A lawsuit alleging that the college discriminated against Jewish students, filed by Jewish students, faculty, parents and alumni at Haverford College, has been dismissed without prejudice by a federal court. Judge Gerald Austin McHugh of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania dismissed the lawsuit in a memorandum filed on January 6, but granted the plaintiffs leave to amend. Lori Lowenthal Marcus, co-founder and legal director of the Deborah Project, has informed the Bi-College News that the organization will be filing a second amended complaint on Monday, January 27 in response to the ruling.
The lawsuit was initially filed in May 2024 by the Deborah Project on behalf of Ally Landau ’24 and several other anonymous Jewish students at Haverford. The 90-page complaint alleged that the college had created a hostile learning environment for Jewish students by neglecting ongoing antisemitism after the events of Oct. 7. The document alleged that “Haverford’s deliberate indifference to, and indeed enabling of, antisemitism on campus” violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Title VI protects individuals from discrimination based on race, color, or national origin while participating in or benefiting from a program receiving federal assistance, such as a college.
This legal action against antisemitism on a college campus is not an isolated incident. Since the attacks on October 7, The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has been looking into Title VI complaints at “dozens” of schools, many of which were lodged by Jewish legal advocacy groups like The Deborah Project.
The initial complaint filed in May stated that the college allowed posters with the chant “from the river to the sea,” which appears in Hamas’ charter, to be hung around campus. Subsection D alleges that “quoting the Hamas Charter is exactly as antisemitic as hanging a Confederate flag is racist.” The lawsuit claims that the college administration did not condemn the Hamas attacks on October 7, instead sending an email comparing the attacks to natural disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes and wildfires.
The Deborah Project names several Haverford students and professors in the lawsuit, including Palestinian student Kinnan Abdalhamid ’25 and Professor of Mathematics Tarik Aougab. In November 2023, Abdalhamid and two other Palestinian college students were shot in Vermont by Jason Eaton, speaking a mix of Arabic and English and wearing keffiyehs at the time of the shooting. While the shooting was initially investigated as a hate crime, the state prosecutor stated that there was not enough evidence to add that charge. Eaton will stand trial, facing 3 counts of attempted murder. The Deborah Project claimed that “The Jews at Haverford [were] blamed” for the crime, stating “pro-Israel students—and Ally in particular—were later explicitly charged with personal responsibility for the attack on Abdalhamid.”
Subsection H deems the 2023-34 Plenary at Haverford “hate fests,” stating that their main focus was a demand that “Israel be forbidden to exercise self-defense” and that plenary organizers had “secretly coordinated with SJP members” to present a biased narrative. This claim was based on the fact that SJP members had signed up to speak at plenary in advance, knowing that the conflict would be discussed, despite it not being in the plenary packet. The Haverford Honor Code states that all students are permitted to sign up to speak at plenary, regardless of whether the topic of discussion is present in the plenary packet. This section of the complaint was initially brought to the college’s attention in an email sent campus-wide by Ally Landau which named the SJP platform “fundamentally antisemitic” and rebuked Student Councils’ conduct at fall plenary. The email initiated much pushback against Landau’s allegations from the Student Council and SJP.
On July 15, The Corporation of Haverford College filed a Motion to Dismiss the complaint, with prejudice, for its “lack of subject-matter jurisdiction” (Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(1)) and for “failure to state a claim upon which relief may be granted” (Rule 12(b)(6)). The motion was filed by Saul Ewing LLP, the law firm representing Haverford College, and signed by partner Joshua W.B. Richards and associate Levi R. Schy. The motion to dismiss notes firstly that “to survive a motion to dismiss under Rule 12(b)(6), a complaint ‘must contain sufficient factual matter, accepted as true, to state a claim to relief that is plausible on its face.'” In essence, the argument based on Rule 12 (b)(6) asserts that the complaint made by Jews at Haverford does not rest on sufficient concrete factual elements.
The argument presented against the complaint is divided into two sections; the first argues that the plaintiff Jews at Haverford lacks “standing,” or, “a sufficient connection to and harm from the law being challenged.” The second argues that the plaintiff’s claim of a Title VI violation fails because the alleged harm to Jewish students is not actionable under Title VI, and because the complaint fails too to prove that the college’s response “was deliberately indifferent.”
The defense’s argument includes that the plaintiff’s reasons for claiming a Title VI violation are descriptions of conflicts based on Landau and her anonymous peers’ “specific and personal views on the conflict in Israel and Palestine (and specifically their support for the Israeli government), not on their ‘shared ancestry of ethnic characteristics’.” In other words, the viewpoint is a political stance rather than an ethnic identity. Another key point is the defense’s questioning of the “severe and objectively offensive” legal standard applied to the alleged harassment of Landau and other Jewish students. The defense concludes that no event described in the complaint reached so high a standard, or was sufficient to deprive the plaintiffs of Haverford’s educational opportunities.
On September 9, an amended complaint of 129 pages was filed by Jews at Haverford, which included a list of new developments on campus since their filing in May and a defense of its original claim to a Title VI violation.
