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‘There was no time to sleep’: 4 Jews reflect on a year of helping Ukrainians at war
(JTA) — In the months after Russian tanks rolled into her country last February, the music largely stopped for Elizaveta Sherstuk.
The founder of a Jewish choral ensemble called Aviv in her hometown of Sumy, in the northeastern flank of Ukraine, Sherstuk had to put singing aside in favor of her day job and personal mission: delivering aid to Jews in Sumy.
“There was no time to sleep,” Sherstuk recalled to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency recently. “All my team members worked the same, 24/7.”
A year later, Sherstuk is still hustling as the Sumy director of Hesed, a network of welfare centers serving needy Jews in the former Soviet bloc. But she has also begun teaching music classes again, too — with performances sometimes held in bomb shelters.
Catch up on all of JTA’s Ukraine war coverage from the last year here.
Sherstuk’s story reflects the ways that Russia’s war on Ukraine has affected Jews in Ukraine and beyond. The conflict has killed hundreds of thousands, left even more in peril and fundamentally altered the landscape and population of Ukraine, forcing millions to flee as refugees.
But the war has also mobilized the networks of Jewish aid and welfare groups across Europe, leading to a Jewish organizational response on a massive scale not seen in decades. And Ukrainian Jews who have remained in the country have recalibrated their lives and communities for wartime.
Here are four stories about Jews who stepped in and stepped up to help, and a taste of the on-the-ground situations they found themselves in.
‘I was needed there’
Enrique Ginzburg, second from right, is shown with Ukrainian doctors in Lviv. (Courtesy of Ginzburg)
Since nearly drowning at 23, Dr. Enrique Ginzburg has felt he “had to pay back” for the extra years of life he was granted.
Now 65, the professor of surgery at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine and its trauma division has lent his critical care expertise in Haiti, Argentina, Kurdistan and Iraq, in various emergency situations. But until last year, he had never been to a war zone.
The Cuba native felt drawn to Ukraine because his grandfather is from Kyiv, while his grandmother is from nearby eastern Poland. So early on in the conflict, he called Dr. Aaron Epstein, an old friend and the founder of the nonprofit Global Surgical and Medical Supply Group.
“Get yourself a flak jacket, a helmet, a gas mask and come on over,” Ginzburg said Epstein told him.
He has been to Ukraine twice under the nonprofit’s auspices, last April and July. Ginzburg’s explanation for why he flew across the world to put himself in danger: “I was needed,” he said.
His base was an emergency hospital in Lviv, a city located west enough that it became a major refugee hub. He consulted with front-line Ukrainian physicians, many of them young and inexperienced, and hospital administrators, watching the doctors in action. He also visited patients in hospital wards and helped to treat gunshot wounds and assorted combat injuries.
Ginzburg’s bags were packed with meaningful supplies. Some had been requested by his Ukrainian colleagues for medical use, mostly specialized catheters. But he also brought tefillin, the phylacteries used by Jews in their morning prayers. Ginzburg, who studied in a yeshiva while young but no longer considers himself Orthodox, wrapped them every day while in Ukraine.
Even though Lviv was far from the fighting, he could hear air raid sirens and the explosion of the Russian missiles, sometimes feeling the earth shake. When intelligence reports warned Ginzburg’s medical team of impending missile attacks, they sought refuge in safe houses.
“Today,” he told the Miami Herald last June, “I was calling my life insurance [company] because I have young sons and my wife, so I’m trying to make sure I have good coverage.”
By the end of his trips, Ginzburg lost count of the number of doctors he helped train and the number of patients he saw. “I’m sure it’s hundreds.” He plans to make a third trip sometime this year.
‘This is our new reality’
Karina Sokolowska is the director of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s activities in Poland. (Courtesy of the JDC)
As the director of the JDC, or the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, in Poland, Karina Sokolowska has heard countless harrowing stories over the past year. But one sticks out in her memory.
It involved an elderly Ukrainian couple she met at the Poland-Ukraine border in late spring. The husband was in a wheelchair, and Sokolowska helped push him — back towards Ukraine. They had spent three months in a shelter in Poland but eventually “realized we cannot go looking for jobs, we cannot restart our lives. We are too old,” the woman said.
“If they are to die, they’d rather die back home,” Sokolowska said. “It’s a story of hopelessness. They are so vulnerable.”
Last year, about 8 million Ukrainian refugees made their way to Poland, the bordering country that accepted the most refugees. Early on in the conflict, Sokolowska contacted and visited Jewish communities throughout Poland, investigating the availability of places where the soon-to-be-homeless refugees could be housed. She also traveled to some of the border crossings where the Ukrainians entered, to arrange transportation to venues in Poland and to oversee the conditions in which the refugees would begin their new lives.
