Astonished Judge Orders UCLA to End “Jew-Free” Zones on Campus

​Aristotle wrote that anybody can get angry. The hard task is to “be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose.”
 
We don’t know if Judge Mark Scarsi of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California is a student of Aristotle. But when he issued a preliminary injunction on Tuesday ordering UCLA to not allow parts of its campus to be off-limits to Jewish students, his order came out hot. Judge Scarsi wrote:
 
“In the year 2024, in the United States of America, in the State of California, in the City of Los Angeles, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith. This fact is so unimaginable and so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom that it bears repeating. Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith.”
 
The plaintiffs in the case are Jewish students who have a religious belief about the importance of the State of Israel. Several students, under threat of violence, were barred from the path to UCLA’s Powell Library. Others could not access the university’s  Royce Quad because to do so they would either have to denounce their faith or meet those who promised violence.
 
As the judge notes, UCLA does not dispute these facts. Instead, it argues that it has no responsibility to protect the religious freedom of its Jewish students because the exclusion was engineered by a third party, in this case student and off-campus protesters angry about the tragedy in Gaza.
 
Judge Scarsi responds: “But under constitutional principles, UCLA may not allow services to some students when UCLA knows that other students are excluded on religious grounds, regardless of who engineered the exclusion.”
 
A preliminary injunction is usually a tell about where a court is going. In this case, it is more like a bullhorn.