(JTA) — The Department of Justice filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday accusing the leadership of UCLA of allowing an antisemitic work environment on campus, intensifying the Trump administration’s long-running scrutiny of the Los Angeles campus.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in the Central District of California, alleges UCLA failed to protect Jewish and Israeli faculty and staff from harassment following the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel and the protests that spread across American universities afterward.

The complaint was filed the same day President Donald Trump is scheduled to deliver the first State of the Union address of his second term, in which he is expected to cite the administration’s broader confrontations with higher education institutions as evidence of its successes. It also comes roughly three months after nine Justice Department attorneys resigned from the government’s University of California antisemitism investigation, telling the Los Angeles Times they believed the probe had become politicized.

The lawsuit says that antisemitic conduct at UCLA became widespread after Oct. 7 and persisted through the 2023-24 academic year. According to the lawsuit, Jewish and Israeli employees were subjected to threats, classroom disruptions, antisemitic graffiti and, at times, were blocked from parts of campus during protests.

The government places particular emphasis on the spring 2024 Royce Quad encampment, when pro-Palestinian demonstrators established a tent protest in the center of campus. The Justice Department alleges UCLA failed to enforce its own campus rules, allowing protests that disrupted university operations and contributed to what it describes as a hostile workplace.

“Based on our investigation, UCLA administrators allegedly allowed virulent anti-Semitism to flourish on campus,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a DOJ press release announcing the lawsuit. Harmeet K. Dhillon, who leads the department’s Civil Rights Division, described the alleged incidents as “a mark of shame” if proven true.

UCLA officials rejected the government’s characterization, pointing instead to changes made under Chancellor Julio Frenk.

“As Chancellor Frenk has made clear: Antisemitism is abhorrent and has no place at UCLA or anywhere,” vice chancellor of strategic communications Mary Osako said in a statement. She cited investments in campus safety, the launch of UCLA’s Initiative to Combat Antisemitism, the reorganization of the university’s civil rights office, the hiring of a dedicated Title VI and Title VII officer and strengthened protest policies.

“We stand firmly by the decisive actions we have taken to combat antisemitism in all its forms, and we will vigorously defend our efforts and our unwavering commitment to providing a safe, inclusive environment for all members of our community,” Osako said.

Frenk, who is Jewish, has spoken publicly about antisemitism in higher education. In an essay published by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency last year, he invoked the history of German universities under Nazism, warning that those institutions “never recovered after driving Jews out” and urging American colleges to confront antisemitism while preserving academic freedom and open debate.

The new lawsuit follows earlier legal battles over campus protests at UCLA. In July 2025, the university agreed to pay $6.13 million to settle a lawsuit brought by Jewish students and a Jewish professor who said demonstrators had blocked access to parts of campus. Under that agreement, UCLA said it would ensure protesters could not restrict movement or access to university spaces.

Campus tensions over speech and security have continued more recently. Bari Weiss, the journalist and founder of The Free Press, withdrew this month from a scheduled appearance at UCLA as part of the Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture series. Weiss had been invited to speak on “The Future of Journalism” but canceled the event, citing security concerns ahead of the lecture.

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A protester uses a pole to break a window at Milano Centrale railway station, during a demonstration that is part of a nationwide “Let’s Block Everything” protest in solidarity with Gaza, with activists also calling for a halt to arms shipments to Israel, in Milan, Italy, Sept. 22, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Claudia Greco

Antisemitism in Italy surged to record levels last year, according to newly published figures, as Jews and Israelis across Europe continued to face a relentlessly hostile environment including harassment, vandalism, and targeted attacks.

In Italy, the Milan-based CDEC Foundation (Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation) confirmed that antisemitic incidents in the country almost reached four digits for the first time last year.

Of 1,492 reports submitted through official monitoring channels, the CDEC formally classified a record high 963 cases as antisemitic, according to the European Jewish Congress and Union of Italian Jewish Communities (UCEI), the main representative body of Jews in Italy.

By comparison, there were 877 recorded incidents in 2024, preceded by 453 such outrages in 2023 and just 241 in 2022. The data fits with several reports showing antisemitism surged across the Western world, especially the US and Europe, following the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.

“The main ideological matrix that has fueled hatred against Jews is anti-Semitism linked to Israel – i.e., the transfer of anti-Jewish myths, such as blood libel, racism by election, and hatred of mankind,” the organization stated.

In May, for example, a restaurant in Naples ejected an Israeli family, telling them “Zionists are not welcome here.” Months earlier, demonstrators at a January protest in Bologna vandalized a synagogue, painting “Justice for a free Gaza.”

Most of the incidents, 643, occurred online on digital platforms, while 320 involved physical acts such as graffiti, vandalism, and desecration of synagogues in addition to discrimination, threats, and assaults.

The surge in antisemitism came amid multiple surveys showing pervasive antisemitic attitudes among the Italian public.

Around 15 percent of Italians consider physical attacks on Jewish people “entirely or fairly justifiable,” according to one survey published in September.

