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At Stanford, a committee to address antisemitism is roiled by Jewish infighting
(JTA) – Ari Kelman spent the entire Hanukkah party looking over his shoulder.
A professor of Jewish studies at Stanford University, Kelman attended this year’s Stanford Hillel party traumatized by what he’d experienced the past few days on campus. People he didn’t know had declared themselves to be his enemy and had just successfully pushed him to resign from his role co-chairing the school’s committee to fight antisemitism — a committee he himself had lobbied the school’s president to form.
“I spent the night looking around the room, feeling suspicious of the people who are in the room — the people in the Jewish community of Stanford, that I am a member of, and have been a member of for more than a decade,” he recalled. “That was a bad feeling.”
That suspicion was born of attacks on Kelman from a range of voices to his right, including a Jerusalem Post columnist, anonymous students quoted in another publication and a group of alumni co-chaired by Kfir Gavrieli, a three-time Stanford alumnus and footwear CEO who advocated ousting Kelman from the committee’s leadership. Both Kelman and Gavrieli are Jewish, both care about Jewish life at Stanford and both say there’s an imperative need to fight antisemitism on campus amid the Israel-Hamas war.
But for Gavrieli and the sizable bloc of the Stanford Jewish community he says he speaks for, elements of Kelman’s past activism led him to believe that Kelman wouldn’t be an effective steward of the fight against antisemitism. At a moment when so many of the antisemitism allegations concerned debate over Israel, Gavrieli zoomed in on Kelman’s past links to non- or anti-Zionist groups. “There was a rich history of very concerning indicators,” he said he concluded.
The episode underscores how — even at a moment when polls show that the vast majority of American Jews are concerned about reports of rising antisemitism — differences in worldview and strategy have impeded efforts to combat it. Stanford is one of several elite schools that have aimed to address hostility toward Jewish students by forming an advisory committee on antisemitism. But now the committees themselves, and their members, have come under increasing scrutiny from activists who fear they will succumb to the same university culture that allowed antisemitism to fester on campuses in the first place.
“I was experiencing panic attacks trying to represent a community that did not want me to represent them,” Kelman told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “So I stepped down.” In a university release Friday announcing his departure from the committee, Kelman chalked it up to “pockets of Stanford’s Jewish community that strongly opposed my leadership on the committee.”
The committees have been formed after students, faculty, donors and other stakeholders of universities accused campus administrators of doing too little to safeguard their Jewish students in the face of antisemitism following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel. Administrators hope such committees — generally made up of a mix of faculty, alumni and students — can help coordinate productive responses to the challenge of antisemitism on campus.
But committees at Stanford and other schools have since faced a challenging landscape. In mid-November, University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill announced an antisemitism committee at her school “to better understand how antisemitism is experienced on campus.” Weeks later, she resigned after a congressional hearing where she and the presidents of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology declined to say that calls for the genocide of Jews constituted harassment.
Rabbi David Wolpe also stepped down from Harvard’s antisemitism committee after the hearing. Wolpe said the body was ill-equipped to address “the task of educating a generation, and also a vast unlearning.”
By contrast, Kelman believes he was forced out of a committee he himself had pushed for, and whose mission he believed in. After Oct. 7, Stanford was the site of several widely reported incidents of antisemitic behavior in conjunction with the war: A professor reportedly forced Jews and Israelis to stand in a corner of class; “Long Live the Intifada” was scrawled in sidewalk chalk near the site of a pro-Israel vigil; and students unfurled banners calling for Israel’s destruction. A campus sit-in that seeks to pressure the university to divest from Israel has continued for over a month. Its organizers recently met with the president and provost.
“After the 7th, you saw on our campus what you saw on lots of other campuses, which was people on the political left saying things, chanting things, tweeting things, supporting things that were calling for the destruction of the State of Israel, that were actively antisemitic, that were sort of violent, that were callous,” Kelman said. He specifically cited instances of students chanting “From the river to the sea,” a phrase associated with Palestinian liberation that many Jews have interpreted as a call for genocide.
A general view of the buildings of the main quadrangle and Hoover Tower on the campus of Stanford University, Oct. 2, 2021. (David Madison/Getty Images)
This wasn’t Kelman’s first rodeo with antisemitism at Stanford. In 2021, he’d led a task force investigating claims that the school discriminated against Jewish applicants in the 1950s, prompting the university to issue an apology. Afterward, Kelman joined the school’s newly formed Jewish Advisory Committee, whose mandate was, at first, broader than simply fighting antisemitism. One of its issues, he said, was “how do we get it so that Orthodox Jewish kids can get into their dorms on Shabbat without using electronic key cards?”
