Over 33,000 undergraduates are enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles, known universally by its acronym, UCLA. It’s one of the most competitive schools in the country, accepting less than 9 percent of its applicants. Among the current undergraduate student body, Hillel International estimates that there are about 2,500 Jewish students.
The story of informal discrimination against Jewish students on prestigious campuses is, by now, a sad and familiar story. And in fact, that story is not foreign to Jewish students at UCLA. Worse still, an undergraduate Jewish leader on campus, Bella Brannon, has recently filed a motion with the student government alleging not informal, social discrimination, but formal employment discrimination against Jewish students.
Here some background is necessary. UCLA has an active student government: the Undergraduate Students Association Council, known by its acronym, USAC. USAC is organized in various offices and commissions, one of which is the Cultural Affairs Commission, or CAC. According to CAC’s website, it is “meant to ignite conversation regarding current events” and “facilitate exhibitions of creativity.” It supports dance, art, music, culinary festivals, poetry readings, and tours of culturally significant areas of Los Angeles.
An elected member of the student body is charged with administering each of these commissions, and receives from the university a modest honorarium or payment of some kind for that service as well as a budget to hire fellow students to manage the commission’s many programs. Because UCLA is a public university, a good deal of that money comes from California taxpayers.
Brannon’s motion claims that the current CAC commissioner has made explicit a policy to disqualify Jewish students, described as Zionists, from employment at the commission. Her motion was recently described in an article in UCLA’s Jewish newspaper, Ha’Am, by the undergraduate writer Benjie Katz. This week, these two students, Bella Brannon and Benjie Katz—who are both leaders of the campus Tikvah chapter—join Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver to discuss their experiences.
Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.