The amended complaint opened with the argument that Zionism is a “central religious tenet of Judaism,” and contains a 47-paragraph explication of the religious history supporting that argument, though the summary acknowledges that “there is no single expression of Zionism upon which all Jews agree.
“Plaintiffs are not asking this Court to adjudicate the truth of these beliefs. Plaintiffs are seeking only recognition and enforcement of the black letter principle that their own sincerely held religious beliefs are entitled to protection under Haverford’s own self-imposed anti-discrimination principles, and that their ancestral and ethnic commitments and identity are entitled to protection under the statutory provisions invoked in this case.”
– Amended complaint filed by “Jews at Haverford”
The Complaint described events at the commencement ceremony for the class of 2024 including the fact that some students wore pro-Palestine symbols to walk across the stage, and particularly asserting the plaintiffs’ frustration that the John G. Wallace 1957 Class Night Award for performing arts was given to a student who was named in their original complaint for a purportedly antisemitic tweet, as well as that the Students’ Association Award for “outstanding service to the Haverford community” was presented to a professor who had posted anti-Zionist and pro-Palestine content to his social media. The Complaint alleged that both these awards were presented to their recipients as “calculated insult[s] directed at the Jews who filed the Complaint in this action,” titling this section of the document “Haverford College Supports The Transformation Of Its 2024 Graduation Ceremony Into Yet Another Anti-Israel Hatefest.”
The document includes, too, the accusation that President Wendy Raymond has ignored reports from Jewish students about their fear of revealing to peers that: “they support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state; they attend programs and events at Jewish spaces on and off campus; they have been on a Birthright trip to Israel or intend to go; they speak Hebrew.” President Raymond, the plaintiffs assert, has suggested that these students are “self-censoring” and that the college cannot act on the complaints because it does not know the extent of them.
Just two weeks after the amended complaint was filed, The Corporation of Haverford College filed a new motion to dismiss, on September 23. The revised motion was largely the same as that filed on July 15, with the additional arguments that the use of pseudonyms “HJSB” and “HJSC” included with the plaintiff’s title “Jews at Haverford” was improper, “because they freely and publicly identify other students with whom they disagree,” and that the plaintiffs failed to “identify any contractual duty breached by Haverford,” and thus their claim to breach of contract is null.
There followed a lengthy exchange of documents filed regarding whether the identities of HJSB and HJSC would have to be revealed to the court. Ultimately, the motion to “compel discovery” of their identities in the documents was denied, though their names were given under seal to the court on December 18.
On January 6 2025, over seven months after the first complaint was filed, Judge Gerald Austin McHugh filed a memorandum ordering that the defendant’s motion to dismiss had been granted, though without prejudice. The plaintiffs have been allowed twenty-one days to refile an amended complaint if they “can cure [its] defects.”
While Judge McHugh notes in his 20 page memorandum that some of the events described in the plaintiffs’ complaint are indeed “concerning” and might support a claim under Title VI were they to be “pled properly,” he concludes in strong language that the structure of the complaint was antithetical to its being presented in a court, as rather than articulating a cohesive set of facts to support a claim, it “sen[t] the Court on a scavenger hunt” for the plaintiff’s argument.
“… a litany of complaints related in a general way to the same subject – in this instance the serious problem of antisemitism – is not the same thing as a legally cognizable complaint pled in accordance with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.”
– Judge McHugh’s Memorandum
Judge McHugh’s decision to rule to dismiss the complaint without prejudice rests on his conclusions that the complaint does “narrowly” have Article III standing and thus cannot be dismissed under Rule 12(b)(1), and that Title VI does apply to antisemitic discrimination. However, the plaintiffs were unable to argue under concrete facts or definitions of such terms as “Zionism,” which has many meanings and is not thus easily applied in legal proceedings. Ultimately, the Judge concluded that the plaintiffs failed to plead their claim to a federal standard, writing, “absent clear factual pleadings as to who knew what and when they knew it, Plaintiffs cannot show that each Plaintiff was aware of each instance of harassment alleged, and as such may not aggregate their claims to demonstrate the presence of a hostile environment.” He further concluded that the plaintiff failed to prove any alleged breach of contract between Jewish students and Haverford College, noting particularly that “of the 430 paragraphs in the Complaint, only twice do Plaintiffs plead that someone put administrators on notice of allegedly discriminatory conduct, and in neither case would Haverford’s response meet the legal standard for deliberate indifference.”
It remains to be seen whether The Deborah Project’s next amended complaint will resolve these issues.
Haverford College senior staff do not comment on active legal disputes as a matter of policy, and representatives from Saul Ewing have not responded to a request for comment.
This is an ongoing story, and will be updated according to any further action or comment from the parties involved.
Correction: A previous version of this article mistakenly stated that Professor Tarik Aougab is Palestinian, when he is in fact of Algerian descent. The Bi-College News apologizes for this error.
Correction: A previous version of this article mistakenly stated that The Deborah Project accused Kinnan Abdalhamid of being antisemitic; this is incorrect. The complaint does not explicitly call Abdalhamid antisemitic. The Bi-College News apologizes for this error.
2 comments
Excellent reporting on this piece, y’all!
What Elle said!