‘Get Rid of the Zionists Here’

“I’m not gonna argue with you. This is a party.” That was Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California at Berkeley’s law school, remonstrating on Tuesday night with activists who had launched a protest at a backyard dinner that he and his wife, the Berkeley law professor Catherine Fisk, were hosting at their house for third-year law students. The protesters, led by Malak Afaneh of Law Students for Justice in Palestine, were themselves third-year law students; they had RSVP’d for the dinner, somehow sneaking in a microphone and amplifier.

As is the rule now, the incident was recorded on a phone camera. The video went viral. It shows Afaneh standing on a short set of steps linking the backyard to the house and beginning a speech while Chemerinsky repeatedly asks her to “please leave” and Fisk attempts to pull the mic from her hand. The dialogue between the protesters and the professors has the surreal quality so characteristic of these interactions, in which the impassioned formulas of militant protest rhetoric meet a resistance alternately impatient and puzzled.

“We are talking,” Afaneh says, “about Ramadan and the holy month of Ramadan as Muslim students. We refuse to break our fast on the blood of Palestinian people. The UC has committed sending $2 billion to weapons manufacturers.” Fisk responds: “I have nothing to do with what the UC does. This is my house.” When Chemerinsky tells another law student that “it is incredibly rude of you to abuse our hospitality in this way,” the student responds: “There is a genocide going on. You haven’t done anything about divestment.” Chemerinsky: “I don’t invest in anything.”

Afaneh insisted that her speech at Chemerinsky and Fisk’s home was protected by the First Amendment; she cited advice she said was given to her by the National Lawyers Guild, a left-wing legal organization. In a statement, the organization affirmed its view that Afaneh’s speech was constitutionally protected. That view is unorthodox. Most lawyers would agree with Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, who tweeted that “there’s no serious argument” for First Amendment protection in such a situation. And the University of California at Berkeley’s chancellor, Carol Christ, has offered Chemerinsky and Fisk support. “I am appalled and deeply disturbed,” she wrote in a statement, “by what occurred at Dean Chemerinsky’s home last night. While our support for Free Speech is unwavering, we cannot condone using a social occasion at a person’s private residence as a platform for protest.”

For their part, the student activists are characterizing the interaction as involving an act of violence, one with sweeping symbolic resonances. “Last night,” Law Students for Justice in Palestine wrote on Instagram, “Professor Catherine Fisk physically assaulted a Palestinian Law Student activist. ... This attack on a Palestinian Muslim law student is only the latest attack on Palestinian, Muslim, and pro-Palestinian students at the University of California, Berkeley.”

In a video posted to TikTok after the confrontation, Afaneh expatiated on what she characterized as Fisk’s assault. “She put her arms around me, grasped at my hijab, grabbed at my breasts inappropriately ... and threatened to call the cops on a gathering of Black and brown students.” In Afaneh’s view, Fisk “assaulted me because to her, a hijabi wearing, keffiyah repping Palestinian Muslim student that felt comfortable to speak in Arabic was enough of a threat to her that I was justified to be assaulted.”

This, she suggested, had its geopolitical analogue in the war in Gaza. “It was the classic thing that Palestinian lives are constructed to be seen as allowed to be harmed, to be killed, and to be slaughtered, while white ones are allowed to live. Professor Fisk embodied the Islamophobia, the deep anti-Arab racism, and the deep anti-Palestinian sentiment, that these Zionist administrations are built on.”

When I caught up with Chemerinsky via Zoom on Thursday evening, he seemed depressed, wounded by recent events. He had the dazed look of someone unexpectedly navigating a crisis. A few hours later, he would appear on CNN. One of the first things I wanted to know was whether he and Fisk anticipated a lawsuit. “Might they sue?” he said, pausing as if to mull the possibility. “I feel confident that there was no assault.”

A week before all this, there was the poster. Posted to Instagram and tacked to law-school bulletin boards by the Berkeley chapter of Law Students for Justice in Palestine, a cartoon depicts Chemerinsky with a ghastly grin, his arms extended at a table and foreshortened fists gripping a bloody fork in one hand and a bloody knife in the other. “NO DINNER WITH ZIONIST CHEM WHILE GAZA STARVES,” the text reads. It’s a nastily assured piece of work, its caricature distorted but immediately recognizable.

But is it antisemitic? More specifically, is it an invocation of the blood libel? Chemerinsky thinks so. “They weren’t objecting to anything I had done,” he told me. “There isn’t any reason other than that I was Jewish.” Many Jewish students, Chemerinsky said, felt the same way.

None of the protesting students has admitted any such intention, though, and within a half hour of the Instagram post they had replaced the image with a new one in which the blood had been erased from the silverware. Hardly dispositive, but it might suggest ignorance rather than a sinister historical allusion.

That leaves the question, still, of why the law dean was being targeted in the first place. I suggested to Chemerinsky that his criticism last October of some pro-Palestinian protest rhetoric might have been the reason. “I call on my fellow university administrators,” he had written, “to speak out and denounce the celebrations of Hamas and the blatant antisemitism that is being voiced.” The poster, he pointed out, didn’t mention any of that. Its only concrete political message was about university finances: “AS UC STUDENTS 2 BILLION OF OUR TUITION DOLLARS ARE INVESTED IN SUPPLYING WEAPONS AND JETS TO THE ISRAELI OCCUPATION.” The law school, however, doesn’t invest anything on its own — all of its funds come from the university generally. “There’s nothing for me to divest,” Chemerinsky said.

Except for his criticisms early on of some pro-Palestinian protest language, Chemerinsky has not been outspoken about Israeli politics since October 7. As he told CNN, “I’ve said nothing in support of what Netanyahu is doing in Israel. I’ve actually said nothing in any public forum about what’s going on with regard to Gaza.” And although, as Chemerinsky told me, some students have referred to him and Fisk as part of a “Zionist conspiracy,” Fisk herself insisted to the protesting students on Tuesday night, “We agree with you about what’s going on in Palestine.”

Despite his sense that campus expression about the war in the Middle East, including expression directed against him personally, has sometimes slipped into antisemitism, Chemerinsky rejected characterizations of Berkeley as a hotbed of hate speech. “I feel completely safe at Berkeley,” he said. “I don’t feel that Berkeley is pervasively antisemitic or anything like that. I don’t generalize from a small group of students to something about the campus.”

Nevertheless, he went on, “I never expected that in my adult lifetime I would hear the antisemitic things that I have heard over the last six months since October 7.” He mentioned, for instance, a town hall he hosted on October 11, 2023, four days after Hamas attacked Israel. A student told him she felt unsafe; he asked her what he could do to make her feel safe. “Her exact words, and I quote, were ‘Get rid of the Zionists here.’ I will tell you that I and a number of Jewish students told me later that they heard that as ‘Get rid of the Jews here.’”

I asked Chemerinsky, who has been in law-school administration since 2008 and in legal academia since 1980, whether the campus tensions of the last few months felt unprecedented to him. “I think it’s an unprecedentedly weird moment,” he said. “Our society is more deeply divided than it’s been at any time since Reconstruction. I think we’ve come to a point where there’s much more vitriol in expression than we’ve seen before.”

He added that the war in the Middle East had pitted student against student in a way that felt new to him. “I was in college during the Vietnam War. The students were almost all on one side. Now my students are deeply divided.”

What would Chemerinsky say to Malak Afaneh if they were to sit down together now and talk? “I wish that none of this had ever happened,” he said. “I wish they hadn’t put up the fliers, I wish that they hadn’t come to my house and disrupted the dinner. I wish that this didn’t become a national media firestorm. But that’s not what she would want to hear.”