‘The Antisemitism Is Absolutely Disproportionate’

The fractious, sometimes violent debate over the Israel-Hamas war on college campuses has not cooled, even as the conflict enters its sixth month. College administrators have struggled to figure out the right balance between some students’ rights to free speech and others’ rights to be protected from discrimination and harassment.

That debate erupted at UC Berkeley this week when a dinner for graduating students held at the home of law school dean Erwin Chemerinsky devolved into a heated confrontation when a Muslim student disrupted the event to make a pro-Palestinian speech and was physically confronted by Chemerinsky's wife, Catherine Fisk. A fierce fight about freedom of speech — and accusations of anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish bias — quickly followed.

The debate at Berkeley is particularly notable since the campus was the birthplace of the student Free Speech Movement in the 1960s. The crown jewel of the University of California system is now under investigation by both the federal Department of Education and House Republicans about its on-campus antisemitism.

One of the administrators navigating this crisis is John A. Pérez, who sits on the Board of Regents for the University of California, the governing body of the sprawling 10 campus public university system that has nearly 300,000 students. Pérez, who attended Berkeley as an undergraduate, is used to the political spotlight, having served for four years as the state’s Assembly speaker. In an interview, Pérez told POLITICO that the student protest at Chemerinsky’s home crossed a line and described how campus leaders can do more to push back on what he sees as a dangerous surge in campus antisemitism.

This transcript has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Let’s start with the protest and confrontation at Dean Chemerinsky’s home in Berkeley. Do you think that the students stepped over the line by interrupting this dinner? Did the dean or his wife, Professor Catherine Fisk, step over the line in shutting down their remarks?

The students overstepped the line by disrupting a purely social event at a private home that was intended to celebrate the collective accomplishments of all the third-year law students. They telegraphed their opposition by calling for a boycott [in advance of the event] — that was fine, that was completely within their rights. But they did it in a horrific way, by employing an antisemitic caricature of Dean Chemerinsky.

What’s interesting is Dean Chemerinsky is a nationally renowned First Amendment expert. And even though he was offended and hurt by the caricature, he defended their right to employ it. He has been the most consistent protector of First Amendment rights of students and student protests as well as others, even when he’s the target of it.

That’s different than what the students ended up doing, which is going to the house, disrupting the event, refusing to leave when asked to leave, confronting and asserting a First Amendment right that I don’t believe they had at a private home and then asserting that they had legal representation to do it. When Professor Fisk again asked them to leave and they didn’t, and then she confronted and tried to take away the mic, I’m sure in retrospect, she wished she would have handled that slightly differently. But that doesn’t forgive the act of the students disrupting and violating the private personal space and refusing to leave when asked.

What should be the consequences for these students?

So these are my individual opinions as somebody who believes in the right to protest, somebody who’s engaged in a lot of protest on the Berkeley campus, myself, and somebody who’s deeply concerned about campus climate and creating an environment that neither stifles free speech, but also doesn’t victimize and marginalize people.

Students broadly have been put on notice that if there’s further disruptions, folks will be turned over to Student Conduct and appropriate evaluations will be made. The question becomes whether the campus decides to engage in a student conduct investigation of this and whether the students involved will say they didn’t have fair notice that this crossed the line. That’s something that the campus has got to wrestle with. And I think the campus could come to either conclusion in defensible ways. They can come to the conclusion that students could have misinterpreted this because it’s hosted by the dean as being the same as anything on campus. And the campus can also come to the conclusion that my God, these are third-year law students at one of the top law schools in the country, and that they should have a better understanding about the consequences of their actions.

UC Berkeley, in particular, is in the national imagination as a place of protests — during the Vietnam War in particular. Do you feel like these current protests on campus are different than protests in the past? And if so, how? 

I do think they’re different.

In each of those waves of previous protests, there was a notion from students that engaging in the protest had to serve the purpose of bringing people along in an area of debate, creating space to protest, but also to change minds and bring people in the direction of the justice that they were trying to seek. But there was also a concept of consequences associated with protest. If you want protest without consequence, what you really want is performance. And I think that right now we’re seeing folks engaging in disruption, without an understanding or appreciation for what consequences can come up with it, which I think can sometimes be performative.