The survey, conducted on Sept. 24-26 by the pollster SWG among a national sample of 800 adults, found that 18 percent of those interviewed also believe antisemitic graffiti on walls and other public spaces is legitimate.

About one-fifth of respondents said it was reasonable to attack professors who expressed pro-Israeli positions or for businesses to reject Israeli customers.

Months earlier, in June, the Italian research institute Eurispes, in partnership with Pasquale Angelosanto, the national coordinator for the fight against antisemitism, polled a representative sample of the country’s population and found that 37.9 percent of Italians believe that Jews “only think about accumulating money” while 58.2 percent see Jews as “a closed community.”

About 40 percent either did not know or did not believe that 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust, and the majority of respondents — 54 percent — regarded antisemitic crimes as isolated incidents and not part of any broader trend.

The report also showed elevated levels of anti-Israel belief among younger Italians, with 50.85 percent of those 18-24 thinking that “Jews in Palestine took others’ territories.”

The Institute for Jewish Policy Research estimates the number of Jews in Italy as ranging from 26,800 to 48,910 depending on which standards of observance one selects. Eurispes places the number at 30,000.

In January, the Anti-Defamation League released the newest results of its Global 100 survey which found that 26 percent of Italians — 13.1 million adults — embrace six or more antisemitic stereotypes.

The man who piloted the Israeli bobsled team to its first-ever Olympic Games defended the athlete-swapping scheme that led to the team’s removal from competition, saying in an interview with the Forward that the Israeli sporting authority blew the incident out of proportion.

The Olympic Committee of Israel said it pulled the team after learning that a member had faked an illness in order to allow the substitution of a teammate in his place.

AJ Edelman, the team’s captain, did not contest that account. He said that the substitution was unanimously agreed to by the group, calling it “essentially a normal maneuver” at the Olympics given what he called a “somewhat arbitrary” rule that allows alternates to compete only when an athlete is medically unable to continue.

The reason it didn’t work, he said, was that the teammate chosen to fake sick tipped off the Israeli committee, which needed to approve the substitution.

“We’re not the only team to have made that sort of substitution in the competition,” Edelman, 34, said in a phone interview with the Forward from Prague, shortly after midnight local time Tuesday. “We are the only team for which the person then was just upset that he was the one doing it and made a scene about it.”

The swap would have made Ward Fawarsy, who was traveling with the squad as an alternate, the first Druze Israeli to appear in Olympic competition. Instead, the committee pulled the team before its third race, cutting short Israel’s run with two heats remaining.

The Israeli committee said in a statement that it had reported the matter to the International Olympic Committee and would conduct an investigation after the Games.

The exit — which Edelman characterized as a voluntary withdrawal — blighted a budding underdog success story. The team, nicknamed “Shul Runnings” (a play on the title of a popular movie about the 1988 Jamaican team), had scrapped its way into the Olympics without financial support from Israel — largely thanks to the perseverance of Edelman, its indefatigable spearhead, who told the Forward he saw the team as a “holy endeavor.”

Without a national sports program behind him, Edelman, a former MIT hockey goaltender, had recruited Israeli athletes from other sports to the project — Zisman was a former pole vaulter, Fawarsy played rugby — and crowdfunded relentlessly to pay for their training. He said this year was the first he broke even, with the team’s costs totaling to around $300,000.

After narrowly missing qualification in 2022 and 2026, Israel broke through in January, receiving an invitation after the United Kingdom decided to send only one team instead of two.

But at the end of a whirlwind month in which the team was burglarized at its pre-Olympic lodgings, booed at the opening ceremony and drawn into controversy involving multiple foreign broadcasters, Israel’s withdrawal left it below teams that crashed in the final results for 4-man bobsled, marked “Did Not Start” on the scoresheet.

Israel also finished last out of 26 teams in 2-man sled.

Taking the plunge

The fake illness plan was set in motion after the second of four heats in the 4-man competition, with Israel in 24th place out of 27 and medaling out of reach.

Olympic rules generally do not allow alternates to compete unless a team member has to withdraw due to injury or illness. The idea to fake an injury, according to Edelman, had been Zisman’s earlier in the year, when it appeared that he, not Fawarsy, would be the alternate. Edelman said he nixed the proposal at the time.

But in Italy, with Fawarsy the alternate due to a pre-Olympics injury, Edelman went for the switch.

“Ward’s inclusion was important because of his years of service to the team, because of who he was and because of who he represented,” Edelman said. “I was quite proud that a group of young Israelis took a look at their brother, their teammate, and said, ‘This is important for you. This is important for us.’”

After the group agreed to the plan, the question became which team member would drop out.

According to Edelman, Zisman thought it should be Menachem Chen, because he had raced with Edelman in the 2-man. But Zisman, Edelman said, “was the weakest performer. And given that Ward’s position was his position in the sled, they were somewhat interchangeable.”