On Nov. 13, Stanford announced that its Jewish Advisory Committee would have a new subcommittee focused on ways “to combat antisemitism at Stanford, to enhance safety and support, and to build community.” It would include the Stanford Hillel director and a Jewish chaplain at Stanford, several current and emeritus professors — including Kelman — and Jewish undergraduate and graduate student representatives.
The committee — created alongside one for Muslim, Arab and Palestinian communities on campus — has already planned out around 30 listening sessions with Jewish and Israeli members of campus. There are currently no Israelis on the committee, though the school says it is working to recruit them.
Kelman soon faced backlash. An anonymous email, a version of which was forwarded to JTA, circulated among Stanford Jews detailing several issues with Kelman. Referencing the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement and a leading anti-Zionist organization, the email declares that “Ari has a long history of alignment with BDS and Jewish Voice for Peace positions and activists.”
Soon prominent alums began attacking him in social media posts, and on Dec. 11, an article in Jewish Insider quoted anonymous student critics of his.
Kfir Gavrieli speaks at the press conference for a shipment of 3,000 L.A. produced face shields at LA County + USC Medical Center on April 14, 2020 in Los Angeles, California. (Presley Ann/Getty Images for Emergency Supply Donor Group)
Outside of the article, one of the most vocal critics was Gavrieli, the founder and CEO of the ballet footwear company Tieks. He earned a bachelor’s and two master’s degrees at Stanford and had been waging a parallel fight against antisemitism at the school in the wake of Oct. 7. Following the Hamas attack, he co-founded Stanford Against Hate, a group of Jewish and Israeli Stanford business school alums who circulated an open letter calling on the university to take concrete action against antisemitism.
The group also includes executives at LinkedIn and Google. Its letter makes eight demands of the university, including that it adopt a definition of antisemitism composed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance that includes some criticism of Israel. The group also demanded that the campus ban rallies “that celebrate, glorify, or condone terrorist attacks or the destruction of Israel or that promote antisemitism.” And it called on the administration to meet with Jewish and Israeli students on a regular basis.
Kelman shares some of the group’s stated goals, but Gavrieli and others in his camp decided that a Kelman-led committee would exacerbate their concerns over antisemitism rather than alleviate them. In particular, Kelman opposes the IHRA antisemitism definition, which critics have accused of chilling pro-Palestinian campus activism.
In addition, Kelman co-authored a 2017 paper finding that Jewish college students at the time reported “low levels of antisemitism” and generally felt safe on their campuses. And he previously served as a faculty advisor for Open Hillel, a now-inactive organization that pushed Hillel International to relax its policies forbidding partnerships with groups that endorse boycotting Israel. In 2017, a member of the anti-Israel group Jewish Voice for Peace served as counsel for an amicus brief that Kelman signed onto.
On Dec. 11, Gavrieli linked to the Jewish Insider article in a tweet lambasting his alma mater — and Kelman.
“You’ve done even less than Harvard and Penn to protect Jewish students, and your Antisemitism Committee is chaired by Ari Kelman who’s aligned with JVP and antisemitic groups and is opposed to the IHRA definition of antisemitism,” Gavrieli posted on X, formerly Twitter, tagging Stanford’s account.
Gavrieli added, in all caps, “HE DOES NOT REPRESENT US.”
“We know that ideologically we’re not aligned with him,” Gavrieli told JTA. “I know people who we’re comfortable with, and I know who we’re not comfortable with.”
Kelman rejects the idea that he doesn’t take campus antisemitism seriously.
“It’s a total waste and a distraction,” he said. “I wrote papers in 2017 — like, really? You’re going to spend all week, you’re going to spend all this kind of energy doing that? How about actually saying, ‘Hey, there’s real problems. Let’s try to figure out ways to solve them,’” he said. “So stupid, right? Call me an antisemite, call me an anti-Zionist, call me a turncoat, it’s such a waste — so stupid. I feel like I’m 5 years old.”
He said he has never been affiliated with JVP, adding, “If I was, there’s nothing to be embarrassed about, but I’m not and haven’t been.”
The antisemitism committee members don’t appear to share Gavrieli’s discomfort. Rabbi Jessica Kirschner, the director of Stanford Hillel, called the concerns about Open Hillel a “red herring.”
“The heart of the matter is something else altogether,” Kirschner wrote in an email to JTA, without offering details. She added, “I think the work of the committee is incredibly important, and I am sorry that Ari stepped down.”
Gavrieli was one of a number of public critics to take aim at Kelman. The conservative Jerusalem Post writer Caroline Glick called Kelman “a self-hating Jew” and the online watchdog group StopAntisemitism posted, “Exactly WHY every University should adopt the IHRA working definition of antisemitism. When you can define what you’re fighting, people like Ari Kelman can’t sidestep or deny it’s actually happening.”
