In Pittsburgh, campus antisemitism report’s authors neglected to speak with Jewish students

Can a college campus accurately assess its antisemitism problem without talking to Jews?

That’s the question facing the University of Pittsburgh, where an internal working group on campus antisemitism recently published a report that did not include, and did not appear to solicit, the perspectives of the school’s estimated 1,400 Jewish students, or any other members of the campus Jewish community beyond the group itself.

The July report by Pitt’s working group on campus antisemitism, which is made up of Jews, has divided the campus, drawing criticism from the left for what they perceive as recommendations that would limit speech, and from within the campus Jewish community for not adequately consulting with Jewish students and faculty. Before it was even published, one author of the report said her home was targeted after she was named to join the working group.

The report has also resurfaced questions about the most effective methods for universities to address antisemitism for Jewish students three years on from the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks that prompted so much uproar across campuses. 

The report’s omission of any research on its Jewish community was by design, the working group’s chair recently told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. 

“Our charge from the chancellor and provost was not to provide data as part of our report,” Katherine Blee, a sociologist and the faculty chair of the Pitt working group, said in an interview.

Instead, she said, the recommendations came out of discussions between the group members, whom she characterized as “a very diverse group with a very diverse set of opinions, which is representative of the university.”

The school immediately agreed to take action on the group’s recommendations, which include strengthening its Title VI civil rights law compliance; giving “clear guidance” on free speech and protest policies; reviewing its bias training; and committing to new “Dialogue and Discourse” programming to facilitate constructive conversations around Jews and Israel. 

The issue of antisemitism at Pitt became particularly urgent after two Jewish students wearing kippahs were wounded in a violent off-campus attack in 2024 in an incident that preceded the announcement of the working group. The perpetrator, who wore a keffiyeh and had no apparent university affiliation, attacked the students with a bottle as they were on their way to a Hillel Shabbat dinner.

“We recognize that members of our Jewish community have experienced harm, and we take that seriously,” the university said in its press release following the report. The school’s statement went on to quote the Mishnah-era rabbinic sage Rabbi Tarfon: “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it.”

This was a heartening development for some of the committee members. But the finished report, along with a strict confidentiality agreement the authors agreed to, has sparked local controversy.

The university’s Jewish Studies program director, initially a member of the working group, didn’t sign the final document.

And some non-Jewish campus faculty writ large have criticized the report’s recommendations for, they claim, potentially threatening shared governance principles at the university. The university’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, the national faculty union that in 2024 ended its longstanding opposition to academic boycotts to allow members to boycott Israel, called for the report to be withdrawn.

Blowback among a more progressive contingent of Jewish personnel at Pitt has led to the proposal of an alternative set of recommendations for tackling antisemitism, including creating a joint Kosher/Halal dining area and emphasizing teshuvah, or the Jewish tradition of repentance, “when a member of the university community does harm.”

This cohort has stronger, more ideological concerns with the report than whether it surveyed Jewish students. “We refuse to let anyone use the pain of antisemitism to dismantle academic freedom, free speech, and open engagement within our university community,” an open letter proposing the new plan reads.

Proponents of the second plan stressed the importance of soliciting perspectives from the broader Jewish community.

“If you’re going to really talk about this, you need to be really thinking more broadly about what the rest of the community thinks,” Harry Hochheiser, a Jewish biomedical professor at Pitt and critic of the report who has helped push the alternative set of recommendations to the university, told JTA.

Pitt’s report, and the response to it, comes as the question of how to respond to campus antisemitism feels less settled than ever. Some campuses are continuing to see fresh threats to Jewish safety: Recent flyers at the University of Oregon targeted that school’s Hillel director, by name, as an “enemy of the people.”

At the same time, the Trump administration’s aggressive response to the issue is starting to see pushback. A recent bipartisan report from the federally mandated US Commission on Civil Rights criticizes the administration’s handling of campus antisemitism cases, as well as its withholding of documents related to the investigations.

In response to a series of emailed questions from JTA, a Pitt spokesperson said the working group “drew on perspectives from across the University community rather than establishing a faculty-only process,” and that the school is “taking next steps on a number of the Working Group’s recommendations.”

The working group includes administrators, a student Hillel president, the lone student named in the final report, and a former director of Pittsburgh’s Jewish Community Relations Council.

The Pitt spokesperson, Jared Stonesifer, also said the school “is in frequent and ongoing discussions with Jewish students about their experiences and their views on the campus environment, and student input was included on the Working Group that produced the report.”

Both Blee and Stonesifer framed the report as the first of many future steps to help Pitt confront campus antisemitism, and expressed hope that future steps would involve talking to Jewish students. One of the report’s recommendations is to “survey antisemitism in the campus environment regularly.”

Pitt’s undergraduate student body is home to around 1,400 Jews, just under 7% of the 21,000 total students, according to Hillel International estimates. The school is served by Hillel Jewish University Center, a local Hillel that also tends to Jewish students at other Pittsburgh colleges, as well as a dedicated Chabad house and a Jewish Studies program that grants an undergraduate certificate.

Julia Jassey, co-founder and CEO of the national Jewish student advocacy group Jewish on Campus, offered a mixed assessment of the Pitt report and of the school’s promise to include students in future decision-making.

“Students should be a part of the process in the implementation, not looking at it as a postmortem,” Jassey told JTA, noting that student input is valuable because “no two campuses are exactly the same.”

Yet, Jassey added, “That doesn’t mean that the report itself is inherently not helpful.”

Tree of Life Synagogue, the site of the 2018 mass killing that was the deadliest act of antisemitism in U.S. history, seen on April 21, 2023, in Pittsburgh, PA. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

That Pitt would commission a campus antisemitism report was, on its own, not unusual.

