UPenn student who launched legal battle over ‘egregious’ anti-Semitism on campus claims

One 21-year-old student at the University of Pennsylvania refuses to remain silent in the face of rampant antisemitism on the Ivy League campus.

Instead, Eyal Yakoby, a senior, is among a growing number of students who have resorted to legal action to fight back against schools they believe are failing to protect Jewish students from hatred and harassment. 

In an exclusive interview with Dailymail.com, Yakoby accused the revered Ivy League institution of falling woefully short in addressing the escalating antisemitism within its hallowed halls and alleged the school had committed ‘egregious’ violations of federal civil rights law by selectively enforcing its rules of conduct.

Detailing some of the disturbing allegations leading up to the lawsuit, Yakoby claimed the school had failed to notify students about bomb threats against the university’s Jewish organization Hillel and allowed swastikas to be openly displayed.

‘If the university isn’t going to uphold the law and its own rules, then the court system will,’ the Israeli-American student vowed. 

Last week a group of six Jewish Harvard students filed a lawsuit against the college, demanding antisemitic professors be fired and students who troll them disciplined. The University of California, Berkeley and NYU have also been hit by similar litigation.  

Yakoby’s lawsuit comes just weeks after Penn President Liz Magill’s shameful testimony at a congressional hearing on antisemitism. 

Fierce backlash swiftly led to her resignation in December, with some donors also withdrawing their support.  

But amid a surge in campus antisemitism, marked by protests and both verbal and physical attacks, students are now also taking a stand through the legal system.

Yakoby is among several concerned students who have recently filed lawsuits against their schools under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to combat the rising tide of antisemitism on college campuses.

After expressing concern about rising hostility towards Jews following the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel and urging the school to address the issue, Yakoby said he felt ignored.

‘I’ve sent 15 emails to the school begging them to take action before any sort of legal battle came into play,’ he said. 

‘In most cases there was no response whatsoever or it was ‘we’re taking it seriously’ – but every time I was told we were taking it seriously, there would be another major incident,’ he added. ‘I’m not talking just a small thing, I’m talking about a major incident happening.’

The lawsuit, filed under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on December 5, claims Penn created a persistently hostile educational environment for the students.

The complaint cited instances of antisemitic slurs such as when a mob, including some non-students, rampaged across Penn’s campus, chanted for the destruction of Israel and scrawled the words ‘intifada,’ ‘blood thirsty’ and ‘shame’ on the walls of Penn buildings.

Shocking acts of antisemitic graffiti across campus saw slogans such as ‘Intifada,’ ‘Avenge Gaza’ and ‘The Jews R Nazis’ scrawled on a building next to a Jewish fraternity. 

Yakoby emphasized disparities in the university’s response to incidents, and called for consistency, especially regarding controversial speakers.

The complaint also claims the university hired ‘rabidly antisemitic professors’ and ignored pleas for protection.

Yakoby pointed out instances where professors endorsed terror organizations and the university’s inconsistent actions regarding controversial speakers. 

‘The university canceled Narendra Modi from speaking on campus because it made Indian students feel uncomfortable and yet they’re fine with hosting Mark Lamont Hill who was fired from CNN for antisemitism,’ he said. ‘And Roger Waters, who was described by the city of Frankfurt as the most notorious antisemite in the world.’ 

‘So consistency is if you draw a line that anytime a group is offended for a speaker coming, then you made your bed here, you have to lie in it,’ Yakoby stated. ‘Or we should say there’s going to speakers that make you uncomfortable. That’s the real world. But we haven’t been upholding them.’

‘So why is it free speech sometimes and not free speech always? I think what the university should have done is been consistent,’ he added. 

Yakoby described one incident that prompted him to take action.

He said: ‘I was eating lunch in Hillel and there were bomb sniffing dogs walking around and I didn’t think too much about it until the university sent out an email later in the day saying that there were threats made against the Hillel. 

‘The university was made aware about this at 6:30 am and they didn’t notify the community until 3:30 pm.

‘That’s when it registered to me that someone has to take immediate action to safeguard the community because the fact that they wouldn’t tell anyone and allow people to just enter and exit a building with an active bomb threat told me a lot.’

He also detailed how Associate Professor of Arabic Literature Huda Fakhreddine had reposted an article about Yakoby that described him as an Israeli foreign agent and propagandist. 

‘This is a professor at Penn … How am I supposed to take her class? If that’s not targeting then I don’t know what is,’ he said.

Yakoby also told how another professor in UPenn’s Middle East Center, Anne Norton, had posted antisemitic content on her Twitter account. 

Despite a 400 percent increase in antisemitism since the brutal massacre against Israelis on October 7, she claimed that ‘playing the victim’ is what ‘Jews are best at.’ 

Expressing disappointment in the university’s stance on protecting students, Yakoby underscored the need for immediate action.

He emphasized that the lawsuit serves as a way to exert pressure on the university when other means, such as emails and communication, yielded insufficient responses.

The lawsuit aims to secure injunctive relief, compelling the University of Pennsylvania to cease discriminatory policies against Jewish students.

Additionally, it calls for preventative measures, including the termination of faculty and staff deemed antisemitic, expulsion of students engaged in antisemitic behavior, and the implementation of mandatory antisemitism training for the Penn community.

The lawsuit also seeks damages, including tuition refunds.

