American Law’s Jewish Question: Religion, Race, and Free Speech in an Age of Campus Antisemitism.
Robert Katz, Professor of Law and John S. Grimes Fellow, Indiana University McKinney School of Law.
The 34th annual Pearl and Troy Feibel Lecture on Judaism and Law will Feature Rob Katz, presenting:
"American Law’s Jewish Question: Religion, Race, and Free Speech in an Age of Campus Antisemitism."
American law has long struggled to categorize Jews within its major frameworks—religion, race, ethnicity, and, at times, the highly protective free‑speech regime. This lecture traces how these shifting legal categories shaped Jewish equality in the United States, from early constitutional protections against religious outsider‑status, through civil‑rights approaches that alternated between treating anti‑Jewish harm as religious or as racial/ethnic, to today’s campus debates where First Amendment constraints limit how institutions may respond to antisemitic expression.
Drawing on recent campus controversies nationwide, including incidents in which Jewish students were blocked from programs or campus spaces, the lecture asks whether American law can better address the realities of Jewish identity as an ethnoreligious tradition. Can legal doctrine evolve to protect religious and secular Jews alike—those whose Jewishness is rooted in faith, culture, ancestry, or peoplehood—across the overlapping domains of religion, race, equality, and speech?
Professor Katz earned a J.D. with honors from the University of Chicago Law School, where he served as a comments editor on the University of Chicago Law Review and received the prize for best law review comments. He also holds an A.B. magna cum laude in Government from Harvard College, where he was awarded the departmental prize for best thesis in political theory. He clerked for the Honorable Stephen G. Breyer, then Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.
Before joining the IU McKinney faculty in 2001, Professor Katz was a Bigelow Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School and served as a trial attorney in the Federal Programs Branch of the Civil Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.
Professor Katz recently published Antisemitism and the Law (Carolina Academic Press, 2025), the first book on the subject, which examines how legal systems manifest and propagate antisemitism and how they can be used to combat it. He is a member of the ABA Presidential Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, the founder and director of the Center for the Study of Law and Antisemitism.
Professor Katz has presented his research at Harvard Law School, the International Prosecutors’ Summit on Antisemitism at The Hague (keynote speaker), the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism at Indiana University, and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law. In Spring 2026, he will present his research at Princeton University, Notre Dame Law School, and the University of Chicago.
As a civil rights advocate, Professor Katz served as co‑counsel in Stafford v. Carter (S.D. Ind.), a class action on behalf of Indiana inmates infected with the hepatitis C virus; the Indiana Department of Correction settled the case by agreeing to fund antiviral treatment for infected inmates at a cost exceeding $80 million. Professor Katz was also co‑counsel in Lee v. Pence (S.D. Ind.), which successfully challenged Indiana’s ban on same‑sex marriage. In March 2015, he testified before the Indiana General Assembly’s House Judiciary Committee in opposition to proposed amendments to the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act, objecting that they would authorize discrimination against LGBTQ individuals. He serves on the Government Affairs Committee of the Indianapolis Jewish Community Relations Council, offering guidance on issues such as hate crimes and reproductive freedom, and he regularly joins fellow Jewish lawyers in Indianapolis for lunch at Shapiro’s Delicatessen.
Supported by: The Pearl and Troy Feibel Lecture on Judaism and Law
Located in: Columbus JCC, 1125 College Ave. Columbus, OH 43209
Register Here
This is a free, public event and open to all.
If you have any questions, contact Tamar Becker, becker.905@osu.edu