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About 20 UC Berkeley students entering law professor Steven Davidoff Solomon’s class on Sept. 9 were greeted with a surprising piece of reading material: flyers calling Solomon a “carreer [sic] sabotager.”

The flyers featured a close-up photo of Solomon, who is Jewish, and a notice of “warning” in all-caps, as well as a yellow triangle with a black exclamation mark. Students were arriving for Solomon’s “Antisemitism and the Law,” an undergraduate class that covers the history of the law as both a “vehicle for institutionalizing antisemitism” and “for combatting” it, according to a course description. The class includes lessons on historical topics such as the prosecution of Alfred Dreyfus and the lynching of Leo Frank.

“Law Proffessor [sic] Steven Solomon announced in a national newspaper that he will sabotage your carreer if you disagree with his religious views on Israel’s war,” read the flyers, which were handed out by an unidentified individual.

The flyers represented the latest salvo by activists in an ongoing campaign against Solomon following his controversial op-ed published by the Wall Street Journal on Oct. 15, 2023. The flyers included a screenshot from the piece, titled “Don’t Hire My Anti-Semitic Law Students.” It ran in the Journal eight days after the Hamas massacre in Israel and after Israel began a retaliatory bombing campaign in Gaza. 

“If you don’t want to hire people who advocate hate and practice discrimination, don’t hire some of my students,” his op-ed stated. “Anti-Semitic conduct is nothing new on university campuses, including here at Berkeley.” The piece pointed to a broad “attitude against Jews on university campuses” and referenced Berkeley Law student groups that adopted a bylaw in 2022 to ban speakers who support Israel’s right to exist.

“You don’t need an advanced degree to see why this bylaw is wrong,” Solomon wrote in the op-ed. “By excluding Jews from their homeland — after Jews have already endured thousands of years of persecution — these organizations are engaging in anti-Semitism and dehumanizing Jews.”

The op-ed sparked controversy at the law school. More than 200 alumni signed an open letter to law school Dean Erwin Chemerinsky that accused Solomon of conflating support for Palestinian human rights with antisemitism and claiming his rhetoric put students at risk of violence. Some called on Solomon to be fired. Ussama Makdisi, a Berkeley history professor recently named the first endowed chair of Cal’s new program in Palestinian and Arab Studies, excoriated the op-ed on X. 

Yesterday a Berkeley Law professor published an opinion piece in the @WSJ demanding that employers not hire his own students and those from his institution. Such is the level of intimidation & hatred directed toward our students across campuses. Because they speak up for… pic.twitter.com/sTzq3X1amV

— Ussama Makdisi (@UssamaMakdisi) October 17, 2023

Solomon said he was relatively unfazed by the Sept. 9 flyers himself because he has been “repeatedly” targeted since his Journal op-ed. But he took issue with someone handing flyers to students.

“I view [the distribution of flyers] as simple harassment of my students more than me,” Solomon told J. on Sept. 12. “I think that the students were rather disturbed by it. They asked me if we would have security at the class going forward.”

Solomon also clarified the position he took in the op-ed.

“I did not say not to hire people who support Palestinian rights. I don’t believe that,” Solomon said. “I did not say not to hire people who don’t support the Israeli government. I did not say that. I said if you support terrorism and Hamas and the killing of Jews … you should not be hired.”

The 2022 anti-Zionist bylaw that Solomon mentioned in his Journal op-ed was introduced by Berkeley Law Students for Justice in Palestine and stated that student groups “will not invite speakers that have expressed and continued to hold views … in support of Zionism, the apartheid state of Israel, and the occupation of Palestine.”

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Some Jewish students at the law school expressed deep concerns about it, feeling they would be expected to disavow an important part of their identity if they wanted to join one of the clubs that had adopted the bylaw.

Chemerinsky confirmed in a Sept. 13 email to J. that a number of law students wrote to him last fall expressing strong opposition to Solomon’s op-ed in the Journal and asking Chemerinsky to speak out against it. Chemerinsky declined to do so but did send a message to the entire law school community about the matter. 

