Just the News reported that American-Israeli dual citizen Sophie Shabot filed a federal lawsuit accusing New School for Social Research officials of tolerating “relentless antisemitic harassment, intimidation, and physical assault” and of rewarding the people who targeted her.
She filed on the third anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel. The complaint seeks penalties that include punitive damages and a jury trial.
The case presses Title VI national-origin discrimination claims under the federal Civil Rights Act, plus New York and New York City human rights and civil rights laws, breach of contract, and negligent infliction of emotional distress. The legal stakes reach far past one campus. They test whether universities that market progressive values will face real consequences when Jewish students say administrators left them unprotected.
Shabot attended Parsons School of Design at The New School in New York City. Her complaint describes a campus she says filled with antisemitic and anti-Israel protests, graffiti, leaflets, and signs that broke the school’s own time, place, and manner rules.
Breitbart reported the suit landed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, with The Lawfare Project and Arnold & Porter representing her.
The complaint states that material “denounced the existence of a Jewish homeland as a racist endeavor and demanded that all Israelis be expelled from TNS.” It also alleges speakers “accused Jews collectively of being racist and responsible for genocide, mocked and denigrated the suffering of Jewish hostages and their families, and celebrated Hamas’s violence against Jewish civilians.”
The lawsuit text frames the setting as central to the harm:
"What made these violent encounters particularly traumatizing for Shabot, was the campus environment in which they occurred."
In December 2023, the suit alleges, protesters let non-Jewish students pass into the University Center while blocking Shabot. It claims they shoved her out, spat on her, and screamed personal and anti-Israel messages through a bullhorn.
Shabot says she repeatedly reported incidents to professors, security, the Office of Student Conduct, senior administrators, and the Office of the President. She says she often named individuals and supplied photographs and video. The complaint alleges the school still refused to enforce its rules.
Months later, in March 2024 per related coverage of the filing, protesters allegedly vandalized and seized space reserved for a Hillel event featuring an Israeli speaker and blocked Jewish students from entering. Shabot and other Jewish students say a mob trapped them for 20 minutes in a dean’s office while pounding on the door. A professor allegedly shoved the student guarding that door.
The university shut the event down for “safety issues,” the suit says. The mob then allegedly followed Shabot for blocks and hurled slurs, including “genocidal freak.”
In April 2024, after Shabot and friends spoke Hebrew, a crowd allegedly “formed a tight Circle” around them, vandalized her desk and workspace, and drove them out of the University Center “while a security guard looked on in silence.”
In fall 2024, a protester allegedly threw a bottle at Shabot’s head outside a campus building and missed by inches. She says the cumulative abuse left her with severe anxiety, panic attacks, and insomnia, and damaged her academic work and her ability to use studios and equipment.
The complaint claims The New School “affirmatively advised students that it had not contacted” the NYPD about an unauthorized encampment and promised police “would not enter University buildings without the University’s consent, even as reports of harassment, intimidation, obstruction, and physical aggression were escalating.” It says the school called police only “after the situation had significantly deteriorated.”
Then-President Donna Shalala, formerly President Clinton’s Health secretary, allegedly gave unauthorized encampment participants $300 to buy dinner, publicly praised them, and posed for a photograph. The suit says she posed with the student who had spat on Shabot. Shalala later called the NYPD to clear the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment.” Faculty and staff then delivered a 94% no-confidence vote, the New School Free Press reported, tied to that police call.
After one assault, two administrators allegedly replied to an email sent to more than 20 people by suggesting Shabot seek therapy and offering no other help. That pattern sits alongside wider federal pressure on schools over hostile climates, including Trump administration civil rights probes into antisemitic bullying at other education institutions.
Brooke Goldstein, founder and executive director of The Lawfare Project, cast the filing as a direct answer to campus conduct since the Hamas attacks.
"This lawsuit is our response to the tidal wave of Jew-hatred on college campuses" since "the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust," and to "The New School’s shameful abdication of its responsibility to protect its Jewish students."
Ziporah Reich, the group’s director of litigation, said the school shifted the cost of bigotry onto the student under attack.
"Rather than protect Sophie, the administration accommodated those targeting her and left her to endure the consequences."
Reich added: "The burden of discrimination should never be placed on the student being targeted." She told Just the News there were “instances in which law enforcement was contacted in connection with conduct occurring at or around The New School,” but said she could not discuss particulars during active litigation.
Shabot stated her own goal in plain terms.
"I hope that by speaking out, The New School will be forced to confront what went wrong, change the way it responds when Jewish students are targeted, and make sure that no other student has to endure what I did."
