The Trump administration sued the University of California last week, accusing UCLA of “deliberate indifferen[ce]” while Jewish students were blocked from buildings, pepper-sprayed and beaten during campus protests. UCLA is just one example of how Jewish students are being harassed, excluded and systematically separated from their own institutions.

The ceasefire in Gaza has been in effect since the fall of 2025. But if you believed, as university administrators long insisted, that campus antisemitism was a reaction to events in the Middle East, then the last academic year should have buried that theory for good.

The war in Gaza is no longer the excuse because it was never the cause.

I am a proud American and Orthodox Jew. I sued Harvard University for its failure to protect Jewish students, wrote to its antisemitism task force more than 40 times without receiving a single reply, testified before Congress and spoke at the Republican National Convention. I have paid a real price for saying publicly what I know to be true. It is a pattern that has been building since Oct. 7, 2023, and it has not stopped, and it has continued because it was never actually about Gaza.

Consider what happened this year at the University of Maryland, home to the country’s fourth-largest Jewish student body. The anti-Israel JusticeUMD party chose the night of Yom Kippur 2025 to pass a BDS resolution calling for economic warfare against Israel. Jewish students, fasting and in synagogue, could not be present to speak against it.

That is not democracy. It is a deliberate ambush, timed to silence the community that has the most at stake. When the spring 2026 elections came, a Jewish candidate was targeted on YikYak with a swastika replacing the letter “O” in his ticket name and a caption calling him “Chief Hitlerite.” The elections commission responded not by punishing the antisemitic attack, but by disqualifying the Jewish candidate’s entire ticket.

On May 1, the student senate at The New School voted to, purportedly, strip funding from its Hillel chapter, branding the organization complicit in “violations of international law.” It was the first time a student government in America moved to sever ties with the primary institution of Jewish communal life on a college campus.

This is not an isolated flare-up. It is a chapter in a documented national campaign, Drop Hillel, with the explicit goal of removing Hillel from campuses because of its Zionist affiliations. The Anti-Defamation League has recorded more than 100 incidents targeting Hillel in the 10 months following Oct. 7 alone.

These are not outliers. At Yale, visibly Jewish students were harassed while walking back from Shabbat dinner. At the University of South Florida, Jewish students were denied entry to a public campus event while non-Jewish students walked in. A Hillel survey found 83% of Jewish college students have experienced or witnessed antisemitism firsthand since Oct. 7.

The ceasefire did not stop this. The hostage deal did not stop this. This was never contingent on Israel’s war against Hamas.

University administrators already have the tools they need: codes of conduct, anti-discrimination policies, rules for recognized student organizations and election oversight procedures. What they lack is the will to use them.

I have testified before Congress. I sued the richest university in the world. I know what institutional cowardice looks like up close. I also know what accountability looks like because I forced it. Harvard settled, and a federal judge allowed that case to proceed after rejecting the university’s motion to dismiss. These things happen when people stop accepting excuses and start demanding enforcement.

Student governments were built to represent all students, not to be captured by factions that plan to exclude Jews from democratic participation. Universities were built to be institutions of learning, not battlegrounds where Jewish students must hide their identity to earn social acceptance.

The answer to every pressure to surrender our institutions and redefine our identity on other people’s terms has always been the same: a deeper commitment to our communities, to one another and to our unassailable right to define for ourselves what Jewish life means.