Zisman appeared to begrudgingly go along with the arrangement at first, undergoing a medical exam and signing an affidavit to support the substitution request, according to Israeli officials. But Edelman said that during that process, Zisman volunteered that “another athlete should do it instead, and at that point Israel made it what it became.”

The Olympic Committee of Israel said in a statement that Zisman had admitted to the head of the delegation that he had acted improperly, forcing the committee to withdraw the request and disqualify the move.

“The Olympic Committee of Israel views any deviation from the Olympic values as unacceptable and cannot accept inappropriate behavior,” the OCI statement added. “It should be emphasized that, up to this point, the participation of the bobsleigh delegation has taken place in the spirit of sport and without any violations by the athletes.”

The Israel committee did not respond to questions sent by the Forward, and Zisman did not respond to a request for comment.

Edelman flatly disagreed with the committee’s decision.

“We felt that it was completely fine, given that it was essentially a normal maneuver,” Edelman said. “It was really blown into something that we hadn’t expected. Israel insisted on sort of making an example of the situation.”

Iced out of Italy

The incident capped a Winter Olympics in which Israel appeared in more headlines due to controversy than competition. The country did not medal at Milan Cortina — it has never medaled at a Winter Games — and most of its athletes ended competition in the bottom half of contestants.

The first Israeli delegation to compete at the Winter Olympics since the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, was also a frequent target at the Games. Much of the ire from foreign press and other athletes targeted Edelman, who has been a vocal defender of Israel’s war in Gaza on social media.

As Israel was racing in the 2-man event, a commentator for a Swiss TV broadcast listed Edelman’s comments and actions related to the war, which it said were “in support of the genocide in Gaza.” The network later apologized.

An Italian commentator also landed in hot water after he told someone off camera but on live air to avoid the Israeli team.

Edelman said the hostility extended to his fellow bobsled athletes, and claimed that one had called the team “baby killers.” He declined to name the athlete or say what country he represented.

“I take a look at a guy like that, who has made the Olympics a couple of times, and I go, ‘What a loser,’” Edelman said. “He spends his time worrying about Israelis or Jews? What a total loser. So I just don’t put too much stock in it.”

Edelman did not want to highlight the role Fawarsy’s ethnic background played in the team’s decision to break the rules, saying doing so “minimizes him as an athlete and it minimizes him as a person, into something demographic.” At the same time, he appeared to allude to Fawarsy serving in the IDF as a reason for his inclusion.

On Oct. 12, 2023, Edelman posted a picture of Fawarsy to Instagram, writing in the caption that his teammate was “serving on the front lines right now.” (He edited the caption earlier this month to, “Love Ward. Send him a message with your support!”)

“He served Israel with distinction and a level of heroism that all of us aspire to have in our lives,” Edelman told the Forward, adding, “Ward earned it and deserved it as much, if not more, than any of the other guys.”

Fawarsy did not respond to an inquiry.

Frozen fallout

Few in the public sphere have found inspiration in the team’s intentional rule-breaking, even done in service of a Druze athlete’s achievement. Israel’s i24 news broadcast called it a “dramatic and disappointing development.” The Times of Israel said the team’s “legacy was tainted.”

And David Greaves, the president of the Israeli Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation, told Times of Israel that he was “deeply disappointed in the actions of the team.”

Edelman maintained that the public reaction reflected a lack of context about how the sport tends to operate.

He compared the move to a football player seeking medical treatment to stop the clock or buy time for fatigued teammates. But that ploy, he noted, conferred a competitive advantage his team’s swap had not.

The rule that alternates could not compete was arbitrary in Edelman’s view because it was mostly designed to limit the census of the Olympic Village. He said that other teams had similarly broken the rule with none the wiser.

“When you take a look at the sport from the outside and don’t understand how the sport works, what the usual behavior is in the sport and why things are the way they are,” he said, “the decision seems like a very heavy risk to have taken on. The move is not unusual. It is not uncommon whatsoever.”

It did not appear that any other men’s bobsled teams made substitutions at the 2026 Games. It was unclear how many alternates ultimately competed at Milan Cortina.

At least one alternate was substituted in in another sport: Rich Ruohonen, an athlete on the U.S. curling team, entered competition late in a match with his team facing a near-insurmountable deficit. His throws made Ruohonen the oldest-ever U.S. Winter Olympian. It was unclear how he was able to substitute, and U.S. broadcasters embraced the moment. (Ruohonen could not be reached for comment.)

In a statement to X following news of the team’s withdrawal, Edelman took accountability for the decision and said he believed he had been “putting the country first.” And while he believed Israel was held to a higher standard than other countries, he was not sure that should have influenced his team’s choices.

“A lot of people have asked, ‘Would you do it again?’” Edelman told the Forward. “I think it would have been very hard in the future for all of us to take a look back on it and go, ‘You know, every other team does this sort of thing — we were just not going to get Ward in there because we’re looked at extra harshly if something goes wrong.’

“Again, it’s tough to explain to outsiders who don’t know the sport,” he continued. “So I feel very comfortable and confident in the decision that the team unanimously took.”

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