In addition to the attack on the two Jewish students in 2024, Pitt’s Jewish community also continues to live in the shadow of the 2018 shooting at the Tree of Life worship center, two miles from campus. Many of the university’s Jewish students and faculty have personal connections to it; Pitt has also hosted exhibits about the attack. A local memorial and museum commemorating the attack, now under construction, is scheduled to open to the public in 2028.

Both the 2024 attack and the Tree of Life massacre were part of “the context in which we were writing,” Blee said.

Blee is a longtime member and past president of Congregation Dor Hadash, the Reconstructionist synagogue located inside the Tree of Life building. One Dor Hadash congregant was among the 11 killed in the attack.

In addition, her research specialty is white nationalism and far-right antisemitism: When the perpetrators of the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, were charged with violations of federal law, Blee was called to the stand as an expert witness.

So when her synagogue became the site of the deadliest antisemitic attack in US history, Blee recalled, “my work and my Jewish life intersected in a really terrible way.”

Blee’s 2025 appointment to chair the antisemitism working group, the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle reported, marked the moment the working group “begins to take shape.”

The final report recommends the university form an “advisory group” on Jewish issues and suggests that the local Hillel and Chabad-Lubavitch house, as well as the Pittsburgh Jewish federation, be represented, a recommendation that spurred criticism from pro-Palestinian groups on campus who objected to the federation’s presence.

Additional members of the working group contacted by JTA for this story, including the former JCRC staffer, directed requests for comment to Blee or declined to comment. The director of the Hillel serving Pitt’s campus, after requesting questions from JTA by email, did not respond by press time.

In a statement accompanying the report’s publication, the working group’s vice chair, Jennifer Murshatashvili, wrote, “My goal was to contribute to outcomes that would improve life for everyone at Pitt, not only Jewish and Israeli members of our community.”

Murshatashvili, a professor of Eurasian studies at Pitt, also told the university community that after she was named to the working group, “my home was targeted, and I was subjected to extensive online hatred and harassment.”

Even though the working group was not charged with gathering data, Blee told JTA that one of its instructions was to investigate “how effective” the university’s existing policies on antisemitism were after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks in Israel strained relationships on the campus. There was disagreement among the group about how seriously to take the encampments mounted by pro-Palestinian groups at Pitt, she said.

“Some people were more concerned about the encampments than others,” she told JTA. Drawing on her own research into the far right, she explained, “Everybody would agree that a Nazi rally is antisemitic. Not everyone on the committee, and not everyone at the university, and not everyone in the United States Jewish community, would agree that the totality of the protests after October 7 were antisemitic.” 

Blee declined to elaborate on how the working group determined policy effectiveness without gathering data. The confidentiality agreement brokered by the group members also prevented her from sharing more detail on their internal deliberations, she said.

“I can tell you that the committee gathered information that was needed,” she said. “But under that confidentiality agreement, I don’t want to go into exactly how that was done.”

Rachel Kranson, the director of Pitt’s Jewish Studies program, was announced as a member of the working group in 2025 but does not appear on its final report. Kranson declined to comment to JTA.

Internal reports chaired by Jewish university faculty, officials and students have become part and parcel of the standard university response to campus antisemitism since October 7.

At public and elite private schools alike, the formation and release of an internal antisemitism report has been greeted with considerable fanfare, and no small amount of controversy, directed at everything from the political makeup of committee members to the data-gathering process and final recommendations.

Yet one consistency among such reports has been the presence of at least some polling of the experiences of that school’s Jewish students, which many Jewish groups and Jewish leaders have agreed is a crucial component of any successful campus antisemitism response.

Committees at Harvard and Columbia, two schools figuring prominently into the national conversation on campus antisemitism, each conducted surveys with more than 500 Jews on campus to inform their findings. Harvard’s final report runs 311 pages, while Columbia released multiple reports on the subject.

Stanford’s antisemitism committee report, released in 2024, runs nearly 150 pages and draws on listening sessions with more than 300 people, plus one-on-one interviews with students, administrators, and representatives of national Jewish groups.

The University of Washington and the University of California, Los Angeles, both public universities like Pitt, also surveyed and interviewed Jewish students to inform their own reports. The data itself can sometimes lead to controversy: A contingent of progressive Jews at UW criticized that school’s report for conducting focus groups with only a few dozen Jewish students, among other objections.

Pitt’s report, published two years after the administration committed to forming the working group, runs eight pages and includes no references to interviews or focus groups. It largely praised the university for, its authors said, already taking meaningful steps to combat antisemitism.

“I was surprised at the brevity of the report as the culmination of 1.5 years of work,” Andrea Goldschmidt, a psychiatry professor at Pitt and member of the Pitt Jewish Community affinity group, wrote in an open letter. “This stands in sharp contrast to the very lengthy and thorough reports I have seen come out of other universities.”

Goldschmidt also criticized the lack of “listening sessions or focus groups with the Jewish community during the course of the task force’s work.” She suggested that the lack of such conversations “reflects either that there was so much internal disagreement on the task force that the short report reflects the only areas of confluence among its members, or that the task force was somehow hobbled in its work before it even began.”

The Pitt Jewish Community affinity group’s president, Vicky Davide, echoed those concerns in comments to the student newspaper, telling the Pitt News that she and her colleagues had trouble accessing information about the group’s inner deliberations. They were “really disappointed” by the finished report, Davide, who leads engagement programs at Pitt, said.

Some suggested that, despite the lack of input from Jewish students, the recommendations themselves could still be useful. Jassey claimed that Pitt’s recommendations generally enjoy a “consensus” among Jewish students more broadly, and expressed hope that students would be included in the implementation step.

“I guess the question now is, what’s next,” she said.