Later she would help with, among other things: arranging legal advice for the people who arrived with few identification documents; lining up medical care and drugs; finding them short- and long-term housing; connecting them to psychological counseling; providing kosher meals; and even caring for the refugees’ pets (“dogs and cats with no documents”).
According to JDC statistics, the organization “provided essential supplies and care” to 43,000 Jews in Ukraine and “aided 22,000+ people” there with “winter survival needs … more than double the amount served in previous years.” The welfare organization also claimed to provide “life-saving services” to more than 40,000 refugees in Poland, Moldova, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and other European locations. It also helped evacuate about 13,000 Jews from Ukraine. (Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen recently said 15,000 Ukrainian Jews in total have immigrated to Israel since the start of the war.)
Karina Sokolowska, JDC director for Poland and Scandinavia sits in her office down the hall from a hotline room, in early March 2022. (Toby Axelrod)
At the height of the refugee flood, Sokolowska said her monthly JDC budget ballooned to more than what she previously spent in an entire year. Her office went from having a few employees to over 20. The amount of sleep she got decreased in tandem; she started taking sleeping pills to get rest when she could.
“This is our new reality” in Poland, she says of the JDC work with Ukrainian refugees. “This is our life now.”
Sokolowska, the granddaughter of Yiddish-speaking Holocaust survivors, became active in Jewish life during college, when a classmate heard her pronouncing some German words with a Yiddish accent and persuaded her to lead the Polish Union of Jewish Students. As JDC director for Scandinavian countries in addition to Poland, she typically organizes educational conferences and helps Jewish families learn about traditions they had not learned while growing up in the communist era.
Today, her sense of optimism has been ground down.
“Everything changed when war came to Ukraine — there is less hope,” Sokolowska said. “It’s a totally new everything. Every aspect of our life changed. Our hope for this to be over soon is going down, down, down. Nothing will change.”
‘It could [have been] me’
Tom and Darlynn Fellman volunteered in Krakow in October 2022. (Courtesy of Tom Fellman)
Sometime in the late 1890s, Harry Fellman, about 20 years old, left his home in Ukraine. According to family legend, he was a sharpshooter in the Ukrainian army and was about to be sent into active combat. Instead, he emigrated to the United States and settled in Omaha, Nebraska, where he became a peddler.
His grandson Tom Fellman — whose middle name is Harry — doesn’t know all the 120-year-old details, but he knows that he is grateful that Harry Fellman decided to leave Ukraine when he did.
“It could [have been] me, if my grandparents had not left when they did,” said Fellman, a successful real estate developer and philanthropist in Omaha.
In October, at 78 years old, Fellman made the reverse trip across the Atlantic to pitch in to the relief effort. He also wanted to pay what he sees as a debt to the memory of his late grandfather and to help the current generation of Ukrainian Jews.
He and his wife Darlynn served as volunteers for a week at the Krakow Jewish community center, joining hundreds (possibly thousands) of volunteers from overseas who have gone to Poland and the other nations in the region over the last year to participate in humanitarian programs on behalf of the millions of Ukrainian refugees. Fellman worked nine hours a day with a half-dozen fellow foreign volunteers in the basement of the community center, transferring the contents of “big, big” sacks of items like potatoes and sugar into small containers to be distributed to refugees in the building’s first-floor food pantry. His wife spent her time in an art therapy program that was set up for the refugee mothers and children to raise their spirits.
Fellman is “not particularly religious” but supports “anything Jewish.” In 1986, he accompanied a rescue mission plane of Soviet Jews headed to Israel. “It was the most rewarding experience of my life,” he recalled.
Fellman says he plans to return to Poland, in June, for the JCC’s annual fundraising bike ride from Auschwitz to Krakow.
What did his friends think of his septuagenarian volunteer stint? “They thought it was cool,” he said. “But none of them are going too.”
‘Everything was a risk’
Elizaveta Sherstuk runs a branch of Hesed, a network of welfare centers, in Sumy, Ukraine. (Courtesy of Sherstuk)
Sherstuk’s parents would have sent their daughter to a Jewish school in her early years if they had had the option. But Jewish education was not permitted In Sumy during the final years of communist rule in the Soviet republic. Sherstuk was exposed to Jewish life only at home.
Her parents infused her with a Jewish identity, she said, and her grandparents used to talk and sing songs in Yiddish. That inspired Sherstuk’s first career as a singer and a music teacher, during which she founded Aviv and took it on tour throughout the region singing traditional Jewish songs. Later, she became the director of Sumy’s branch of the JDC-funded Hesed network.
Sumy, an industrial city with a population of 300,000 before the war situated only 30 miles from the Russian border, was one of Russia’s first targets. In the days before the pending invasion, Sherstuk stockpiled food, which was certain to become scarce in case of war, and arranged bus transportation to safer parts of the country for hundreds of vulnerable civilians, mostly the elderly and disabled. The bus plan fell through for safety issues.