Kelman claims that no critic of his ever approached him directly about their concerns. But Gavrieli said there had indeed been attempts from his camp to talk to him — and added that the fact that Kelman was unaware of the level of animosity toward him was further evidence he should not be chairing the committee.
In the end, Gavrieli decided that nothing Kelman could say — not even his past work pushing Stanford to respond to antisemitism — could make up for his past stances on Israel.
Last week, Kelman told the committee he would be stepping down. Not even a direct appeal from the school’s interim president, Richard Saller, could convince him to stay. Saller said in a statement that Kelman had “the full confidence of the president, provost, and committee membership.”
Kelman will remain an advisor on the committee and told JTA he still corresponds regularly with its members.
“I want them to succeed,” he said. “I hope they don’t enter the headwinds that I did.”
As for Gavrieli, he commended Kelman for recognizing he could not do the job anymore but said his group still has concerns about other members who remain. (Multiple committee members told JTA its lineup has not yet been finalized.) He said that his group would continue to pressure the university to instead appoint members who more closely align with their views.
“The composition of the committee speaks volumes about the root of the problem here. And we can’t have people on them who share the ideologies that created the problem in the first place,” Gavrieli said. “I don’t want to suggest that these people share antisemitic ideologies. It’s that they share ideologies with an institution that allowed things to get this bad.”
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The post At Stanford, a committee to address antisemitism is roiled by Jewish infighting appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Egypt Rejects Israeli Opposition Leader’s ‘Egyptian Solution’ for Gaza
Yair Lapid, Israel’s opposition leader, presents his Gaza plan at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, DC, Feb. 25, 2025. Photo: Screenshot
Egypt has rejected any responsibility for governing the Gaza Strip after the Israel-Hamas war, reiterating its opposition to a proposal by Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid, who suggested Cairo take over reconstruction efforts.
“Cairo rejects any proposal to manage the Gaza Strip,” the Saudi television channel Al-Hadath quoted sources as saying. “Gaza will be managed by the Palestinians and in coordination with them. Cairo is committed to rebuilding Gaza without displacement.”
At an event hosted by the Washington, DC-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) think tank on Tuesday, former Israeli Prime Minister Lapid, who currently serves as the leader of the opposition in Israel’s parliament, presented “The Egyptian Solution” as his alternative plan for reconstruction efforts in Gaza after the war, proposing that Egypt take over administration of the enclave for 8-15 years in exchange for the cancellation of its $155 billion external debt.
“Egypt is a key strategic partner and [has been] a reliable ally for almost 50 years,” Lapid said. “A strong, moderate, pragmatic Sunni state, a crucial player in the region.”
According to the Egyptian state news agency MENA, Foreign Ministry spokesman Tamim Khalaf declared that any proposals contradicting Egypt and the Arab world’s established stance on Gaza are “rejected and unacceptable,” asserting that the territory must be under “full Palestinian sovereignty and management.”
Cairo has also previously rejected US President Donald Trump’s plan to “take over” the Gaza Strip to rebuild the war-torn enclave, while relocating Palestinians elsewhere during reconstruction efforts.
Trump called on Egypt, Jordan, and other Arab states to take in Palestinians from Gaza after nearly 16 months of war between Israel and Hamas.
Like many other Middle Eastern leaders who rejected Trump’s proposal, Egypt has advocated a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Lapid explained on Tuesday that his plan aims to strengthen Israel’s security in the south, which borders Gaza, by enabling reconstruction and administration without Hamas’s involvement, ultimately resulting in a complete “divorce” from Gaza.
“Down the road, 10 years from now, the best solution is for Israel to separate from the Palestinians in a way that contributes to Israel’s security,” he said.
Under Lapid’s plan, Egypt would be responsible for demilitarizing Gaza and stopping weapons smuggling during its control. In return, he proposed that the international community and regional allies pay off Egypt’s massive debt to support Gaza’s management and reconstruction.
“The situation whereby a terrorist organization controls a country or territory and leaves it for others to manage the civilian affairs – like Hezbollah in Lebanon – is unacceptable,” Lapid said.
He added that Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the countries that normalized relations with Israel under the Abraham Accords could play a role in gradually integrating the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority into governing Gaza. “But that must be done in coordination with Israel and the United States, and with a constant focus on Israel’s security needs,” he emphasized.
Last week, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi met with leaders from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the UAE, and Qatar to discuss his country’s alternative to Trump’s plan and urged the global community to support rebuilding Gaza without displacing its residents.
