“In the year 2024, in the United States of America, in the State of California, in the City of Los Angeles, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith. This fact is so unimaginable and so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom that it bears repeating, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith.”

So begins the order issued Tuesday by a United States district judge, Mark Scarsi. Hizzoner went on to note that UCLA “does not dispute” that Jewish students were excluded from portions of its campus because they refused to denounce their faith. “Instead,” the flabbergasted judge noted, “UCLA claims that it has no responsibility to protect the religious freedom of its Jewish students because the exclusion was engineered by third-party protesters.”

One has to wonder what the members of the Board of Regents who are the defendants in the case were thinking. The court seemed so shocked that it named in the text of the order the defendant Regents — Michael V. Drake, Gene D. Block, Darnell Hunt, Michael Beck, Monroe Gorden, Jr., and Rick Braziel. These worthies appeared in the case against the university’s own Jewish students who wanted to cross Royce Quad and go to class.

They were, the order suggests, blocked by “pro-Palestinian protesters” who had occupied a portion of the quad. Protesters established checkpoints and required passersby to wear a specific wristband to cross them.” The judge quoted “news reporting” indicating that “the encampment’s entrances were guarded by protesters, and people who supported the existence of the state of Israel were kept out of the encampment.”

We understand that this — or analogous behavior — is not all that unusual in these times, when the administration of our own government seems to stand back from a forceful defense of Jewish students on our campuses. Nor is it the first time the administration of a major university has taken in court a position against the Jewish students on their own campus. What catches our attention is the incredulity — and prompt action — of the judge.

The Regents, he wrote, “are prohibited from offering any ordinarily available programs, activities, or campus areas to students” if the Regents “know the ordinarily available programs, activities, or campus areas are not fully and equally accessible to Jewish students.” And also from “knowingly allowing or facilitating the exclusion of Jewish students from ordinarily available portions of UCLA’s programs, activities, and campus areas.”

He also ordered the Regents to instruct “any and all campus security teams that they are not to aid or participate in any obstruction of access for Jewish students to ordinarily available programs, activities, and campus areas.” And then, the judge ordered that “for purposes of this order, all references to the exclusion of Jewish students shall include exclusion of Jewish students based on religious beliefs concerning the Jewish state of Israel.”

Will the Regents obey, or will they stand in the schoolhouse door the way, say, George Wallace did during the civil rights battle to integrate the University of Alabama? Will the appeals court step in? The circuit is the notorious Ninth Circuit, one of the most liberal in the country. The case is captioned Yitzchok Frankel [a student] v. Regents of the University of California. It will be one to watch in the season ahead in the state that handed up Vice President Harris.