As the bombing started, it became dangerous for members of the local 1,000-member Jewish community, many of them elderly, to venture outside of their apartments. Sherstuk, working out of a bomb shelter, assisted by a Hesed network of volunteers, coordinated food and medicine deliveries.
The situation grew more dire, and she coordinated the Jewish community’s participation in a brief humanitarian corridor evacuation of vulnerable civilians that the Russians permitted. She communicated with Sumy residents mostly by smartphones provided by the JDC — the Russian attacks had cut the landlines — and accompanied the busloads of Sumy Jews to western Ukraine. Some of them eventually moved on to Israel, Germany, or other nearby countries, she said.
Sherstuk stayed in western Ukraine for a while (“The humanitarian corridors are only for one-way trips,” she noted), moving from place to place, keeping in touch with the Jews of Sumy and waiting for Ukraine’s army to make the trip back safe. But Sumy, like many Ukrainian cities, has come under frequent Russian rocket attack.
“Everything was a risk,” she said. “We were following whatever our hearts told us to do. We had to save people. I was the one who had to do it.”
Last May, Sherstuk was among 12 men and women (and the sole one from the Diaspora) who lit a torch at the start of Israel’s Independence Day in a government ceremony on Mount Herzl. During two weeks in Israel, she spent some time with members of her family, and held a series of meetings with JDC officials, government ministers and donors. “It was not a vacation,” she said.
After going back to Sumy, at the suggestions of her choral group members and fellow Sumy residents, she organized concerts in Hebrew, Yiddish, Ukrainian and Russian — some in person, some in a bomb shelter in the city’s central square, some online. She has now resumed her music classes, too, and it has all boosted morale. “I [teach] all the time,” she said.
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The post ‘There was no time to sleep’: 4 Jews reflect on a year of helping Ukrainians at war appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Are You Doing Everything You Can to Reach Out to Your Fellow Jews?
Jewish Americans and supporters of Israel gather at the National Mall in Washington, DC on Nov. 14, 2023 for the “March for Israel” rally. Photo: Dion J. Pierre/The Algemeiner
While Israel and the US have been fighting against Iran side-by-side over the past few months, I heard the story of an Air Force cadet that inspired me.
The Air Force graduate in question, Joel Usher, appeared in a TikTok video and stood at attention during his graduation ceremony, knowing no family was coming. No friends either. In the military, when you complete basic training, someone has to physically “tap you out” at the end of the ceremony. It is a moment of recognition, a moment of arrival. And Joel had no one.
Then a fellow trainee found him in the crowd and stepped forward. He tapped him out.
Joel said he felt “proud, relieved, and grateful all at once.” He could barely hold back the tears. Millions of people saw that video and understood exactly why.
I watched it and immediately thought of shul.
How many times have you walked into a synagogue you did not know and stood there feeling invisible? You look around, and no one looks back. You do not know when to turn the page. You do not know the melodies. You are standing in the middle of a celebration that was not built for you, at least not on that particular morning. Then, if you are lucky, someone walks over. They hand you a siddur open to the right place. They say, “Do you have somewhere for Shabbat?”
That small gesture is a “tap out.” It is someone saying, “You belong here, and I am going to make sure you know it.”
The problem is that it does not happen nearly enough.
Our observant communities have grown enormously in recent years. Walk into almost any Orthodox or traditional shul on a Shabbat morning, and the room is full. But a room full of people does not mean a room full of connection. A crowded room can still be a lonely room if no one reaches beyond their own circle.
And right now, the stakes could not be higher.
So many Jews today are searching. They are rattled by the world outside, by the antisemitism that has exploded in ways many of them never expected to see in their lifetime. They are watching what is happening in Israel and feeling something stir inside them that they do not have words for yet. They are close, many of them. They are standing right at the edge of something real.
And we know them. They are our doctors, our accountants, our neighbors, the people we see at our kids’ games on Sunday morning. They are Jewish. They are family. They just have not had someone tap them out yet.
That is what family does, actually. Family does not wait to be asked. Family notices when someone is struggling. Family knows when something is wrong before the person says a word. Family shows up.
Being Jewish means being part of a family that stretches across continents and centuries. That is the whole idea. And a family that only shows up for people inside its immediate circle is not really living up to what family means.
So here is my question. What are you actually doing with that? When you walk into shul and see someone standing alone, looking lost, do you cross the room? When you sit next to a Jewish colleague who never grew up with any of this, do you ever think to send them something worth reading — a Shabbat thought, a piece of Torah that might actually speak to them? When Passover is coming, do you pick up the phone and say, “You should be at our table”?
Joel’s friend could have assumed someone else would handle it. He could have told himself it was not his place. Instead, he walked over.