During a press conference in Madrid alongside Spain’s prime minister, the Egyptian president reiterated that the international community must support reconstruction efforts without displacing Palestinians.
“We stressed the importance of the international community adopting a plan to reconstruct the Gaza strip without displacing Palestinians — I repeat, without displacing Palestinians from their lands,” he said.
On March 5, Egypt will host an emergency Arab summit to discuss what it described as “dangerous” developments for Palestinians, according to a statement from the Egyptian foreign ministry. The statement also said the summit was being called in response to a Palestinian request.
The post Egypt Rejects Israeli Opposition Leader’s ‘Egyptian Solution’ for Gaza first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Anti-Zionist Group Occupies Barnard College Building
Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) members occupying an administrative building on Feb. 26, 2025. Photo: Screenshot
The anti-Zionist group Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) has occupied the Milbank Hall administrative building at Barnard College in New York City to protest recent disciplinary sanctions imposed on student activists.
The highly anticipated action comes one day earlier than CUAD advertised on Monday, when it announced its intention to hold a demonstration on Thursday. In preparation for the event, which many feared would be disruptive of normal campus operations, college officials have spent the last several days tightening campus security — forbidding, for example, non-students from accessing campus, unmasking people who conceal their identities with masks or other garments, and performing random searches of “backpacks, purses, luggage,” and other effects.
Barnard College vice president of strategy Kelli Murray formally announced the measures, first reported by The Columbia Spectator, on Tuesday in an email to the campus community. However, by taking over Milbank Hall on Wednesday, when the college’s guard was down, CUAD has claimed an advantage in what could be a hotly contested struggle for control of the building.
Posting on Instagram during the late evening, CUAD said its members are “flooding the building despite Barnard shutting down campus. Barnard expelled two students and hundreds more rise up!”
Since then, a staff member has been assaulted, according to a source with knowledge of the situation.
CUAD’s demonstration gives expression to its fury over Barnard’s expelling two students who last month stormed Columbia professor Avi Shilon’s course on modern Israeli history and proceeded to distribute antisemitic literature and spew pro-Hamas propaganda.
This week, CUAD resorted to promoting antisemitic tropes to mobilize its supporters for the event, alleging that “Zionist billionaires” influenced the administration’s decision to expel the students.
“This is the first official expulsion of a Columbia affiliate over a protest against the ongoing genocide, ethnic cleansing, and occupation of Palestine by israel [sic],” CUAD said on Monday in an Instagram post. “Barnard’s decision to expel two students marks a serious escalation in the crackdown against students advocating for divestment from the israeli war machine…Barnard’s arbitrary timing and level of punishment is heavily influenced by external pressures from billionaires, donors, and government officials.”
Spinning conspiracies of Jewish control, it continued, “Numerous articles have exposed how billionaires have pressured Columbia administrators to suppress campus activism for Palestine. Zionist networks have specifically targeted the Palestine class disruption activists for harassment, doxxing, and school discipline as part of a coordinated wave of repression against Palestinian activism.”
Columbia University has struggled to contain CUAD — which just last month committed an act of infrastructural sabotage by flooding the toilets of the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) with concrete — and plug the stream of negative publicity and scrutiny it draws. In September, during the university’s convocation ceremony, the group distributed a pamphlet which called on students to join the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s movement to destroy Israel. Several sections of the document were explicitly Islamist, invoking the name of “Allah, the most gracious” and referring to Hamas as the “Islamic Resistance Movement.” Proclaiming, “Glory to Gaza that gave hope to the oppressed, that humiliated the ‘invincible’ Zionist army,” it said its purpose was to build an army of Muslims worldwide.
In April 2024, CUAD members commandeered a section of campus and, after declaring it a “liberated zone,” lit flares and chanted pro-Hamas and anti-American slogans. When the New York City Police Department (NYPD) arrived to disperse the unauthorized gathering, hundreds of CUAD members and their affiliates reportedly amassed around them to prevent the restoration of order. During the ensuing clashes with law enforcement, one student screamed “Yes, we’re all Hamas, pig!” while others shouted “Long live Hamas!” and filmed themselves praising the al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas.
CUAD demonstrated again the challenge it poses to the university’s security apparatus when it attacked SIPA. Numerous reports indicate the action was the premeditated result of planning sessions which took place many months ago at an event held by Alpha Delta Phi (ADP) — a literary society, according to the Washington Free Beacon. During the event, the Free Beacon reported, ADP distributed literature dedicated to “aspiring revolutionaries” who wish to commit seditious acts. Additionally, a presentation was given in which complete instructions for the exact kind of attack which struck Columbia were shared with students. However, security officials were unable to amass any intelligence on the group’s plan before it unfolded.
