A University of California, Santa Cruz, department bestowed students with graduation stoles featuring Palestinian flags and keffiyehs—headdresses often worn by Palestinian terrorists—during an official graduation event last June, according to previously unreported photos shared with the Washington Free Beacon.
Pictures from the university's Critical Race and Ethnic Studies graduation show department staff presenting students with the keffiyeh-patterned stoles during the department's "Senior Celebration," while a projection screen behind the graduates showed an image of an anti-Israel encampment from 2024.
The keffiyeh, popularized by the late Palestinian terrorist leader Yasser Arafat, has become a symbol of both anti-Israel protests and anti-Jewish violence since Hamas's Oct. 7, 2023, attack. The shooter who killed two Israeli embassy staffers at the Capitol Jewish Museum last year, an assailant who attacked two Jewish students walking to a Shabbat dinner at the University of Pittsburgh in 2024, and members of a mob that rampaged at a Los Angeles synagogue that summer all wore keffiyehs.
The AMCHA Initiative, an anti-Semitism watchdog group, published the photos as part of a new report on the University of California system. AMCHA said the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies senior ceremony was transformed into a political spectacle that "blur[red] the line between academic operations and political demonstration, using university authority and official platforms to signal anti-Zionist activism as normative."
The watchdog group stated in its report that even though the problem of campus anti-Semitism and anti-Zionist radicalism is often treated as "primarily student-driven," its investigation led to a "different conclusion."
"The hostile or exclusionary campus conditions documented here reflect a governance breakdown in the academic domain," AMCHA said: "UC has failed to enforce institutional boundaries on how faculty and academic units use instructional authority … creating conditions that can predictably produce hostility, exclusion, and targeting of affected students."
The graduation event, the report states, was part of a pattern of faculty, staff, and institutional programming designed to push students toward hating Israel, fueling anti-Semitism on the university system's campuses. The news comes after several years of legal proceedings surrounding anti-Semitism within the University of California. Last year, the Department of Justice launched a civil rights investigation into "whether UC has engaged in a pattern or practice of discrimination based on race, religion and national origin against its professors, staff and other employees by allowing an Antisemitic hostile work environment to exist on its campuses." Last summer, the University of California, Los Angeles, paid a $6 million settlement after Jewish students sued the school over its alleged "Jew Exclusion Zone" during a 2024 encampment.
The AMCHA report, released on Wednesday, compiled numerous examples of how "UC resources and authority" were "used to advance activist agendas inside the university's core educational functions." The report states that campus activists used institutional hubs on each UC campus—the Consortium for Palestine Studies at UCLA and the Palestinian and Arab Studies Program at UC Berkeley, for example—to promote anti-Israel programming.
AMCHA's report found that, at UC Santa Cruz, the university departments and institutions sponsored "at least 27 events featuring speakers aligned with academic, economic, or cultural boycotts of Israel," including a workshop called "The Genocide in Gaza in Our Classrooms," and a seminar that called for weakening the definition of anti-Semitism and was cosponsored by the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.
Academic departments, including the UCSC Critical Race and Ethnic Studies department, also used their social media platforms to amplify calls for anti-Israel protests, according to the report.
UC Santa Cruz spokesman Scott Hernandez-Jason said in a statement provided to the Free Beacon that "antisemitism has no place" at the university.
"We know that incidents at universities across the nation, including our own, have been especially difficult for Jewish students," Hernandez-Jason said. "We have been working to address the concerns of individual students when their education and sense of belonging are impacted, while also focusing on strengthening our overall campus climate to foster a sense of belonging for all students and engender a shared responsibility to live that value in our daily lives and practices."
Neither the broader University of California system nor the UC Santa Cruz Critical Race and Ethnic Studies department responded to requests for comment.
