Does Cal State’s Faculty Union Have a Jewish Problem? Newsom Should Look at the Record

When Jewish professors in the California State University system asked their faculty union for the same kind of identity caucus it provides to other groups, including a Palestine, Arab and Muslim caucus, they met fierce opposition. Their proposal was denounced as a “Zionist, right-wing, settler-colonialist project.” One longtime union activist, once named its “Unionist of the Year,” was so disillusioned that he resigned. His path to that decision has been described as a story of “persistent, entrenched antisemitism” and of a union apparently unwilling to afford Jewish members the representation it grants others.

The union was the California Faculty Association. And the controversy could hardly have surfaced at a more consequential moment.

CFA is the driving force behind AB 2551, now on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk, which would weaken the campus-protest framework California strengthened after the explosion of antisemitic harassment following October 7. The new allegations of antisemitism within CFA raise an uncomfortable question about the organization leading that effort.

This is not the first time accusations of antisemitic conduct within CFA have surfaced at the same time the union was fighting legal protections designed to protect Jewish students from antisemitism.

Last year, CFA fought legislation aimed at curbing antisemitism in California’s K–12 schools. While that bill was awaiting Newsom’s signature, Melina Abdullah, chair of CFA’s Political Action and Legislation Committee, used a class she was teaching to urge students to oppose it. She told them that “AIPAC has bought and paid for almost every single member of Congress,” a claim the Anti-Defamation League identified as invoking the antisemitic trope of Jewish money controlling American politics.

Then, days after Newsom signed the bill, Abdullah’s committee sent political candidates a questionnaire asking whether they had received support from AIPAC or the Jewish Public Affairs Committee of California. It grouped those Jewish organizations with oil and tobacco interests and other groups the union said “harm working people.” CFA said the question was directly connected to its opposition to the new antisemitism law.

Jewish organizations condemned the questionnaire in unusually blunt terms. In a letter signed by Jewish communal groups across California, they accused CFA of perpetuating “long-standing stereotypes about Jews and power that have fueled antisemitism for centuries” and of making Jewish participation in civic life appear “suspect or dangerous.”

Now the same pattern has reached California’s universities.

The protections CFA is seeking to weaken grew out of the post-October 7 campus crisis, when anti-Israel protests and encampments were accompanied by an extraordinary surge in antisemitic harassment, intimidation and violence. When lawmakers considered SB 1287 in 2024, the legislative record cited a 2,000% increase in antisemitic incidents on college campuses in just five months. The bill’s author said explicitly that the need for stronger protections had been “highlighted by incidents of antisemitism” after October 7.

SB 1287 strengthened protections against violent, harassing, intimidating and discriminatory conduct and reinforced reasonable, content-neutral rules governing campus protest. CFA originally backed AB 2551 with language that would have repealed those protections outright.

That repeal was removed. But CFA did not abandon its larger effort. The version now on Newsom’s desk singles out protest-related discipline for special reporting and creates a forum focused specifically on time, place and manner restrictions and how they are enforced. Those provisions give activists who object to the restrictions a dedicated avenue to press universities over their application without repealing them outright.

CFA has made clear where it hopes that pressure will lead. At the Senate Education Committee hearing, Abdullah appeared on behalf of the union and called AB 2551 a “first step towards ending time, place, and manner restrictions.”

The pattern is difficult to overlook. Last year, CFA was fighting protections against antisemitism in California schools while its own political apparatus was accused of invoking antisemitic stereotypes about Jewish organizations and political power. Today, Jewish members are describing antisemitism within CFA itself as the union presses to weaken protections born of the post-Oct. 7 campus antisemitism crisis.

Newsom now faces a stark choice: preserve protections strengthened in response to an unprecedented antisemitism crisis on California campuses, or begin weakening them at the urging of a union whose own treatment of Jewish members and Jewish organizations has generated serious allegations of antisemitism.

Rossman-Benjamin is the director of AMCHA Initiative, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to combating antisemitism at colleges and universities in the United States. She was a faculty member at the University of California for 20 years.