The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) has provided the federal government with the private information of more than 150 students, staff, and faculty.
The move comes in response to the Trump administration’s investigation into alleged campus antisemitism, which is widely viewed as a means to crack down on campus Palestine activism.
The Daily Californian reports that the school’s Office of Legal Affairs sent emails to those impacted on September 4.
“As part of its investigation, OCR required production of comprehensive documents, including files and reports related to alleged antisemitic incidents,” the email read. “This notice is to inform you that, as required by law and as per directions provided by the UC systemwide Office of General Counsel (OGC), your name was included in reports as part of the documents provided by OGC to OCR for its investigation on August 18, 2025.”
Students say they received the notification two weeks after their info had been handed over to the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights.
“It is obvious that the Department of Education and UC Berkeley are using the very office meant to protect civil rights as a Trojan horse to silence anyone who condemns the genocide of the Palestinian people, target those who reject the conflation of Judaism with the genocidal Zionist regime, and disempower those of us who call on our academic institutions to uphold their integrity and honor the BDS mandates that their communities demand,” said the university’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter in a statement on Instagram.
Judith Butler, a distinguished professor at the university’s graduate school and the Hannah Arendt chair at the European Graduate School, was one of the individuals whose information was given to the administration.
“Gaza is the background for this particular issue at UC Berkeley, because the students, the faculty, the staff who have opposed genocide or who have supported Palestinian rights and freedoms have been consistently accused of antisemitism, even though there is no good evidence that antisemitism is rampant on campus,” the gender studies scholar told Amy Goodman in a recent interview with Democracy Now. “To take a position against genocide is certainly not an antisemitic thing to do. Most Jews are against genocide, and we were taught to be against genocide, and we were taught, as well, that “never again” is a slogan that should apply to all people.”
“So, but a genocide can’t take place without suppressing political speech and without suppressing educational efforts that will explain what genocide is and how it’s happening now,” they continued. “So, part of what we’re seeing is the accusation of antisemitism being used as a cudgel to suppress speech, to threaten people. And it is, of course, appalling to me as a UC Berkeley faculty member who put 30 years into that institution, or almost, to see that the administration would hand over names and files, when we, ourselves, many of us, at least, most of us, have never been apprised of the allegation. We still don’t know what the allegation is. We don’t have any access to the file.”
Butler’s sentiments were echoed in an open letter to University of California President James Milliken and Chancellor Richard Lyons from David Lloyd, a Distinguished Professor of English at UC Riverside and a former professor at the school’s Berkeley location.
“You have shabbily failed the university that you were appointed to protect and whose interests and traditions you are called on to advance,” wrote Lloyd. “Since the list was forwarded under cover of secrecy, it is too late to retract it and the damage you have inflicted on too many of your community should weigh on your consciences henceforth. Hopefully you are capable of learning some lesson from your failure in this instance and will commit yourself to furthering the true mission of the university, as your faculty do daily, under the extreme pressures and threats that they have faced over the last few years and which your own actions have now only worsened.”
In January, President Trump signed an executive order creating a multi-agency task force to allegedly combat antisemitism on college campuses. The administration initially launched an investigation into five universities, but expanded it to 55 schools after additional complaints were filed.
In March, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights sent a letter warning them of “potential enforcement actions” if they don’t comply with actions under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits schools from receiving federal funds if they discriminate against students based on race, color, and national origin.
“The Department is deeply disappointed that Jewish students studying on elite U.S. campuses continue to fear for their safety amid the relentless antisemitic eruptions that have severely disrupted campus life for more than a year. University leaders must do better,” Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a press release at the time.
The University of California is not the only institution to comply with Trump’s crackdown on Palestine activism.
After the administration cut $400 million of Columbia University’s funding over an alleged failure to address antisemitism, the school’s Board of Trustees restructured the University Judicial Board to prohibit student representation and eliminate faculty oversight of protest-related disciplinary cases.
Shortly after, Columbia expelled and revoked the degrees of more than 70 students for participating in a Gaza protest at the Butler Library.
In July, The Guardian reported that multiple schools had begun “antisemitism trainings” in response to Trump’s threats. Many of those trainings were designed by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a pro-Israel organization that openly conflates antisemitism with anti-Zionism.
“I think that, in fact, we have two different issues here. One, a system like the University of California is dependent on federal funding, and it doesn’t want to lose that funding, and it sees the threat made against everyone else, and itself has received a threat, if it’s not compliant with this investigation, it will — it will, very possibly, be deprived of federal funding,” Butler explained in their Democracy Now interview. “At the same time, it has to accept the equation of political speech against genocide as antisemitic. It has to accept that and patrol for it and enforce it. So, we have both the fear of losing money, on the one hand, and a complicity with the U.S. support for the genocidal conditions and ongoing practices in Gaza.”
So why aren’t our American and Palestinian anti-Zionist students and teachers with Jewish Y-Chromosome tests in Court filing lawsuits? The statutes and Executive Orders on Antisemitism have always included a prohibition of the IHRC definition ever being employed to violate any constitutional right. That wording suggests a government sanctioned religious test isn’t inherently unconstitutional. How do you get around both the “No Religious Test Clause” in Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, and the 1st Amendment list of religious freedoms, and prohibtions of any government establishment of religion or abridgment of free speech, the press, assembly, and petition? The government simply “can’t get there from here”.
We’ve all seen the three card Monte trick, where you have to follow the queen. It’s never where you think it is though, because the card handler is a master at sleight of hand. The premise of Kenneth L. Marcus, “Anti-Zionism as Racism: Campus Anti-Semitism and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 15 Wm. & Mary Bill Rts. J. 837) worked in exactly the same way.
The US Constitution prohibits religious tests and the government making laws that violated the listed prohibitions in the 1st Amendment. That’s why Congress excluded religion from the scope of applicability and the jurisdiction of officials who administer Title VI in the first place. Marcus obscured those facts by defining an imaginary and exclusively Zionist Jewish race. But in 1929 the Jewish Agency for Palestine reserved 50 percent of the seats of its own governing council for non-Zionist Jews who lacked that racial or ethnic charateristic. See: Zionist Congress Approves Text of Jewish Agency Constitution –JTA. Marcus suggested that the prohibition of the government adopting a religious test for Zionism was somehow “ambiguous” and could be made lawful, despite the black letter prohibitions.
In 1895 the founders of Reform Judaism said Judaism was a Mosaic religion that anyone could adopt, regardless of the fact their ancestors had never lived in Judea. They stressed that the ancient Judeans had been absorbed into the local population of the Roman Empire and Palestine. They ceased to be a nation. A Zionist state was impossible because the Palestinian Jews included Christians, Muslims, or non-religious citizens too. See “A Jewish State Impossible”, Rabbi Isaac M. Wise, NY Time