Second, it feels like much of the protest now isn’t, at least from my perspective, effective in trying to move debate and create space to find a new common ground that aligns with the justice that the protesters are seeking. When it’s disruption for the sake of disruption, as opposed to civil disobedience to capture attention and create space for debate, I think it serves a fundamentally different [purpose].

When you look at the Free Speech Movement, it was about creating the space for all debate, including debate that one disagrees with. What we’ve seen of late is something very different, which is shutting down debate. Last year, at Berkeley Law School, student groups passed a series of resolutions, essentially banning debate, saying that holders of “Zionist viewpoints” would not be allowed to come [to their events]. That’s very different. It’s one thing to say any given organization shouldn’t be compelled to invite somebody who has a viewpoint that’s contrary to theirs. But to say that we want to ban a whole section of debate is inherently problematic in society. It’s particularly problematic in law school, and particularly problematic in a law school centered in a place that in many ways was the birth of the free speech movement on university campuses.

There has been a horrible spike in antisemitic activity across college campuses across the country, but particularly at elite universities, and there’s been a spike in the community more broadly as well. And I don’t think that we, societally and we, as university leaders, have done enough to push back against this spike in antisemitism.

You talked about these flashpoints across the country, not just at Berkeley or the UCs. Why do you think this war has lit up so intensely on these elite campuses throughout the country?

I don’t know. I struggle with this. One theory is that there’s been significant funding of organizations on elite campuses to push back against the policies of the state of Israel. Second, you look at a student population that is generationally different in its worldview than folks of my age. I’m in my 50s. My fundamental experiences looking at the state of Israel are different than somebody in their 20s. Somebody in their 20s has grown up with an Israel that’s been disproportionately governed by the Netanyahu government, and a government that has been more conservative. Somebody of my age would’ve seen a variety of different expressions of leadership in Israel. I think it’s allowed for a certain shorthand that I think is ahistoric.

I think you can be, as I am, a supporter of the existence of the state of Israel and the ability of Israel to defend itself and a critic of the current administration leading Israel and the policies of the administration. You can be a critic of government there just like you can be a critic of government here. So I could be a critic of a Trump administration and a supporter of America, somebody else can be a critic of the Biden administration and still a supporter of America. We don’t seem to have a generational ability to afford that same duality with respect to viewing Israel.

But it goes further than that. What we’re seeing is stuff that we saw in the Chemerinsky caricature, which goes back to old antisemitic tropes — blood libel with respect to the way they depicted Erwin with the bloody knife and fork — and a sense that we’re holding all Jews accountable for anything that we find problematic with respect to the situation [in Gaza] unless and until they actively renounce and reject Israel. That’s really problematic. It really goes against all of the standards of community that we have.

If it was any other group, we wouldn’t do it. We’re not seeing on college campuses, attacks and questioning every student of Russian heritage because we take issue with the Putin administration, and what they’ve done in Ukraine and other places around the world. We’re not seeing where we’re attacking every Muslim student, because we take issue with what Hamas did on Oct. 7. One can debate the space between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. But one would have to have serious blinders not to recognize that what’s happening on college campuses, UCs included, is a series of activities that are targeting Jewish students because of their identities, making them feel unsafe and apart from the rest of the community in a way that really should have no place in our society and no place on our college campuses.

But we have seen spikes in incidences of Islamophobia and anti-Arab sentiment, too.

Absolutely.

Are you saying that the antisemitism we’re seeing is disproportionate? 

The antisemitism is absolutely disproportionate. We reject both. We reject all forms of hatred. But what we’re not seeing is massive student protests targeting every Muslim-identified student, asking students of Muslim or Arabic background to denounce or renounce something that they have no part in. The numbers and the spikes are vastly different, and the types of incidences are vastly different.

I was on the Los Angeles City Human Relations Commission, I think I was president at the time in 2001 when 9/11 happened. We immediately came together and said, ’how do we avoid an irrational targeting of Muslim members of our community in the wake of the response to 9/11?' Now that said, we saw spikes in anti-Muslim activities, Islamophobic activities. That was problematic and offensive. And we've seen some of that now, and we have to speak out against that.

