Joey Fishkin has a lengthy Balkinization post about the protests at UCLA and the way the story of the “Jew Exclusion Zone”–the basis for a private lawsuit (by the Becket Fund) and $ 6m settlement and the latest Trump attack–was false, fabricated by non-UCLA students (seemingly adults) looking for a way to break protests presenting a message they did not like. Worth a read.
UCLA is unique because the controversy went beyond value disagreements (“the university is not doing enough to stop antisemitism”), here we have a testable factual proposition (“the protest actively prevented Jews from entering a certain space”). But the absence of a trial may mean that factual proposition will never be tested.
Posted by Howard Wasserman on September 3, 2025 at 11:37 AM