Lawsuit against Carnegie Mellon for pervasive anti-Jewish discrimination

In December 2023, The Lawfare Project filed a lawsuit against Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in the Western District of Pennsylvania on behalf of a courageous Jewish student. The student, who was subjected to pervasive anti-Jewish discrimination during her tenure at the university, filed numerous complaints with the school’s administration, all of which went unresolved.

The CMU student’s exposure to the university’s antisemitic environment began in her freshman year when she was denied an excused absence to attend a memorial service following the Tree of Life Synagogue massacre. Her experience culminated during her last year, when she was told by her instructor, after creating a model to depict how an Orthodox Jewish community turned a public space into a private one for religious purposes, that it would have been better had she done her project on “what Jewish people do to make themselves so hated.” The student’s complaints to the DEI and Title IX offices yielded nothing and her appeal to professors for help brought retaliation in the form of exclusion and an undeserved near-failing grade.