Judge dismisses Haverford College’s anti-Semitism lawsuit

Lawsuit filed by students regarding anti-Semitism in Haverford A federal court judge this week dismissed the college without prejudice. This allows plaintiffs file an amended complaint which they say they will.

A call complaint Judge Gerald Austin McHugh of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania said the case was “rampant and disorganized” and he couldn’t even review the relevant facts.

The complaint, he wrote, “details every frustration and disagreement of Jewish students and faculty that has occurred at Haverford over the past year” and “reads more like an editorial than a legal complaint.”

“It spills the ink pages into long ramblings about events on other college campuses and ideological debates,” McHugh wrote, “instead of isolating incidents of harassment and logically linking them to the elements of a hostile environment claim.”

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The complaint was filed in May Deborah’s projecta public think tank that advocates for the rights of Jews who face discrimination in the education system. It was submitted on behalf of a group of Jewish students who identify as Jews at Haverford. Only one is named, Ellie Landau, a high school basketball player.

The lawsuit was filed amid rising tensions on many college campuses, including Haverford, following the Israel-Gaza war.

In their complaint, the plaintiffs alleged that the college discriminated against Jews by tolerating anti-Semitic speech and failing to provide adequate support for Jewish students, some of whom were shunned on campus and barred from group discussions where the war was discussed. The college, the group said, has failed to condemn Hamas attacks on Israel, even though it has issued statements in support of other minority groups, including black people, following the police killing of George Floyd.

Among other allegations, the group said the professor called students who support Israel “racist genocidals,” which the college did not dispute, and that the school allowed students to hold an event that claimed Israel had deliberately infected Palestinians with the coronavirus. .

Haverford College did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the dismissal of the lawsuit.

Laurie Lowenthal Marcus, legal director of the Deborah Project, said the plaintiffs will file an amended complaint within 30 days. The judge “basically gave us a road map” of what he wanted to see in the complaint, she said.

“We obviously have everything he wants to see,” she said. “We will write a simplified complaint.”

McHugh, the judge, concluded: “The court has no doubt that the response to events in Israel and Palestine has created many uncomfortable moments for Jewish students at Haverford, as on other campuses. But that in itself is not a violation of federal law.”