal workplace antidiscrimination norms aren’t being applied at colleges, and the EEOC has not adopted the same widely accepted definition of antisemitism as is being used when the victim is a student, not an employee. Simply put, the EEOC needs to join this fight immediately.

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is the primary federal statute that protects Jewish college students from antisemitism and is enforced administratively by the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Education. OCR has opened investigations at over a dozen college campuses in defense of students. Federal law, in the form of a presidential executive order, requires OCR in evaluating antisemitism complaints to consider the definition of antisemitism developed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, a consortium of 35 national governments representing almost all the world’s Jewish population. The IHRA definition is widely embraced by America’s Jewish community and by hundreds of governments and nonprofit organizations in the U.S. and around the world, including in the Biden White House’s recently released U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism.

The IHRA definition focuses attention on certain historically antisemitic tropes about Jewish control and manipulation of the media, economy and government; Holocaust denial; and the demonization, delegitimization and application of double standards to the Jewish state of Israel (e.g., “Delegitimizing the state of Israel and in doing so denying the Jewish people their equal right to self-determination”).

But it is the next section of the Civil Rights Act — Title VII — that is the prime federal antidiscrimination law protecting Jewish employees based on their religious beliefs, their ethnicity and, if those Jews are or were Israeli citizens, their national origin. Title VII is enforced by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the EEOC has not yet explicitly embraced IHRA. It should — quickly.

Even still, Title VII is a powerful statute that already gives the EEOC important tools to protect Jewish employees on college campuses. For example, to its great credit, the EEOC has proposed guidance on enforcing Title VII’s prohibition on workplace harassment that recognizes, as many courts already have, that certain symbols and phrases are so shocking — so degrading and evocative of hatred and violence — that even a single instance of their use in the workplace can establish an unlawfully discriminatory hostile environment. The EEOC guidance offers as examples the noose, the swastika and the “n word.”

Is not the flag of Hamas and the depiction of Hamas terrorists paragliding into southern Israel on their way to murder Jewish children the swastikas of our time? The chant of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” a call for extinguishing the Jewish state (and the Jews living there, if necessary) a degradation of Jewish identity, freedom and equality, if not an outright call to genocide?

The EEOC needs to act. It needs to embrace all the tools available to it — including IHRA and the EEOC’s existing understanding of the federal antidiscrimination law it is charged with enforcing — and protect Jewish employees, on college campuses and elsewhere, from the wave of antisemitism that is making their professional lives unbearable.

Colleges are workplaces, too.

Rory Lancman is director of corporate initiatives and senior counsel at the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law. He served as a Democratic NYC Council Member from 2014-2020 and a NY State Assembly Member from 2007-2012.