The most powerful moments in a person’s life are rarely the grand gestures. They are the quiet ones. The siddur passed across the aisle. The invitation that was extended without waiting to be asked. The text message on a Friday afternoon that says, “Thinking of you, here is something I found beautiful this week.”
We are all surrounded by Jews who need to be tapped out. The only question is whether we are paying enough attention to notice them standing there, waiting.
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The Other Iranian Energy Crisis: How Israeli Gas Disruptions Will Cost the Jewish State’s Economy
The production platform of Leviathan natural gas field is seen in the Mediterranean Sea, off the coast of Haifa, northern Israel June 9, 2021. Picture taken June 9, 2021. Photo: Reuters/Amir Cohen
The global oil shock created by Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz obscured a second energy crisis that unfolded much closer to Israel’s borders. The month-long shutdown of Israel’s Leviathan and Karish gas fields, caused by repeated Iranian and Hezbollah missile attacks, was the longest gas export disruption since Israel began supplying gas to Jordan and Egypt.
This interruption, the third in the past two years, exposed how dependent Israel’s neighbors have become on Israeli gas for electricity generation, and reinforced a broader strategic lesson for them.
Viewing Israeli supplies as unreliable, Jordan, Egypt and even Syria are now more likely to deepen hedging strategies by expanding renewables, maintaining costly backup fuels, increasing liquefied natural gas (LNG) flexibility, and looking for alternative regional transport and energy corridors. The bright side is that this shift may strengthen the case for IMEC (the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor) by reframing it less as a Europe-oriented transit initiative and more as a domestic infrastructure project for ensuring intra-regional energy security.
The East Mediterranean energy crisis that accompanied the Iran war was distinct from the better-known oil crisis centered on Hormuz. Israel’s wartime safety procedures forced it to shut down its northern Leviathan and Karish gas fields and divert all the gas from its single remaining field (Tamar) to serve the Israeli market at the expense of its export commitments to Jordan and Egypt.
The Leviathan gas field, the largest source of Israeli gas, eventually resumed operations on April, 2, 2026, 32 days after its initial shutdown. Karish opened a week later on April 9, 2026. Together, these closures mark the longest gas supply disruption since Israel began exporting gas to its neighbors, and the third major disruption following the eruption of the Gaza War on October 7, 2023 and the 12-day war with Iran that took place in June 2025.
The importance of these supply disruptions lies not only in their immediate economic effects, but in the fact that they have become recurrent. From the perspective of Israel’s neighbors, the problem is no longer a one-off technical interruption but a recurring pattern of conflict-driven unreliability. That unreliability is concerning because Israeli gas has become structurally important to the region’s power sectors. In 2025, Israel’s natural gas exports to Egypt and Jordan grew by 13%, reaching about 13.2 BCM – an amount that is set to increase significantly over the next 15 years, to an additional 130 BCM, following Israel’s landmark gas deal with Egypt in 2025.
Jordan is especially exposed to this dependence, as natural gas accounts for roughly 68% of its electricity generation and Israeli gas supplies over half of that gas demand.
During the disruption, Jordanian officials moved quickly to reassure the public that the power supply would remain stable, but the emergency steps they took highlighted the depth of the problem.
The National Electric Power Company (NEPCO) had to shift parts of its electricity generation to heavy fuel oil and diesel at a time when oil prices were at a record high and diesel was in short supply worldwide. Jordan had to tap into its limited petroleum stockpiles, import additional LNG cargoes through Aqaba at a higher cost, and reduce gas deliveries to its industry. These measures preserved grid stability, but at significant cost. Jordan’s energy minister stated that substituting diesel for natural gas raised NEPCO’s daily operating costs by about 1.8 million Jordanian dinars (~2.5m USD) and that its strategic reserves were being quickly depleted. The actual fiscal burden is likely to be much higher than that, and does not take into account the additional cost of refilling depleted stockpiles in the months ahead.
Egypt is less dependent on Israeli gas than Jordan, but it too faced a major challenge following the disruption.
Israeli gas accounts for about 15-20% of Egypt’s total gas consumption, and Egypt’s electricity sector is overwhelmingly gas-dependent. Unlike in June 2025, when Egyptian fertilizer producers were forced to halt operations after Israeli gas imports dropped, the steps taken by Egypt during the March-April 2026 crisis point to a broader emergency response.
Cairo increased LNG purchases, relied more heavily on alternative fuel imports, and introduced demand-side conservation measures, including early closing hours for shops, restaurants, malls, cinemas, and other venues. Egypt’s LNG receipts reportedly tripled year-on-year in the first quarter of 2026, from $560 million to $1.65 billion, while its monthly energy import bill rose sharply as it replaced cheaper Israeli pipeline gas with more expensive LNG and liquid fuel imports. This is a striking development for a country that only a few years ago was hoping to leverage its liquefaction infrastructure and offshore resources to become a major gas exporter; it now relies on gas imports to keep the lights on.