Barnard College has said that it will not tolerate CUAD’s behavior, a statement it reinforced by suspending the protesters who invaded Professor Shilon’s class.
“Barnard will always take decisive action to protect our community as a place where learning thrives, individuals feel sage, and higher education is celebrated,” college president Laura Rosenbury said in a statement shared with The Algemeiner on Monday. “This means upholding the highest standards and acting when those standards are threatened.”
She continued, “When rules are broken, when there is no remorse, no reflection, and no willingness to change, we must act. Expulsion is always an extraordinary measure, but so too is our commitment to respect, inclusion, and the integrity of the academic experience. At Barnard we fiercely defend our values. At Barnard, we always reject harassment and discrimination in all forms. At Barnard, we always do what is right, not what is easy.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Anti-Zionist Group Occupies Barnard College Building first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Australian Nurse Charged for Threatening Israeli Patients as Spy Chief Flags Antisemitism as Top Concern
Members of the Jewish community and supporters gather for a protest rally against rising antisemitism at Martin Place in Sydney, Jan. 21, 2025. Photo: AAP Image/Steven Saphore via Reuters Connect
An Australian nurse working at a hospital in Sydney has been charged with making threats after saying in comments caught on video that she would refuse to treat Israeli patients and instead kill them.
The latest legal step comes amid law enforcement’s scramble to combat a wave of antisemitic incidents in recent months that Australia’s spy chief has called his agency’s top priority.
On Tuesday night, 26-year-old Sarah Abu Lebdeh was arrested and charged with federal offenses, including threatening violence against a group and using a carriage service to threaten, menace, and harass, New South Wales (NSW) Police said in a statement. If convicted, she faces up to 22 years in prison.
The arrest follows an incident at Bankstown-Lidcombe Hospital in Sydney, in which Abu Lebdeh and her fellow nurse, Ahmed Rashid Nadir, were seen in an online video posing as doctors and making inflammatory statements during a night-shift discussion with Israeli influencer Max Veifer.
The footage, which circulated widely, showed Lebdeh stating she would refuse to treat an Israeli patient and instead kill them, while Nadir used a throat-slitting gesture and claimed to have already killed many.
“It’s Palestine’s country, not your country, you piece of s—t,” Lebdeh told Veifer.
“One day your time will come, and you will die the most disgusting death,” she added in a sentence riddled with obscenities.
After reviewing patient records, the hospital found no evidence that Lebdeh or Nadir had harmed patients.
NSW’s Health Minister Ryan Park confirmed that both nurses had been suspended and would be permanently barred from employment within the state’s health system.
According to the NSW Police statement, Lebdeh was released on bail and is set to appear in court on March 19. At this time, Nadir has not been charged.
The incident is the latest in a surge of antisemitic acts across Australia since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza in October 2023, with Jewish institutions targeted in arson attacks and businesses defaced.
Law enforcement in Sydney and Melbourne, home to the majority of Australia’s Jewish population, is actively investigating hate crimes, including the recent discovery of a trailer containing explosives and a list of potential Jewish targets.
In a Senate committee hearing on Tuesday, Mike Burgess, the director-general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO), the country’s domestic intelligence agency, said that antisemitism is now the agency’s top priority.
“In terms of threats to life, [antisemitism is] my agency’s number one priority because of the weight of incidents we’re seeing play out in this country,” Burgess told the Senate. “Antisemitism and significant antisemitism acts are prominent in our investigation caseload at this point in time.”
In a recent 2025 threat assessment declassified by ASIO, Burgess warned that the surge in antisemitic attacks across Australia could escalate, as extremists are increasingly self-radicalizing and “choose their own adventure” toward potential terrorist activity.
“Threats transitioned from harassment and intimidation to specific targeting of Jewish communities, places of worship, and prominent figures,” he said. “I am concerned these attacks have not yet plateaued.”
After the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel, several Jewish sites in Australia have been relentlessly targeted with vandalism and even arson.
A recent report from the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) found that antisemitism in Australia quadrupled to record levels following the outbreak of the Gaza war, with Australian Jews experiencing more than 2,000 antisemitic incidents between October 2023 and September 2024.
Burgess also described how narratives originally centered on “freeing Palestine” have expanded to include incitements to “kill the Jews.”
During the Senate hearing, Burgess praised the “strong law enforcement responses,” stating that the police “have done exceptionally well.” However, he also addressed criticism over delays in arrests and responses to antisemitic incidents, saying investigations take time and are necessary to fully grasp the problem.
The post Australian Nurse Charged for Threatening Israeli Patients as Spy Chief Flags Antisemitism as Top Concern first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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