It’s interesting to me that the only time where we have to do this both sides-y rejection is when the victims are Jewish. When we saw a spike in anti-Asian hate crimes over the last couple of years, there was no immediate pushback that said, now you have to reject these other forms [of hate]. In fact, after George Floyd, when we were talking about Black Lives Matter, there was a clear distinction that if you responded by saying, “All Lives Matter,” that yes, that’s true that all lives matter, but if you were doing it reflexively you are denying the real pattern and problem of what was happening in the African American community. So we’ve got to be careful in that we should be able to have a conversation about the spike in antisemitism, the very clear expression of antisemitism, without then having to do a litany of [denouncing other forms of hate in order] to renounce the antisemitism.

There are a number of California campuses, including three UC campuses — Berkeley, UCLA and San Diego — that at the moment are under investigation by the federal Department of Education in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks because of discriminatory incidents. What can you tell us about where those investigations stand? 

I can’t tell you anything about where those investigations stand. I’m not fully read in on the moment to moment of the investigations. And to the extent that I know anything in the middle of an investigation, it would be inappropriate for me to comment.

But at a certain level, there’s got to be a gut check. When you look at something, does it look right? And then can you go and figure out a way to confirm that your inclinations are correct, and that you can create defensible policies based on that? It was right that you asked about the 1960s in the Free Speech movement, and the antiwar movement. We’re 60 years later. We should have learned from 60 years. How do we adjust in real time? On many college campuses, there’s been such an orthodoxy around the First Amendment that there hasn’t been enough debate about how it exists in conflict with these other protections.

Let me give you an example of where I think students broadly would say the First Amendment should have limits — sexual harassment. We know that we can regulate certain speech that is, in fact, sexual harassment. At what point does the First Amendment come into conflict and into tension with other sets of laws and other protections? Again, I’m not a lawyer. I’m not a constitutional scholar. But there’s some basic common sense questions that are asked.

Another question around these free speech issues is directly on your plate as a regent. The regents are considering banning political statements from the department homepages. It’s largely been seen as a response to faculty groups posting critical statements of Israel and its conduct in Gaza. That vote has been delayed twice.

Who’s the person that moved to delay the votes?

It was you.

It’s an important area of debate and there hasn’t been enough work to land in the right place. And this does cut to the core of who we are. We shouldn’t have unreasonable restrictions on speech. And that speech can take many forms including posting on websites. When the first policy came forward, I didn’t think enough work had been done. So I moved to put it off. And this last one, I don’t know if I made the ultimate motion to put it off or not, but I think I did, again, because there’s more work.

Any regulation has to be content neutral. What I did say at the last meeting is the timing of it makes the action suspect. Had we done this a few years before, without the current tension, it would be less suspect than it is right now. Now, college campuses have free speech zones. Public buildings have places where free speech is and is not allowed. I think it’s reasonable to say that as we move to a world that significantly exists and people interact with online, you can make distinctions between places where you have official business versus opinion. It’s appropriate. Newspapers have editorial and opinion pages and letters to the editor. Websites don’t do as good a job, in my opinion, of moderating comments, but there’s a distinction between editorial space, news space, opinion space. I think it’s reasonable to try to find that distinction if it’s 1) content neutral, and 2) provides an equally accessible way to access people’s opinions.

I’d like for you to put on your jersey as a lifelong Democrat for a moment. You know that a crucial part of your party’s coalition depends on young people. When you see the intensity of the reaction to the Israel-Hamas war on campus and the criticism that Biden is getting for how he’s been handling this, does that make you worried for November? 

You’ve seen the Biden administration’s view and interaction with Israel evolve in real time based on real circumstances. Biden, who has a lifetime record of having a very positive relationship with Israel, has also been trying to hold the Netanyahu administration accountable and pushing back. Is that enough to satisfy the critics? Of course not. It’s appropriate to have tension. But in the end, elections are about choices. This is going to be a question about Biden versus Trump. Students, like everybody else, need to look at the totality of everything that they’re offering as candidates and I think that young people will once again overwhelmingly vote for Biden.

That sounds to me like you’re not very worried.