Finally, a third casualty of Israel’s gas closures was Syria, which has been involved since early 2026 in a new gas arrangement with Jordan based on Israeli-sourced gas. In January 2026, Jordan and Syria signed an agreement by which the former would supply the latter with up to 4 million cubic meters of natural gas per day.
Jordanian officials stated that gas deliveries to Syria had already begun on January 1, albeit at much lower volumes than agreed, with the goal of helping Syria operate power plants and reduce chronic electricity shortages. When Israeli production and exports were disrupted at the start of the war, gas flows from Jordan to Syria declined or stopped, worsening Syrian power shortages. These developments underscore the extent to which Syria’s fragile electricity recovery is now linked not only to Jordanian infrastructure and Gulf financing but also to the reliability of Israeli gas supplies.
The strategic implication is that Jordan, Egypt, and Syria are now more likely to view Israeli gas through a dual lens, a process that for Jordan and Egypt had already begun in October 2023. Israel remains attractive as a gas supplier because it is geographically close and is already integrated into regional infrastructure, and its gas is often significantly cheaper than liquefied alternatives.
But repeated wartime interruptions make overdependence increasingly difficult to justify. Even if the political will still exists among all parties to continue energy trade, the risk that supply remains susceptible to frequent war-related precautionary closures and wider regional escalation is too serious to ignore.
As a result, neighboring states are likely to intensify their efforts to diversify both fuel sources and generation structures. The most plausible response is not a complete abandonment of Israeli gas but a strategy of hedging against its interruption. That logic is already visible in Jordan’s reliance on backup fuels and LNG capacity and in Egypt’s move toward large-scale LNG purchases and regasification expansion.
But this trend is also likely to expand interest in non-gas electricity sources, especially renewables. Solar and wind do not provide a full substitute for baseload gas generation, but they can reduce marginal dependence on imported fuel and improve resilience in systems where gas is used primarily for power generation. The political meaning of this shift is that the “green energy transition” in the East Mediterranean will no longer be viewed only as a climate or development issue but as a security issue. The repeated shutdown of Israeli gas exports has made that connection harder to ignore.
The second measure Jordan and Egypt will take is to seek more diversified physical supply routes, whether through domestic exploration, additional import infrastructure, or overland pipeline projects that connect Arab markets more deeply to one another. This includes the long-promoted prospect of oil and gas pipelines from Iraq to Jordan, from Saudi Arabia to Egypt, and from Turkey to Syria. This logic applies not only to Jordan and Egypt but also, indirectly, to the wider Levantine energy system. Even where Israeli gas is re-exported, blended, or politically relabeled to find its way to Syria or even Lebanon, the region is still exposed to the same upstream vulnerabilities.
These developments also have implications for how Israel and its partners should think about regional projects such as IMEC (the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor), and whether it is a net win or net loss for Israel itself.
If such corridor projects continue to be presented mainly as infrastructure meant to serve Israeli regional interests and European energy needs, they risk appearing politically detached from the immediate needs of neighboring Arab states. In Jordan especially, the overtly Israel-centered regional branding of IMEC remains difficult to sell.
However, if future corridors are framed primarily as tools for East Mediterranean resilience and not as transit corridors for the West, their logic becomes more compelling. A rail, pipeline, or fuel corridor that improves Jordan’s, Syria’s, Lebanon’s and Egypt’s access to alternative supplies, or that deepens connectivity between Arab states before connecting onward to Israel and Europe, is likely to be more politically palatable and strategically sustainable. In this sense, the repeated gas disruptions strengthen the case for IMEC, but only if it treats the East Mediterranean as an energy-consuming region first and an energy exporting region second. The infrastructure itself will still benefit Israel in the long term, but the corridor’s regional acceptability is likely to depend on its being presented as an intra-regional public good rather than a Europe-facing geopolitical flagship.
For Israel, the lesson emerging from these trends is not that gas exports to neighboring states have lost their strategic value, but that gas interdependence alone does not create durable regional energy security.
Israeli gas exports remain one of the few concrete mechanisms linking Israel economically to the region. If Israel wants its gas diplomacy to retain strategic value, it will need to think less in terms of singular export leverage and more in terms of system resilience.
That means hardening offshore infrastructure, improving redundancy, coordinating emergency arrangements with importers, and recognizing that partner states will actively seek alternatives after each disruption. Leviathan’s planned expansion may increase Israel’s export capacity over time, but larger volumes will not by themselves solve the core problem of ensuring reliability under conflict conditions, as the recent war revealed once again.