The plaintiffs argue that Penn has neglected to enforce its own policies safeguarding Jewish students from discrimination, harassment, and intimidation, citing violations of seven university policies, including the Code of Student Conduct, Guidelines on Open Expression, Penn’s Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action Policy, and the Faculty Handbook.

The case docket details over 100 incidents of antisemitism on campus since 2015.

It alleges that the Palestine Writes Literature Festival set the stage for a ‘wave of antisemitism’ in the fall, noting that 25 festival speakers, including Roger Waters and Marc Lamont Hill, were identified as antisemitic by the Anti-Defamation League.

The students are being represented by legal teams from the Law Offices of Eric A. Shore and Kasowitz Benson Torres LLP.

Dailymail.com contacted UPenn for a comment. 

This is not the first time Penn has been accused of antisemitism in recent months. 

The school is facing a civil rights complaint after it was accused of being a ‘magnet for anti-Semites.’

Another UPenn student, Noah Rubin, detailed the harassment and anti-Semitism Jewish and pro-Israel students have faced on campus. 

One video showed a group of students at UPenn chanting in favor of ‘Intifada revolution.’

Rubin hammered the Ivy League institution as a ‘climate of fear’ amid antisemitic protests and language litter the campus. 

‘We’re fed up with the inaction from the administration. And frankly, we’re fed up with all the enablers of this — which includes professors who are antisemitic and who have participated in, organized with, and even supported them financially,’ he alleged. 

In November, the school also came under fire over anti-Semitism on campus after anti-Jewish slogans were projected onto three of the school’s buildings.

‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,’ read one message splashed across the John M Huntsman hall on Wednesday night. The slogan demands the land from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea, meaning the end of the State of Israel.

Meanwhile, six Jewish students from Harvard University announced last week they are suing the school, claiming it has become a ‘bastion of anti-semitism and hatred’ with descriptions of how they have been bullied since the university’s president Claudine Gay resigned.

The lawsuit, filed in Massachusetts, alleges that President Claudine Gay’s congressional comments about campus antisemitism are just the tip of the iceberg of the school’s problem.

Gay stepped down on January 2 after sparking fury and threats of a donor boycott with her remarks. By then, she had also been accused of plagiarism.

The school stood by her, refusing to accept that it had an antisemitism problem. In her resignation letter, Gay said she had been the victim of racist threats because she is a black woman. 

The lawsuit, filed by student Alexander Kestenbaum and five unnamed others from Students Against Antisemitism, describes how Gay’s student supporters bullied them and other Jewish kids after her resignation.

In internal chat rooms, Jewish students were labeled ‘pedo loving Zionists’, according to the lawsuit.

Some pro-Palestine students said they also supported Hamas’ attack and considered it a ‘moment of decolonization.’

The students say the issue existed before Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, but became more ‘severe’ afterwards.

They are now asking for students who have threatened them to be expelled, and for anti-Israel professors to be fired.

In November, three students also sued NYU for failing to protect them against ‘festering Jewish hatred permeating the school’ that has accelerated amid the Israel-Hamas war.

Jewish pupils Bella Ingber, Sabrina Maslavi and Saul Tawil accused their college of ‘egregious civil rights violations’ by allegedly allowing other students to chant anti-Semitic slogans like ‘gas the Jews’ and ‘Hitler was right’ without repercussions.

Their lawsuit, filed in New York federal court, says the college has been giving ‘mobs of students carte blanche to harass and intimidate NYU’s Jewish population’ through its ‘actions and inactions’ over the past month.

It alleges ‘the age-old virus of antisemitism is alive and well at New York University’ and has grown worse after Hamas’ horrific October 7 incursion into Israel brought tensions to a boiling point.

Ingber, Maslavi and Tawil blasted the university for allegedly violating the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color or national origin.

They say they tried to address their concerns, but administrators brushed them off and said they should call a hotline for students with ’emotional challenges.’

NYU contested their claims, telling DailyMail.com at the time they ‘do not accurately describe conditions on our campus,’ and that it ‘looks forward to setting the record straight’ in court.

But the plaintiffs say antisemitism has been a ‘growing institutional problem’ on American university campuses for decades – and NYU is ‘among the worst.’

‘This case arises from NYU’s egregious civil rights violations that have created a hostile educational environment in which plaintiffs and other Jewish NYU students have been subjected to pervasive acts of hatred, discrimination, harassment, and intimidation,’ the lawsuit reads.

‘For years, NYU—acutely aware of ongoing and disgraceful acts of anti-Jewish bigotry—has reacted with, at best, deliberate indifference, refusing to enforce its own anti-discrimination and conduct policies that it readily applies to protect other targets of bigotry, and instead fostering an environment in which students and faculty members are permitted to repeatedly abuse, malign, vilify, and threaten Jewish students with impunity.

‘Regularly confronted with such genocidal chants as, ‘Hitler was right,’ ‘gas the Jews,’ ‘death to kikes,’ and ‘from the river to the sea,’ and other abuse, plaintiffs not only have been deprived of the ability and opportunity to fully and meaningfully participate in NYU’s educational and other programs, but they have suffered and have been put at severe risk of extreme emotional and physical injury.’

Inger, Maslavi and Tawil say antisemitism on university campuses increased by 40 percent and that NYU has long been aware of the ‘festering Jewish hatred permeating the school.’

They claim the increase in alleged issue was allowed to happen because rather than implementing ‘urgently needed protective and disciplinary measures to restore campus order and safety’, administrators have ‘gaslighted the Jewish students.