GIFT MATCH DONATION
Help Contribute to the Efforts of the StandWithUs Saidoff Legal Department!
With the meteoric rise of antisemitism, especially on college campuses, one of the best tools we have to combat it is through legal means. However, the StandWithUs legal team is overwhelmed with over 600 new intake since October 7, ten times the usual amount. The requests are coming in from middle schools, high schools, college campuses, and community members seeking legal help.
Our team urgently needs additional staff litigators and an intake manager to help triage the incident intake, conduct research, draft and file demand letters, complaints, grievances and lawsuits. While many of the cases are coming from students affiliated with StandWithUs, we are also seeing an influx of new students, professors and community members who have never before reached out to StandWithUs.
It is imperative that we expand our legal in-house team so that we can better meet the growing challenges nationwide.
A generous anonymous donor has given us a matching grant of $150,000 to increase the size of our legal department. Thank you for your support of these efforts!
1. Filing Title VI of the Civil rights Act complaints with the U.S. Department of Education. Each complaint takes approximately 200 hours of work—interviewing witnesses, combing through the facts, drafting the complaint, meetings with the Department of Education, prepping witnesses for those meetings, etc. We are ready to begin this process at several universities and are simply awaiting more legal staff to enable us to do this critical work.
2. We are inundated with requests to help individuals receiving criminal threats, terroristic threats, victims of vandalism and physical assaults as a result of standing up for Israel and simply being Jewish. We help them navigate filings police reports, FBI reports, and following up with these. Our expanded team would enable us to help all of them in the myriad ways they need.
3. Empowering students to fight back against anti-Jewish harassment and discrimination, often through direct representation at administrative hearings, meetings with deans and school administrations in K-12.
4. Protecting students from antisemitic bullying and harassment through mentoring and legal demand letters, as well as filing Title VI complaints.
5. Holding DEI offices accountable for anti-Israel bias and antisemitism through legal demand letters to universities.
6. Preventing student governments from abusing bylaws through antis Israel activity by providing bylaws analysis to campus professionals, including StandWIthUs staff.