The Lawfare Project says the Jewish community is “standing up against a campus that allowed a pro-Hamas mob to take over an American college campus,” and that the group has filed, won, or settled many cases that forced campus changes. Parallel enforcement fights continue elsewhere, from federal investigators probing New York City antisemitism to other civil rights actions in higher education.
Just the News placed the New School case beside other institutions already forced into settlements or criminal process. Haverford College settled class-action litigation brought by Jewish students, with The Deborah Project involved in that matter. Settlement conditions included removing “privileged” and “marginalized” student distinctions from the honor code, punishing masked students who threaten others and refuse to identify themselves, and providing effective security parity for Jewish, Zionist, and Israeli events.
Haverford President Wendy Raymond told her community that “All students including those who identify as Jewish, and/or Israeli, and those who support Zionism [...] are welcome and enjoy equal access to the College and all of its educational programs and activities.” On a recent Tuesday relative to the Just the News report, Haverford religion professor Guangtian Ha was arrested and criminally charged with antisemitic “online harassment and intimidation,” with the FBI involved. He was already on sabbatical and was banned from campus indefinitely.
The same report cited a $6.3 million settlement tied to UCLA litigation over a so-called “Jew Exclusion Zone” and a $36 million defamation judgment connected to Oberlin College. Those figures matter to plaintiffs’ lawyers watching whether federal courts will treat university nonfeasance as a billable civil rights injury. They also sit near broader fights over race engineering in schools, including a DOJ case accusing a UC medical school of discriminating against white and Asian applicants.
Shabot’s filing asks a federal jury to decide whether The New School’s alleged pattern violated Title VI and state and city civil rights laws, breached contractual promises to students, and negligently inflicted emotional distress. Investigators and courts will need to determine what administrators knew, what evidence they received, and whether they enforced neutral conduct rules evenhandedly.
Authorities have not publicly detailed full outcomes of every law-enforcement contact tied to conduct at or around The New School in this dispute. The complaint itself does not, in the public reporting, list a complete defendant roster beyond New School officials and Shalala’s role as then-president. No public on-the-record defense from the university appears in the sourced package.
Still, the procedural posture is clear. A dual citizen student says she documented assaults and exclusion, got therapy suggestions instead of protection, and watched leadership praise an encampment that included a person she identified as her assailant. That is the fact pattern she wants a jury to test under civil rights statutes written to stop national-origin discrimination in education. Federal education policy has already sharpened around related disputes, from notices covering thousands of schools over race-based program criteria to continued scrutiny of ideological double standards.
At the center of the New School allegations is a simple enforcement claim. The university had time, place, and manner restrictions. The suit says antisemitic and anti-Israel activism saturated classrooms and cafeterias in open violation of those rules. Shabot says she reported named people with photos and video. Administrators, she alleges, still accommodated the aggressors.
When an unauthorized encampment took hold, the school allegedly told students it had not called the NYPD and that officers would not enter buildings without consent. Only after further deterioration, the complaint says, did officials summon police. Shalala’s later no-confidence vote shows how costly basic order can become inside institutions that treat law enforcement as the scandal rather than the violence that required it.
That inversion is the policy problem conservatives have flagged across higher education. Rules exist on paper. Jewish students who support Israel’s right to exist say those rules vanish when the mob arrives. The New School case asks whether Title VI still has force when the protected characteristic is Jewish national origin and the preferred campus politics run the other way. Watchdogs keep finding the same institutional habits in other professional schools as well, even after federal crackdowns on DEI-driven practices.
Public reporting has not released a full docket number or a complete list of individual defendants beyond the institutional focus and Shalala’s described role. Exact calendar dates for every email, photograph, and security contact remain thin outside the month-level timeline in the complaint summaries. Investigators will need to determine whether any student or employee faced discipline for the alleged shoving, spitting, bottle throw, door pounding, or event seizure.
The Lawfare Project’s litigation posture treats those gaps as reasons for discovery, not reasons for silence. Goldstein’s framing ties the filing to the post-Oct. 7 surge in campus hostility. Reich’s statements place the burden back on the institution that collected tuition while, in the plaintiff’s account, declining to keep a Jewish student safe in her own buildings.
For readers tracking civil rights enforcement, the New School suit is another data point in a multi-year collision between progressive campus culture and federal nondiscrimination law. Shabot wants penalties, a jury, and institutional change. The school now has to answer in court, not only in statements about safety.
When a university soft-pedals assaults and poses with the faction that made Jewish students afraid to walk into class, it is not neutral. It is choosing sides, and civil rights law still gets the last word.