For Jordan and Egypt, the likely post-crisis response is not disengagement from Israeli gas but a hedging strategy. Jordan will continue using Israeli supply because it remains economically attractive, but it is also likely to preserve and strengthen backup arrangements through Aqaba, reserve fuels, and renewable generation. Egypt, facing a sharper structural gas deficit, will continue buying Israeli gas but will simultaneously expand LNG imports, regasification capacity, and upstream exploration.
The larger implication is that the East Mediterranean should increasingly be understood not only as a potential export platform, but as an energy-consuming region with growing internal interdependence and shared vulnerability. That shift in perspective should encourage policymakers to ask not merely how the region can ship product outward, but how it can better absorb shocks at home. In that sense, the East Mediterranean gas crisis was not a side story to the oil drama that unfolded during the Iran War. It was a warning about the fragility of the region’s emerging gas order, and a signal that future regional strategy must be built around deeper intra-regional connections and shared infrastructure.
Dr. Elai Rettig is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Studies and a senior research fellow at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University. He specializes in energy geopolitics and national security. A version of this article was originally published by The BESA Center.
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Jewish students wanted to bring J Street to Sarah Lawrence. Why did the student senate say no?
(JTA) — After Oct. 7, Sarah Lawrence College student Emilyn Toffler felt something was missing on campus.
“My campus blew up with pro-Palestinian activism,” Toffler recalled. “I was encouraged to see my classmates engage with the issue, many for the first time, but I looked around campus and saw that there was no space for students to have conversation or nuanced dialogue.”
Last fall, Toffler and another Jewish student tried to change the situation. They decided to form a campus chapter of J Street U, the college arm of the liberal pro-Israel group. With the help of a faculty advisor, they tried to make the club a campus reality.
Nearly two dozen such J Street U chapters have formed nationwide since Oct. 7, as students have sought to promote the group’s self-described “pro-Israel, pro-Palestinian and pro-peace” outlook as an alternative to anti-Israel activism surging on campuses — as well as to hawkish campus pro-Israel activism.
But when the students applied to the student government at Sarah Lawrence, an elite progressive liberal arts college in New York’s Westchester County, to make J Street U an official club, they encountered fierce resistance.
After voicing their strong opposition to the group, the Student Senate rejected the J Street U application — the first time a J Street campus chapter has ever been rejected anywhere, according to the group. (The final vote tally was not included in the meeting minutes.) When the students appealed the decision, the senate rejected the appeal, too. And though some faculty and alumni supportive of the students have tried to lobby Sarah Lawrence’s administration to intervene, the college leadership has so far chosen not to.
The Sarah Lawrence J Street rejection offers a window into how campus politics around Israel have evolved since Oct. 7. Two years after anti-Israel protests roiled campuses, even Jewish groups that support Palestinian statehood and sharply oppose Israeli government policies can be treated as beyond the pale.
According to several Sarah Lawrence students and faculty members, it’s rare but not unprecedented for the student senate to reject a student club application. But what happened in deliberations over the J Street U application, they said, was shocking.
Student senators compared recognizing the group to approving “a white supremacist organization,” according to an audio recording and transcript of the meeting obtained by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
One senator said they were concerned about “the whole Zionist language” of the group “that’s still furthering the same logic of Israeli sovereignty and self-determination when there is no existence or security for Israel that’s not contingent on Palestinian displacement, on apartheid, on genocide.”
The application was rejected. The Jewish students appealed to the same body. In March, their appeal was rejected, too.
The Student Senate did not return several JTA requests for comment.
The case, according to J Street, marks the first time a J Street U campus chapter has been blocked from forming.
“We are proud of the work students do to create spaces for dialogue and diverse perspectives on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict,” Jeremy Ben-Ami, J Street’s president, told JTA in a statement. “J Street has long opposed efforts to curb speech and free expression on campus, and we encourage Sarah Lawrence’s administration to approve the chapter’s application.”
At other schools where student governments have recently taken aim at Jewish groups — such as when The New School’s student government tried to block funding to the campus Hillel last month — administrators have rejected their decisions.
Sarah Lawrence’s senate bylaws allow for the intervention of the school’s dean or other leadership to “grant … recognition of the organization” in cases “when it is in the best interests of the college.” Despite prodding from local J Street allies, President Crystal Collins Judd has not stepped in. On Monday, faculty members delivered a petition to Judd, drawing on those bylaws in calling on her to intervene to permit the campus J Street U chapter. Yet so far, the president has opted not to take action.
Sarah Lawrence’s administration “does not intervene in the process unless there is a clear violation of policy,” the school’s dean of students, Dave Stanfield, told JTA. Stanfield also said it was “not unusual for organizations to be denied recognition.”
He suggested that students hoping to form a J Street U chapter should explore other means of activism or try again next year.
