UC Berkeley’s campus is in turmoil. It’s unlike anything in recent memory.

BERKELEY, California — University of California, Berkeley’s leaders are under tremendous pressure from Democrats at home as turmoil stemming from the war in Gaza shows no sign of easing.

Liberal members of the state’s legislative Jewish caucus have publicly castigated UC Berkeley for its handling of hostility toward Jewish students and professors amid the war. They’re pushing state laws targeting antisemitism in response to the events — including a violent protest of an Israeli speaker in late February that forced Jewish students to be evacuated.

“There is nothing more indicative of the failure of our college campuses to protect students and protect free speech,” Jesse Gabriel, a Democrat who was UC Berkeley’s student body president in 2002, said of the incident.

While UC Berkeley hasn’t been called before Congress, it is one of six universities nationwide facing an antisemitism probe from the Republican-led House education committee. It’s also under investigation by the U.S. Department of Education’s civil rights arm. In California, state lawmakers have pressed UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ and UC system President Michael V. Drake in private meetings over their responses to antisemitism and issued public statements expressing their dissatisfaction with the university's handling of the issue.

The bicoastal criticism has magnified the challenges roiling UC Berkeley — the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s — six months after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. The tense confrontations, doxing of student activists and interfaculty disputes — including a viral incident with a student activist during a graduation celebration in the backyard of Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky’s home — are emblematic of tensions that continue to tear apart American campuses.

It’s unlike anything the California university has seen in recent memory.

“This is very different because this is student against a student,” Christ said in an interview in February. “It's faculty against faculty. It's internally the most divisive protest issue that I've seen.”

Christ’s career at UC Berkeley spans nearly four decades.

The close watch of not only UC Berkeley but the entire ten-campus UC system has come from the state Legislature as well as the governor’s office. Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, visited Israel in October. After the trip, the “very first meeting the governor had, even before he met with Jewish leaders or any community leaders, was with the heads of all the segments for higher education in the state to talk about campus climate,” said senior Newsom adviser Jason Elliott. “He wanted to make sure that in California, members of the Jewish community felt protected and connected here back in our home state.”

Long before Oct. 7, Berkeley students were at the forefront of anti-Israel activism. Past students created the founding chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, a loosely-organized network of activist groups present on several American campuses. Members of the university’s student government also led a failed campaign to have the University of California system divest from Israel in 2015.

Campus divisions intensified when the war in Gaza began. The chapter of SJP, called Bears for Palestine, issued a statement on Instagram endorsing the Oct. 7 attacks, writing, “We support the resistance, we support the liberation movement, and we indisputably support the Uprising.”

House Education Chair Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) would later point to the comments — as well as the February protest — when she made sweeping documents requests from the university in March.

Dueling protests were mostly peaceful for months, aside from two demonstrators reportedly striking a student holding an Israeli flag with a metal water bottle. That changed in February when a private event featuring Ran Bar-Yoshafat, an Israeli attorney and veteran of the country’s military, was disrupted by counter protesters. Demonstrators broke open a door and shattered a window. One Jewish attendee said she was choked, and that she was one of at least two students who had to seek medical care.

Christ’s office had deployed additional security to the event and would quickly condemn the demonstration, and Bar-Yoshafat later returned to campus without incident. But the episode fed a perception among some lawmakers and students that the campus was no longer a safe place.

Christ acknowledged that there is an “enormous sense of just physical precarity that our students feel, whether they are supporters of Israel or supporters of Palestine.” Social media has stoked that fear, she said, through the spread of videos of tense confrontations on college campuses as well as news of Israel’s ground invasion in Gaza.

“It's almost as if the students are internalizing the sense of violence that is so horrifying to see in the Middle East right now,” Christ said.

Also contributing to the problem is “widespread prevalence of doxing in this conflict” said Christ, which “also leads to this sense of helplessness and vulnerability that so many of our students articulate.” Doxing is when someone’s name or other personal information is sought out and publicized, often online and with malicious intent.

