The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law has asked a US federal court to allow a whistleblower of antisemitism at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) to pursue her lawsuit anonymously and avoid acts of retaliation which may await those who come forward to report civil rights violations against Jews in higher education.

The request comes as an amendment to a suit the Brandeis Center filed earlier this year after its client, Jane Doe, sought representation in a civil suit alleging that FIT allowed what the nonprofit has described as “one of the most alarming antisemitic environments on a campus.” According to the complaint, students there traded antisemitic tropes, allegedly charging that Jews “literally control our school,” calling on the student body to “punch a Zionist,” and denying a Jewish student the presidency of a club by citing his identity as the reason.

Meanwhile, school officials weaponized procedures for investigating discrimination by allowing anti-Zionists to filed politically charged complaints which reversed the roles of victim and perpetrator in order to create new ways of harassing Jews, the Brandeis Center said.

Jane Doe has asked for the chance to tell her story behind the protection of a pseudonym, a courtesy that would minimize the disruption of her life that being forced into litigation has already caused.

“We routinely hear from Jewish students and professionals who are too afraid to come forward publicly,” Brandeis Center founder and chairman Kenneth Marcus said in a statement. “They fear being doxxed, stalked, defamed, or ostracized — and without anonymity, many will simply remain silent. Courts must not allow antisemitism to chill Jewish voices seeking justice.”

He added, “By preventing victims from filing complaints anonymously, more Jewish individuals will be forced to abandon their civil rights rather than face potential consequences from their abusers. Our nation’s legal system was created to protect the most vulnerable populations.”

The Brandeis Center suit comes amid a worsening campus antisemitism crisis that continues to roil Jewish students, faculty, and staff across the Western world.

On Wednesday, members of Toronto Metropolitan University’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter led a mob that spilled blood and caused the hospitalization of at least one Jewish student after forcibly breaching a venue in which the advocacy group Students Supporting Israel had convened for an event featuring veterans of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

The former soldiers agreed to meet Students Supporting Israel to discuss their experiences at a “private space” on campus which had to be reserved because the university denied the group a room reservation and, therefore, security personnel that would have been afforded to it. However, someone leaked the event location, leading to one of the most violent incidents of campus antisemitism since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel sparked a surge of anti-Jewish hostility in higher education.

By the time the attack ended, three people had been rushed to a local medical facility for treatment of injuries caused by a protester’s shattering the glazing of the venue’s door with a drill bit, a witness, student Ethan Elharrar, told The Algemeiner during an interview.

“No one should have known where this event was, but they were setting up when a couple of girls with keffiyehs walked in yelling ‘baby killers!’ and ‘free Palestine!’” Elharrar said. ‘Then more started coming in, and then we closed the door trying to make sure no one could come in, and then these individuals in masks then began banging on the door and trying to open the door.”

“Our universities don’t care, and it comes down to our government, which won’t do anything about it,” he continued. “They don’t want to support us. I’ve had maybe a dozen calls with the human rights division at the university, and they told me specifically that they won’t help with anything having to do with Israel.”

According to a study released by the Combat Antisemitism Movement’s Antisemitism Research Center, there were 53 antisemitic incidents on college campuses in the month of September alone, a 178 percent increase over the previous month, when 19 were recorded despite students not being present on campus during the summer holiday.

“This surge reflects the resumption of the academic year and the persistent problem of antisemitism at colleges and university,” the report said. “In France, students at Sorbonne University in Paris discussed a targeted shooting attack against Jewish students at the school. In Argentina, students at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba seized control of parts of the campus, protesting Israel’s ‘genocide’ of the Palestinians.”

The report added that the US saw 38 campus antisemitism incidents in September, several of which The Algemeiner reported.

In upstate New York, for example, law enforcement agencies filed hate crime charges against two Syracuse University students who they say forcefully gained entry into a Jewish fraternity’s off-campus house during Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and heaved a bag of pork at a wall, causing its contents to splatter across the floor. In Hanover, New Hampshire, an unknown person or group graffitied a swastika, the symbol of the Nazi Party, outside the dormitory of a Jewish student at Dartmouth College.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.