Late in the election year of 2004, a soft-spoken but determined civil rights lawyer named Susan Tuchman filed a complaint with the San Francisco regional office of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). Tuchman, little known then even within the organized Jewish world, was the new director of the Center for Law and Justice at the Zionist Organization of America. Already an experienced litigator, Tuchman had been the first woman litigation partner at her Boston law firm before moving to New York the previous year. Tuchman’s complaint described an extraordinary pattern of anti-Semitic intimidation, harassment, threats, and vandalism at the prestigious Irvine campus of the University of California. Within two years, this OCR case would catapult Tuchman to the Jewish Daily Forward’s prestigious “Forward 50” list of the people who are “making a difference in the way American Jews, for better or worse, view the world and themselves.” At the same time, it would demonstrate deep ambivalence, discomfort, and confusion in the way that the federal government perceives American Jews.

In her complaint, Tuchman Irvine with fostering a hostile environment for Jewish students in violation of the prohibition on racial and national origin discrimination contained in Title VI of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964. With extraordinary specificity, Tuchman detailed that Jewish students had been physically and verbally harassed, threatened, shoved, and targeted by rock throwing; that Jewish property had been defaced with swastikas; and that a Jewish holocaust memorial was vandalized. Signs were posted on campus showing a Star of David dripping with blood. Jews were chastised for arrogance by public speakers; called “dirty Jew” and “fucking Jew”; told to “go back to Russia” and “burn in hell”; and heard people urge one another to “slaughter the Jews.” One Jewish student who wore a pin bearing the flags of the United States and Israel was told to “take off that pin or we’ll beat your ass.” Another was told, “Jewish students are the plague of mankind” and “Jews should be finished off in the ovens.”