“For students who may be disappointed by this outcome, including those nearing graduation, there are multiple avenues for community-building, programming, and engagement on campus,” he wrote in an email. “For students returning next academic year, they can reapply for organization recognition.”
Toffler graduated on Friday. “I am sad that we never got recognition as a club,” they said. “I think we could have positively contributed to the political conversation on campus.”
Jewish faculty, too, were upset about how the J Street students were treated.
“I was immediately alarmed,” Matthew Ellis, an endowed chair of Middle East studies at the college, told JTA when he heard about the rejection. “That just smacked of very obvious, blatant political discrimination.”
For the past few years, Ellis said, he had already been struggling to promote responsible campus dialogue about “the complexities of Zionism.” Some students have been receptive, he said, but a hardline pro-Palestinian contingent “has taken up all the space on campus.”
“And then the J Street thing happens,” he recalled. “I just put my palm to my head: ‘Jesus, what is going on?’”
Rejecting the J Street U chapter, the faculty petition argues, violated Sarah Lawrence’s “Principles for Mutual Respect” and its policy to “foster honest inquiry, free speech, and open discourse.” The petition, circulated to a limited number of faculty members, has garnered more than 20 signatures.
“We, the faculty — and I very much include myself — have clearly not been successful in helping students understand that the only community worth belonging to is a community in which everyone welcomes disagreement rather than trying to shut it down,” novelist Brian Morton, a longtime Sarah Lawrence professor, told JTA.
“This should be one of the bedrock ideas of higher education,” he added, “but somehow we’re failing to get it across.”
J Street occupies a complicated place in American Jewish politics.
Founded in 2008 as a liberal alternative to more hawkish pro-Israel organizations, the group has spent years advocating for a two-state solution and criticizing Israeli military operations and West Bank settlement policy. It was rejected from the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations in 2014 amid criticism that it too often sparred with other Jewish groups over Israel.
Since the Gaza war began, J Street has departed even further from the pro-Israel consensus. Last summer, before the Sarah Lawrence students applied to form their chapter, Ben-Ami said he had been “persuaded” by the argument that Israel had committed “genocide” in Gaza, a charge that Israel and its allies fiercely reject.
Last month, the organization announced that it now opposes continued U.S. military aid to Israel, including for the defensive Iron Dome system.
J Street has also criticized the Trump administration’s campus antisemitism investigations and deportation efforts targeting pro-Palestinian student activists.
Many of those stances have set J Street apart from more mainstream pro-Israel groups. But at Sarah Lawrence, student senators said they saw little distinction.
“What the students here are invested in is Palestinian liberation. And there’s no existence or advocation for Israeli or Zionist security that can co-exist with Palestinian liberation,” one student senator told the J Street students, according to audio and a transcript of the meeting where the club was rejected the first time. “The normalization of Zionism and of Israel is what students are opposed to.”
The J Street students tried to explain that they had been misunderstood. According to the official meeting minutes, they “argued that their idea of Zionism aligns fixedly with more of a textbook definition of it, rather than how it has come to be more widely defined around campus.”
In their appeal, they continued the argument. “It is our impression that the decision to not approve J Street U at SLC relies on a caricature of our position as reflexively aligned with an extremist Israeli government and callously indifferent to Palestinian suffering and aspirations to statehood,” they wrote. “That could not be further from how we feel or what our organization hopes to work for.”
In written decisions rejecting the chapter, Sarah Lawrence senators raised concerns about J Street’s lobbying work and questioned whether the student organizers could guarantee that the campus group would remain independent from the national organization.
They also asked whether J Street U “would fulfill a unique political/cultural space on campus that doesn’t already exist across different clubs,” pointing to the anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace, Hillel, a Humanist Jews group and the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.
Toffler, who also served as student president of the campus Hillel board, said the process revealed a profound ignorance about Jewish life and political diversity.
“If you can’t tell the difference between Hillel, JVP and SJP, you’re simply not doing a good job representing the one-fifth to one-fourth of your classmates who are Jewish,” they said.
Supportive faculty, including their advisor, had planned to attend the students’ March appeal meeting. But just before the meeting, according to the advisor, the senate announced that only two people would be permitted at the appeal, and they would only be granted 10 minutes to make their case. (The faculty advisor declined to be identified publicly out of fear of the repercussions for their own standing in academia.)
According to meeting minutes from March, senate chair Nora Tucker-Kellogg reiterated concerns that the chapter could eventually “more closely resemble” the national organization. Tucker-Kellogg also referenced what she described as “widespread concern” about the group. The final vote tally denying the application was, again, not recorded in the meeting minutes.
Tucker-Kellogg is also a co-plaintiff in a legal complaint against the college and a U.S. congressional committee investigating antisemitism, alleging that pro-Palestinian students and faculty have had their First Amendment rights chilled by “false accusations of antisemitism.”