A member of Bears for Palestine described several instances in which her classmates have had their names displayed on trucks circling campus, fueling unease.

“A lot of pro-Palestine students feel uncomfortable showing their faces as a result,” said the student, who was granted anonymity over her fear of backlash for speaking publicly.

She talked to POLITICO in March behind a banner featuring photos of Gazans killed by the Israeli military. Posters and the pro-Palestinian activists holding them have for weeks blocked much of the walkway through Sather Gate, an iconic landmark at Berkeley where students have protested for decades.

Jewish students have pushed administrators to ban the pro-Palestinian activists from loitering under the archway. The administration has declined, saying occupying only part of the gate is common and not a violation of university policy, but campus leaders have installed monitors to watch for threats to students’ safety.

One of the Jewish students, Hannah Schlacter, was involved in facilitating an antisemitism lawsuit against the university. Her testimony to the House education panel about her experience on campus helped inform the committee’s decision to investigate Berkeley, according to Foxx’s office.

“I've never been in such a hostile, discriminatory environment before,” Schlacter said in an interview.

The university commanded national attention again this month after Chemerinsky, the law school dean, was chastised by a pro-Palestinian student at a dinner celebrating graduating students at his home. In videos, Chemerinsky’s wife, law school professor Catherine Fisk, can be seen trying to take the protester’s phone away — complicating the public debate that ensued over the First Amendment rights of those involved.

Chemerinsky has defended the free speech rights of pro-Palestinian campus groups in the past, but in the days prior to the incident, a student activist group on Instagram called for a boycott of the Jewish dean’s dinner over what it said was his “complicity and support for the genocide of the Palestinian peoples.” The post featured a caricature of Chemerinsky holding utensils dripping with blood; it has since been deleted and replaced with a bloodless version.

“Could there be a clearer use of the awful antisemitic trope of blood libel?” Chemerinsky said in an email.

The Jewish Caucus lawmakers, all Democrats, have proposed banning calls for genocide on college campuses, requiring universities to update their codes of conduct — an idea Newsom has endorsed — and mandating that public university students be trained on how to have civil discourse, among other measures. They’re responding to incidents at other California campuses, too, including a case in which protesters at UC Santa Barbara hung up a poster telling the school’s Jewish student body president, “You can run but you can’t hide.”

Elected officials from other states have also questioned their local universities for their handling of antisemitism. The University of Pennsylvania, for instance, took heat from Pennsylvania representatives and Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro in the leadup to the resignation of President Liz Magill. The Penn leader left office, as did Harvard President Claudine Gay, under backlash against their comments to the committee.

Washington’s focus on antisemitism in California is centered on Berkeley — and it goes beyond the collegiate level. The House Education Committee has summoned the superintendent of the K-12 school district in the uber-liberal city to face questioning from congressmembers in May. The district faces a complaint from the Anti-Defamation League and Brandeis Center to the Office for Civil Rights that its students and teachers have discriminated against their Jewish peers.

Foxx said at a press conference before Wednesday’s questioning of Columbia University President Minouche Shafik that the committee hasn’t yet decided whether other college presidents will be called to testify. Shafik was questioned because the Ivy League school has been “one of the worst offenders” for allegedly allowing campus antisemitism, Foxx said.

The committee has only summoned four presidents to Washington so far, but it has requested documents from Rutgers University and UC Berkeley as well as Columbia, Penn, Harvard and MIT.

UC Berkeley spokesperson Dan Mogulof said the university is responding to all of the committee’s requests and questions and will continue to do so.

“At Berkeley we believe every student, regardless of who they are or what they believe in, should feel safe, welcome, and respected,” Mogulof said in a statement. “Our every action is based on the premise that safety and free speech are not, and must never be mutually exclusive.”

Bianca Quilantan and Lara Korte contributed to this report.