Tessa Veksler says the university failed to protect her during months of threats and harassment.By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel NewsThe Jewish former student body president at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) filed a lawsuit against her alma mater last week, alleging it failed to protect her from months of antisemitic harassment following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel.According to the complaint, Tessa Veksler endured harassment “on a daily basis” for seven months after publicly condemning the massacre that sparked war in Gaza and expressing support for Israel.She said she was accused of supporting “genocide,” having dual loyalties and being funded by a foreign government – meaning Israel – to “line her pockets for clout.”The suit describes a barrage of threatening messages and vandalism on campus, including graffiti sprayed on the building where she worked as student body president reading, “You can run but you can’t hide Tessa Veksler.”Pictures of her were slashed on campus and signs were hung in the building where her office was located calling her a “racist Zionist” and demanding her resignation.Veksler alleges that repeated requests for protection went unanswered, even after she told administrators she felt physically unsafe.“UCSB refused to assist Tessa in protecting herself from these ongoing attacks and harassment, choosing instead to leave her to face the anti-Semitic mob alone — and increasingly vulnerable — for months on end,” the court papers charged.In a separate lawsuit filed in December 2025, Veksler alleged that the school not only “did nothing” to deal with the antisemitism targeting her on campus “despite its elaborate anti-discrimination policy,” but that a UCSB staffer even joined her attackers.This complaint said that as she was meeting with masked anti-Israel protesters in February 2024 to try to reach some kind of understanding, “the defendant joined the meeting and began … purposefully inciting the crowd’s antisemitic animus toward Tessa.”Veksler first initiated legal action in May 2024, when the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law filed a Title VI civil rights complaint on her behalf, alleging discrimination based on the university’s failure to respond adequately to the harassment.That December, the University of California (UC) system reached an agreement with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) to resolve nine Title VI investigations across multiple schools, including Veksler’s.The agreement requires enhanced training for staff handling discrimination complaints and detailed reporting to federal authorities, including the supportive measures offered to the complainant, corrective actions taken, and steps initiated prevent such cases from recurring.Veksler made history as UCSB’s first Sabbath-observant student body president when she was elected in April 2023.The post Former USCB student body president files antisemitism lawsuit appeared first on World Israel News.