The complaint, which claims the campus is not hostile to Jews, describes Tucker-Kellogg as an organizer involved in campus encampments and building occupations related to pro-Palestinian activism.
An attorney for Tucker-Kellogg did not respond to requests for comment.
Opposition to liberal Zionism on campus predates the students’ J Street U application.
Before Oct. 7, former Sarah Lawrence student Sammy Tweedy told JTA he was treated as a “pariah” for having gone to Israel; Tweedy, the son of rock musician Jeff Tweedy, left the school after the Hamas attacks as a result of the hostility he said he faced there. He was targeted, he said, even though he has also opposed “current Israeli government policy propaganda.”
In 2024, students protested then-Forward editor-in-chief Jodi Rudoren, accusing her outlet of being “a hotspot for dangerous Zionist propaganda.”
Earlier this year, New York Times columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein, who himself often criticizes Israel, visited Sarah Lawrence for a public event. Protesters interrupted the discussion, shouting “You like genocide” and calling Klein a “Nazi normalizer.” Toffler said a poster labeling Klein “a Zionist pig” remained posted on a campus bulletin board for weeks.
Following the disruption, according to video of the event, Judd, the college president, joked to Klein, “Welcome to Sarah Lawrence.”
Both demonstrations were organized by the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.
Last week, SJP said some participants in the Klein protest had been disciplined by the school shortly before commencement. According to the group, one student was barred from campus on graduation day while others were prohibited from attending certain events.
The chapter denounced the disciplinary actions as “racialized and Islamophobic attacks” and expressed solidarity with “those resisting ziomerica.”
Stanfield declined to comment on specific disciplinary measures but said the college takes disruptions seriously and seeks to balance free expression with mutual respect.
The atmosphere has alarmed some Jewish alumni. “It makes me very sad, and at the moment a bit angry,” said Jo-Ann Mort, a Sarah Lawrence alum, poet and longtime J Street activist. Mort did not directly advise the J Street U students but had reached out to the president and faculty about the issue as a concerned alum.
“I believe that J Street U is really useful because it can directly challenge, on these campuses, the hypothesis of the anti-Zionist left,” she told JTA. “And they’re not a comfortable fit for those willing to acknowledge there are two peoples living in one place.”
Rachel Klein, executive director of Hillels of Westchester, which serves Sarah Lawrence and nearby campuses, said she was shocked by the senate’s decision and rhetoric.
“I expected backlash and protest after the club was established,” she said. “But I did not expect the student senate, who are supposed to be representatives of the entire student body, to be so biased.”
Klein has spent years clashing with the Sarah Lawrence administration over antisemitism concerns. She said the campus Hillel has not hosted a formal Israel-related event since 2015, when an Israeli soldier’s visit to campus was targeted by protests.
Today, she said, she doubts a Hillel chapter would be approved if proposed from scratch.
In 2024, Klein filed a federal civil rights complaint against Sarah Lawrence — a highly unusual step for a Hillel director to take — after concluding that the administration would not adequately respond to serious concerns about antisemitism.
“I did not want to have to file a federal complaint against one of my campuses,” Klein said. “I wish I had a partner in Sarah Lawrence who believed in the equity of every student.”
The complaint triggered a federal Title VI antisemitism investigation. Sarah Lawrence also figured into a Republican-led House inquiry into campus antisemitism launched in 2025. Internally, Stanfield, the school’s dean, had told the president that Klein’s initial claims of post-Oct. 7 campus antisemitism were “exaggerated and alarmist,” according to emails later published as part of the House committee report.
Some Jews on campus say the student senate’s response to the J Street U petition must be understood in the context of the scrutiny from the federal government.
“Students hear ‘pro-Israel’ and sometimes make assumptions about what opinions that means that don’t apply to J Street,” said Joel Swanson, a Jewish studies professor who said he supported the students’ application.
Swanson himself criticized the congressional inquiry in a Forward op-ed, arguing that Jewish students were uncomfortable being used in national political battles. (He did not mention the J Street U saga in his Forward piece.)
“I wish we could have a more nuanced discussion about this,” he told JTA. “But the way this has been polarized through the federal climate is making that harder.”
Another Jewish professor rebutted Swanson’s defense of Sarah Lawrence in an essay in the Jewish Journal.
“The record at Sarah Lawrence is not thin,” wrote Samuel Abrams, who teaches politics, arguing that administrators had inadequately addressed repeated incidents involving Jewish students.
Toffler, who studied politics and government and spent a year studying abroad in England, said the experience has left them worried about future students who may hold opinions outside the prevailing campus consensus.
“I also worry for the next generation of Sarah Lawrence students,” they said. “Who’s going to be there for them as they strive to express opinions that differ from the mainstream on campus? I don’t know.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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