JTA — An event at the University of California, Los Angeles featuring the freed Israeli hostage Omer Shem Tov has become the latest flashpoint in campus dialogue over Israel, after the university’s student government issued a statement condemning the talk.

The event itself went off without disruption. But the school’s Undergraduate Students Associated Council issued a letter the same day declaring that bringing Shem Tov to campus was an example of “selective platforming of narratives that obscure the broader reality of ongoing state violence.”

The statement ignited a firestorm. The student government has drawn ire from a sitting University of California regent, the campus Hillel, and its own president, who accused a faction of student leaders of passing the resolution with underhanded methods.

The controversy comes as UCLA continues to face scrutiny under the Trump administration’s campus antisemitism push, much of it tied to student protester actions after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel. UCLA is currently facing a lawsuit from the Justice Department over what the administration said was the fostering of a hostile work environment when protesters took over sections of campus and sought to bar “Zionists” from entering; the school has also settled a $6.13 million lawsuit with Jewish groups over the same instances.

“I am disgusted and appalled by the Council’s recent statement condemning an on-campus event featuring former Israeli hostage Omer Shem Tov,” Jewish UC regent Jay Sures, a leading Hollywood talent agent, wrote in a lengthy open letter published earlier this week. “Talk about a missed opportunity.”

UCLA’s Hillel, together with the campus’s Israel Studies center and its Student Supporting Israel club, hosted Shem Tov for an event earlier this month coinciding with Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. The school’s Jewish chancellor Julio Frenk, who has been outspoken about his commitment to combat antisemitism on UCLA’s campus, attended the talk with his wife.

Shem Tov, 24, was abducted from the Nova music festival by Hamas in October 2023 and held captive in Gaza for 505 days. His parents co-founded the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, an Israeli group that advocated for the hostages’ release during the war. Since his release he has spoken widely on college campuses and in other venues, including to Turning Point USA, the conservative group.

A previous campus stop by Shem Tov, at Duke University, also caused controversy when comedian Jerry Seinfeld introduced him by saying pro-Palestinian protesters were worse than the Ku Klux Klan.

The UCLA student government letter opposing Shem Tov’s talk said the event was “elevating a single narrative, absent of critical political and humanitarian framing.” It also condemned the school’s Israel Studies center for hosting the talk, writing, “Universities must not be complicit in the production or amplification of one-sided narratives that erase systems of oppression and occupation.”

In an Instagram post, Hillel at UCLA and Students Supporting Israel jointly accused the student board of antisemitism.

“Members of UCLA student government (USAC) have once again shown they are anti-dialogue, anti-learning, anti-truth, anti-student, anti-Jewish and antisemitic in condemning our beautiful event last week with Omer Shem Tov, a young man kidnapped from a music festival and held, tortured, and treated inhumanely as a hostage and human slave by Hamas in Gaza for over 500 days,” the groups wrote.

Sures’s note had more pointed criticisms of the student government’s stance.

“Omer Shem Tov is not a representative of the Israeli government,” he wrote, later adding, “‘You claim you want balance in programming and more than ‘a single narrative’ from speakers at UCLA. Balance, by definition, inherently involves equal consideration of more than one point of view. By condemning this speaker’s public appearance on our campus, your words and actions make clear you have no interest in balance at all. That is the biggest double standard of all.”

In his talks, Shem Tov often describes his experience of psychological torture in captivity and concludes that his Hamas captors had “no humanity.” He has described carrying hundreds of boxes of food aid from the United Nations into Hamas’s tunnels in Gaza, saying that Hamas was taking the rations for its own members. At a recent Harvard talk, Shem Tov also said of Gaza’s non-Hamas citizens, “I’m sure there is some who wish for peace and want peace. But I can say this: the majority of them, the majority of them, they want to eliminate us.”

In his own statement, student body president Diego Bollo said he and several other council members, including one who had been involved in promoting the Shem Tov event, had not been present at the meeting where the letter was drafted and voted on.

“It is my belief that the councilmember who introduced this letter chose to bring it forward on a day when [the member who promoted Shem Tov] was not present and therefore unable to offer her perspective as someone with knowledge of the organized event featuring Omer Shem Tov,” Bollo wrote.

He and the other student leadership also fielded public comment opposing the letter at a subsequent meeting, and Bollo said he would review “our internal processes for drafting and releasing public statements.”

UCLA’s own statement backed the groups that had hosted Shem Tov, saying, “The event’s message was one of resilience and respect for human rights and dignity — a message we support.” The school’s statement added, “The condemnation of such a peaceful event to share a story of resilience in the face of extreme suffering is antithetical to the values of our Bruin community.”

Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.

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