“Some students strongly objected to Professor Solomon’s op-ed,” Chemerinsky wrote to J. “There were explicit requests from students that I condemn it. I did not do so. I sent a message to the school community saying that he had the right to express his opinions, and the law school’s position was to help every student find employment.”

Chemerinsky also received private messages last fall requesting that he fire Solomon, but could not recall whether those messages came only from students. He emphasized that there was never an attempt by either the law school or the UC Berkeley administration to fire Solomon. 

“That would violate the Constitution, as well as basic principles of academic freedom,” he wrote in the Sept. 13 email to J. “Professor Solomon had the First Amendment right to write the op-ed and there was no basis for even considering firing him.”

Chemerinsky did not mention the flyers in his response.

It was not clear whether the flyers, which contained misspellings, were distributed by a student. They included a reference to a Reddit page titled “Zionist McCarthyism,” which is intended to “document the systematic silencing of pro-Palestinian voices,” according to the Reddit page description.

The page contains a Sept. 10 post by a user named JadedUnit8955, taking credit for distributing flyers outside of Solomon’s classroom and includes a photograph of one of the flyers posted on the classroom door.

Per the law school’s posting policy, only its departments, centers, registered student organizations, students, staff or faculty may post within its buildings. Attaching flyers to classroom doors is prohibited by anyone per university publicity rules. Posters are also required to display the name and contact information of the organization or individual responsible.

Reddit user JadedUnit8955 did not respond to J.’s request for comment.

Solomon reported the incident to the university’s Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination (OPHD). 

I did not say not to hire people who support Palestinian rights. I don’t believe that.

Steven Davidoff Solomon

Dan Mogulof, assistant vice chancellor of the university’s Office of Communications and Public Affairs, confirmed that the OPHD is following up on the information that Solomon provided in his complaint.

“While we cannot, as a matter of law, comment on investigations … we take compliance with our rules and with Title VI very seriously.” Mogulof wrote in an emailed statement to J.

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its regulations prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin, “including shared Jewish ancestry,” under any program or activity that receives federal financial assistance. 

This is not the first time that flyers have been distributed around campus in order to damage the reputation of Berkeley faculty. In April, Berkeley Law Students for Justice in Palestine called for a boycott of a Chemerinsky student dinner by posting flyers with a disturbing cartoon of the law school dean, who is Jewish, holding a fork and knife covered in blood. “No dinner with Zionist Chem while Gaza starves,” it read.

And in November 2023, an unknown person hung a poster outside of a class on theories of war taught by Ron Hassner, a political science professor and faculty co-director of Cal’s Helen Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies.

The poster, which Hassner shared with J. but requested that the image not be further reproduced online, depicts a bloody red handprint overlaid on a black-and-white image of rubble and destroyed buildings with the text: “Carol Christ & Ron Hassner for Genocide.” Christ was Cal’s chancellor before she retired this summer.

Hassner, who is Jewish, told J. on Sept. 13 that students expressed outrage and felt intimidated at the sight of the poster. 

“No harassment and no hate mail that I receive will stop me from advocating for students,” Hassner said. “But it might stop others.”

Solomon expressed a similar sentiment: He welcomes civil debate, but not at the expense of the well-being of Jews on campus.

“People can have political views, and people can have political views about the conflict, and Israel, and I respect those views,” Solomon said. “But it doesn’t give you a right to harass Jewish students and faculty.”

Hassner has been outspoken on behalf of Jewish and pro-Israel students over the past year. In the spring, he gained national attention for staging a sit-in in his campus office to prompt UC Berkeley’s administration to address antisemitism. 

Notably, in the days following the Oct. 7 attack, Hassner issued a brief public statement in collaboration with lecturer Hatem Bazian, a staunch Israel critic and co-founder of the anti-Zionist group Students for Justice in Palestine, urging students to “treat each other with respect and dignity.”

Editor’s note: The reporter, Niva Ashkenazi, works for J. through the California Local News Fellowship, a program managed by UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.