No, no. I’m worried. But I’m also hopeful. This doesn’t happen magically. It happens by having conversations, by engaging voters, by talking to voters, by looking at what’s at issue. It’s not enough to say, “Hey, young people are going to be so offended by what Trump is doing on abortion..." You have to speak to the concerns that they’ve articulated.

You’re Mexican American and grew up with deep ties to the Jewish community in east L.A. This week, a new poll said 40 percent of Latinos support a cease-fire and nearly 40 percent believe the U.S. should not be involved in the conflict. Does it concern you that these two communities that you have been so much a part of seem to have a fraying relationship?

It worries me that Americans writ large are becoming more isolationist. There’s not only an interest in us playing less of a role in the conflict in the Middle East, but there’s a spike in folks wanting us to play less of a role in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. But yes, it bothers me that there’s less of a connection between communities that have historically been connected. But Latinos exist in the same world that everybody else does. Latinos are a disproportionately young community — younger on average than just about any other ethnic group. And young people have grown up with 20 years of the Netanyahu administration that they increasingly take issue with.

Latinos also are horrified by what happened on Oct. 7. Absolutely horrified — by murder, by rape, by torture, by kidnapping. Part of the problem with a poll is what question you’re asking. What does cease-fire mean? Does cease-fire mean a temporary cease-fire, does it mean an effort at sustainable peace? I’m somebody who’s supportive of cease-fire. It can’t be unilateral. It doesn’t work that way.

Putting the polls aside, do you sense a fraying in the relationship between Jews and Latinos? 

I think there’s a little fraying in the relationship but what I think we’re seeing is a national spike in antisemitism and it expresses itself in every community. Latinos don’t exist in a bubble. And there has been a persistent rise in antisemitism. And it goes unchecked in ways that discriminatory actions against other communities do not go unchecked.

When somebody on a college campus targets a Muslim student for identity, targets a Muslim woman for wearing traditional garb, there is offense taken and a pushback. The same isn’t expressing itself when we’re seeing antisemitic acts. At the last Regents meeting, protesters erected an effigy, in violation of policy, of a bloody pig holding a cage, bags of money and [it] said “UC regents time is running out.” Protesters came and took over the Regents meeting and the room was cleared. I think three of us stayed in the room to listen. Nobody took the opportunity to speak to the three of us. It was just chants. And the chants weren’t about a policy, the chants were about Jews. They were about Jews. It wasn’t about this university policy or that university policy, it wasn’t even that the regents need to divest. It was about Jews. It was antisemitic.

What were the chants? 

“We've got to go after these Jews.” “We got to stop the Jewish lobby.” It was very clear.

We have gotten to a point of both sides-ism in this question, which is completely not constructive. When I go around to different college campuses, I tend to meet with a cross section of students and faculty. I have only in my 14 years on the board been challenged once about trying to meet with a group of students. And it was trying to meet with a group of Jewish students on a campus where there have been efforts to target their Hillel. The campus told me that if you meet with Jewish students, you have to meet with the Muslim students. I said, “I’m meeting with students at Hillel because Hillel was targeted.” There’s no balancing that needs to happen. If you asked me to meet with Muslim students because I’m on campus, I’m happy to do it. But it can’t be because I’m meeting with Jewish students. When I go meet with Latino students, I don’t have to go balance that by meeting with somebody else. When I go meet with LGBTQ students, I don’t have to balance that with meeting somebody else. When I go meet veteran students that are dealing with the complexity of coming back after having served and navigating a college campus, I’m not told you now have to go meet with another group. The only time it’s ever happened was in one instance trying to meet the Jewish students. It shouldn’t be the case.

Anything else you’d like to add?

I take all of this personally. I take it a little more personally at a UC because I have responsibility for UC. I take it a little more personally still at Berkeley because it’s such an important part of my life experience. Berkeley is the first place where I ever experienced a Ramadan. Berkeley was the first place I ever meaningfully engaged with the Muslim student community and navigated making sure that we were an inclusive campus for Muslim students. As you mentioned, I have a clear, very personal tie to the Jewish community. But that’s not an exclusion of a tie and an interest in the Muslim community. Having a deep connection to one community doesn’t mean that there’s not a concern and care for another.