UC Berkeley is investigating allegations of abuse following protests in Gaza at a private dinner

UC Berkeley has launched an investigation into whether a confrontation occurred over a protest speech in Gaza during a dinner party at the home of two law professors amounted to discrimination and abuse.

The investigation stems from an invitation-only dinner for graduate students on April 9 at the home of Berkeley Law’s Jewish dean, Erwin Chemerinsky, and his wife, Professor Catherine Fisk.

As part of a group protest against the war in Gaza at Chemerinsky’s dinner, Muslim student Malak Afaneh stood to give an unscheduled speech commemorating Ramadan and drawing attention to Gazans killed by Israeli bombings when Chemerinsky and Fisk called her asked to leave. Then Fisk put her arm around Afaneh, As videos show, she briefly reached for her phone before reaching for the microphone the student was holding.

Before the event, the group had distributed posters calling for a boycott of the dinner. The posters called the professor a Zionist and showed a caricature of him holding a bloody knife and fork, while referencing the deaths of children in Gaza. Chemerinsky said the images evoked anti-Semitic terms of “blood libel” that associate Jewish people with the ritual murder of children.

The university’s Title IX Division, which operates under the Office to Prevent Harassment and Discrimination, opened a formal investigation on April 26 after Afaneh filed a complaint with the office.

Afaneh, who wore a hijab and keffiyeh when she stood to give the speech, says Fisk violated the university’s anti-discrimination and abusive behavior policies and claims she was harassed because of her Palestinian and Muslim identities .

Reached for comment on Tuesday, she said the priority of her message during the dinner and currently was to draw attention to the plight of Palestinians. Israel’s months-long attack began in retaliation for a Hamas attack on October 7 that killed more than 1,100 people in Israel. More than 34,000 Palestinians were killed in the bombings and attacks that followed, and aid groups say displaced survivors face starvation.

“As pro-Palestinian students, we are aware of the repression we endure,” said Afaneh, co-president of Law Students for Justice in Palestine. “But that is only a fraction of the violence that Palestinians experience on the ground in Palestine.”

Fisk said she was confident “nothing will come of this investigation,” calling it a routine response to a student complaint. She noted the leaflets that were circulating before the event, and said it was “disturbing” that a student who intentionally disrupted a dinner party at her home had the “audacity” to file a complaint of mistreatment.

“This is a discrimination complaint. It is impossible to see how I have discriminated against anyone,” Fisk said in an email to Berkeleyside. “My husband and I simply asked anyone who was disrupting a dinner at our house to leave, which was our complete right and which we would have done to anyone who was disrupting a party at our home.”

The confrontation, which went viral online, became another example of the polarized reactions surrounding the war in Gaza. The local office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations said in a statement Tuesday that it welcomed the university’s investigation and called Fisk’s actions “a blatant act of Islamophobia.” UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ, meanwhile, issued a statement in support of Chemerinsky and Fisk after the incident, saying she was deeply disturbed by what happened.

The university has not commented on the investigation because it is confidential under the university’s human resources policy.

The investigation will take 90 days, according to Title IX documents provided to Berkeleyside.