UCLA to pay $6M to settle discrimination complaints including campus ‘Jew Exclusion Zone’

WASHINGTON — The University of California, Los Angeles, will pay more than $6 million to settle discrimination complaints brought by Jewish faculty and students against the school in 2024 — which included letting antisemtic protesters build a “Jew Exclusion Zone” to block them from campus.

The university agreed early Tuesday to enter into a consent judgment and fork over $6.13 million to the plaintiffs who brought the case, apparently the largest private settlement of its kind.

If the settlement receives final approval from a federal judge, it will be in effect for the next 15 years.

The lawsuit was filed last year after the Board of Regents and Chancellor Gene Block admitted in congressional testimony that the Westwood school had taken no action against demonstrators who blockaded campus.

Asked during a House Education and Workforce Committee hearing in May 2024 about viral video footage showing keffiyeh-clad demonstrators stopping a Jewish undergrad from entering the Westwood campus, Block said that preventing students’ access to university grounds based on their race, religion or ethnicity “could be” an expellable offense.

Block also told “Squad” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) in the same hearing that “any part of campus is open to students, so blocking him was really inappropriate.”

“This encampment was against policy, this violated time, place, and manner,” he added.

The encampment was one of several that popped up at US universities and colleges in spring 2024 — and devolved into a violent clash between anti-Israel demonstrators and law enforcement.

More than 200 were arrested after cops declared an unlawful assembly.

Yitzchok Frankel, a third-year law student at UCLA, was one of several plaintiffs represented by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty in the complaint, having faced antisemitic harassment for wearing his kippah.

A Jewish professor and other students also signed on, including Eden Shemuelian, who wasn’t able to attend law school orientation events because of the hatred on campus.

Security officers were stationed around the tent city, barred Jewish UCLA community members from entering without “an approved wristband” and allowed bike racks to be used to seal the demonstrators off from the rest of campus, noted Becket president Mark Rienzi.

“The plaintiffs brought this suit because they were victims of abhorrent and unimaginably bad antisemitism on a public university campus,” Rienzi told The Post. “That kind of bending the knee to the antisemites is impermissible … We should never see that again in America, and I hope we never will.”

Last August, a Los Angeles federal judge tore into UCLA’s Board of Regents for denying it had a responsibility to protect Jewish students, granting Frankel and other plaintiffs a preliminary injunction to maintain equal access to the school’s programs and activities.

“In the year 2024, in the United States of America, in the State of California, in the City of Los Angeles, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith,” wrote US District Judge Mark Scarsi in a scathing, 16-page order (italics original).

“This fact is so unimaginable and so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom that it bears repeating, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith,” the judge added.

A subsequent report released by UCLA’s interim chancellor in October 2024 confirmed that antisemitism had been allowed to fester on campus.

Tuesday’s consent judgment echoes Scarsi’s order last year in stating: “For purposes of this order, all references to the exclusion of Jewish students, faculty, and/or staff shall include exclusion of Jewish students, faculty, and/or staff based on religious beliefs concerning the Jewish state of Israel.”

President Trump’s Department of Justice issued a statement of interest in the case this past March after UCLA moved to dismiss the complaint.

The US Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights also investigated discrimination complaints against UCLA last year, while the Anti-Defamation League gave the school a “D” letter grade for its handling of antisemitism on campus.

Mary Osako, UCLA’s vice chancellor for strategic communications, claimed last year that Scarsi’s ruling “would improperly hamstring our ability to respond to events on the ground and to meet the needs” of the student community.

“UCLA is committed to fostering a campus culture where everyone feels welcome and free from intimidation, discrimination, and harassment,” she added at the time.

UCLA reps did not immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday.