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Connecticut College students are in revolt after president’s planned talk at Florida club with antisemitic and racist past
(JTA) – When students at Connecticut College learned that their president had been planning to attend a fundraiser at a historically racist and antisemitic golf club, they began to organize.
But their school’s building for race and ethnicity programming, the Unity House, didn’t have enough space to hold them all. So a pivotal meeting that kicked off a weeks-long campaign against the university took place at a space with a larger capacity: its Hillel house.
“Having a Jewish space on campus that felt like a safe space to gather as a community is something that really struck me as important,” Ilan Listgarten, a Jewish sophomore at the college, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Three weeks later, Connecticut College students have moved to an even bigger location: They have occupied a central administrative building on the New London campus for five days and counting, and are receiving support from faculty and staff.
The students want the president to resign, and they are calling for increased funding and support for various ethnic studies and student group programs. Their demands include enhancements to the Jewish studies program (the school currently offers a minor) and bias training to address antisemitism.
Tensions have remained so high that Hillel leaders canceled a planned Shabbat dinner with the embattled president, Katherine Bergeron, an annual event that this year had been scheduled for Friday.
As Jewish students and faculty on other campuses have complained that they feel excluded from progressive activism, the crisis at Connecticut College has gone in a different direction. Jewish students are playing a leadership role in the protests, working closely with a coalition of activists from other backgrounds who specifically invited Hillel to join in its efforts. That’s notable because, at other schools across the country, recruiting support from coalitions of minority groups has been a hallmark of pro-Palestinian activists — who often boycott (or are themselves barred from) Hillel due to its pro-Israel stance.
“I’ve felt even more proud to be Jewish on campus right now,” sophomore Davi Schulman, a student journalist and member of Connecticut College Hillel’s leadership team, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “And I’m just proud to be a Connecticut College student. We’re really coming together like we never have before.”
Connecticut College students are protesting against their school’s president, Katherine Bergeron, who had been scheduled to speak at a venue with an antisemitic and racist history. (Courtesy of Sam Maidenberg/The College Voice)
Key to Hillel’s participation, observers said, was the fact that the kindling for the student uprising involved antisemitism. Bergeron had been planning to attend a fundraiser for the college to be held at the Everglades Club, an exclusive golf club in Palm Beach, Florida, that has a history of denying entry and membership to Jews and Black people (reportedly including Black Jewish entertainer Sammy Davis Jr. and Jewish cosmetics mogul Estée Lauder).
Today the club is secretive about its current membership policies, though recent testimony from officials has claimed that the club no longer discriminates against Jews. Its antisemitic past was enough to turn off former President Donald Trump from selling his Mar-a-Lago club to them in the 1990s.
The larger campus community became aware of the fundraiser only after the school’s dean of institutional equity and inclusion, or DIEI, resigned from his position Feb. 7 after only a year on the job, citing the president’s unwillingness to take his advice to cancel the fundraiser. Bergeron announced the next day that the event had been canceled and apologized “to all who saw our plans as contrary to Conn’s values or to the inclusive institution we aspire to be.”
The dean had leaked his resignation letter to a group of student activists, sparking the initial efforts to organize what became Student Voices for Equity — and that meeting in the 6,700-square-foot Zachs Hillel House. Jewish students suggested the venue, opened in 2014 to serve the school’s roughly 200 Jewish students, when it became apparent that the crowd of hundreds wouldn’t fit in Unity House.
The controversy over the fundraiser was “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” according to Rabbi Susan Schein, the director of Connecticut College Hillel (and an employee of the university’s diversity and equity office). She and students said there had been long-standing dissatisfaction among many on campus with Bergeron’s leadership; several students said they wanted to see more funding and support for ethnic studies and diversity-focused programs.
When the student activists approached Hillel’s student leadership about having a Jewish representative join their efforts, the students quickly agreed, electing to have Listgarten play the role; today he is helping to support the around 30 students who are occupying the campus building where the president’s office is located. The Hillel also issued a statement standing in solidarity with the movement’s goals.
Connecticut College sits along the Thames River in New London, Connecticut. It enrolls about 2,000 students. (Connecticut College)
A Connecticut College spokesperson told JTA that Bergeron and the school’s administration “take the issues that have been raised seriously,” and that it would conduct an independent review into “the workplace-related concerns.” The college also pledged “significant additional resources” into its diversity-focused efforts. It did not address how the planned fundraiser at the country club had come together. Bergeron has sent six letters to the campus community about the controversy since the diversity dean’s initial resignation.
The ease with which the campus’s Jewish community has fit into this movement is a testament to deliberate programming efforts at the Hillel to reach out to forge relationships between Jews and non-Jews on campus, Listgarten and Schein said. Hillel hosts events like “Unity Shabbat” designed to bring together other marginalized groups, and its center — which includes a game room — was envisioned by funder Henry Zachs as a common space for Jews and non-Jews alike, Schein said.
It wasn’t always this way at Connecticut College. In 2015, the school attracted national attention when a student decried as racist a months-old Facebook post by a Jewish professor about the previous year’s conflict in the Gaza Strip. The professor had ambiguously used an analogy of “rabid pit bulls,” without specifying whether he was talking about Hamas or all Palestinians.
In the resulting furor, hundreds of students and alums signed an online petition demanding the college condemn “the racism and dehumanization” of his post. Pro-Israel activists came to the professor’s defense and accused the campus community of being hostile to Jewish and pro-Israel views.
Today, Listgarten said, Israel hasn’t come up in this current period of student activism, and dialogue between Jews and non-Jews remains civil. He confirmed Bergeron has also hosted annual Shabbat dinners with Hillel students. But this year, after the fundraiser controversy broke into view, Hillel leadership elected not to dine with her for their scheduled Shabbat dinner, which would have taken place Friday.
“The Hillel Board has very clear values of tzedek,” Listgarten said, using the Hebrew word for “justice.” “As soon as this event occurred and it was clear that our values were drastically opposed to that of the president, we canceled.”
Despite their warm reception, Schulman said she’s “conflicted” by the fact that the other campus activists “consistently mentioned the Jewish community on campus and included us in the group of marginalized students.” To her and the other Hillel leadership, the Jewish community has “privilege” that students from some backgrounds don’t, and they’ve made that a central part of their messaging. They cite the existence of the Zachs Hillel House itself, and the fact that it is in better condition than other university spaces devoted to race and ethnicity programming, as one example.
“We don’t want to appear to be pushing any kind of agenda or whatever,” Schulman said. “We’re kind of taking a step back and supporting everyone who is expressing their feelings.”
This dynamic has been crucial to Hillel’s success at ingratiating itself with larger campus culture, Schein said. She invoked Jewish teachings by way of explanation.
“The country club issue that came up involved antisemitism, and I think that caught the attention of the Jewish students. But here they recognized it is not just about themselves, and that they have a responsibility to support others,” Schein said.
Citing the famous quote by Rabbi Hillel, the campus group’s namesake, she added, “They stepped into it. They could’ve been outside, but they said, ‘Now is the moment to support our DIEI colleagues.’ And that’s what the campus is doing. They said, ‘If not now, when?’”
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The post Connecticut College students are in revolt after president’s planned talk at Florida club with antisemitic and racist past appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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No Hate Crime Charges Yet Filed After 3 Suspects Arrested in Brutal California Assaults of Israeli-Americans
Screenshot from video circulated on social media showing three unknown attackers punch two Israeli-Americans in San Jose, California on March 8, 2026.
California prosecutors have charged three men with felonies and misdemeanors after an attack on two Israeli-Americans overhead speaking Hebrew outside a San Jose restaurant.
The district attorney of Santa Clara County released a statement on Monday, announcing that “Bruneil Henry Chamaki, 32, of Morgan Hill, along with Roma Akoyans, 20, and Ramon Akoyans, 18, of San Jose, self-surrendered today to the San Jose Police Department.”
Video which widely circulated online last week showed three alleged assailants punching Lior Zeevi, 47, and Daniel Levy, 48, leaving the men with injuries which required hospitalization. District Attorney Jeff Rosen said “we won’t tolerate pummeling a victim on the ground in front of a restaurant or anywhere, and we will hold the perpetrators fully accountable.”
Prosecutors have not yet filed hate crime charges against Chamaki—who works as a lawyer—and the Akoyans brothers noting in the release that “these charges do not reflect allegations of a hate crime at this time. However, this remains an active investigation. The DA’s Office is working closely with SJPD to review all new information. We encourage anyone with knowledge about this crime to contact the San Jose Police Department.”
According to the police report, before the assault outside Augustine restaurant on Santana Row began, one of the attackers yelled “f— Jews.” As the three men ran away toward the Valley Fair mall after the beating, a witness heard one of them say “don’t f— with Iran,” according to the police report. The witness told police that he thought the suspects were Persian because he was Persian too.
The arresting officers named the offenses in the police report as “simple assault” and “violate civil rights by force/threat of force.”
Chamaki worked as a lawyer for Murphy Austin Adams Schoenfeld LLP until January. The firm confirmed the separation and released a statement to Fox KTVU saying “the conduct described in the reports is deeply troubling. Murphy Austin condemns antisemitism, violence, and acts of hatred in any form.” The police report lists the Akoyans as living in San Jose and Roma as a student at West Valley College. The Santa Clara county court scheduled an arraignment for the three suspects on May 12.
The invocation of Iran during the assaults against Levy and Zeevi places the crime as another example of violence targeting Jewish individuals and institutions in response to the US-Israeli attacks against the leadership of the Islamic regime in Iran which resulted in the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on Feb. 28.
On Saturday, two individuals detonated a bomb outside a Jewish school in Amsterdam, causing minor damage. An Islamist terror group claimed responsibility, as well as for recent strikes on synagogues in Rotterdam and Liege. On Monday, the Netherlands announced the arrest of four unnamed teenagers—aged 19, 18 and 17—suspected of involvement with the Rotterdam attacks. Dutch prosecutors said the crime sought to instill “serious fear in a population group, in this case the Jewish community.”
On Saturday, the Israel Defense Forces revealed that the brother of Ayman Mohamad Ghazali—the man who committed a terrorist attack on Thursday against the Temple Israel synagogue in Michign—served as a Hezbollah commander who died the previous week in an Israeli airstrike.
Ghazali had rammed his pickup truck through the building’s doors and drove through a hallway, the vehicle loaded with fireworks, before dying from a self-inflicted gunshot wound during a shootout with police, failing in his mission to murder Jews.
On March 1, Ndiaga Diagne, 53, allegedly fired rounds from an AR-15 rifle at people outside Buford’s bar in Austin, Texas, resulting in three deaths and 16 injuries. Investigators say that he wore a sweatshirt that proclaimed him as “Property of Allah” and that a t-shirt underneath featured an Iranian flag design. In addition, when searching Diagne’s home, they found an Iranian flag and photos of Iranian leaders.
The FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force has labeled the mass shooting as a “potential act of terrorism” with Acting Special Agent in Charge Alex Doran warning that it was too early to name the motive in spite of the available evidence.
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Joe Kent, Trump official with white supremacist ties, resigns over Iran war and blames Israel
Joe Kent, director of the federal National Counterterrorism Center, resigned Tuesday in a letter to President Donald Trump that claimed Israeli officials had used lies to convince Trump to start the current United States-Israel war against Iran.
Some administration officials, notably Secretary of State Marco Rubio, had previously asserted that Israel compelled the U.S. to strike Iran; Rubio later tempered those claims. But Kent, a controversial figure who has repeatedly engaged with white supremacists and neo-Nazis, made more sweeping — and unproven — assertions in his letter, which Kent posted to social media, declaring the president of a victim of an Israeli “misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran.”
He further claimed Israel had used similar lies “to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war” which he called “manufactured by Israel” without pointing to any evidence. Israeli officials expressed support for striking Sadaam Hussein at the time, but then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon also reportedly warned President George W. Bush not to occupy the country.
Kent’s departure may be a sign that the isolationist wing of the conservative movement — associated with antisemitic influencers like Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes — may be losing influence with the White House. Despite repeated fulminations against the war by isolationists inside and outside of the administration, Trump has shown little sign of recalibrating his approach to the Iran war and recently proposed a possible military incursion in Cuba.
The White House issued a scathing response to Kent’s claim in his resignation letter, with Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt stating, “the absurd allegation that President Trump made this decision based on the influence of others, even foreign countries, is both insulting and laughable.”
It remains to be seen if Kent’s resignation will trigger a wave of departures from within the administration. Congressional Republicans have largely stayed aligned with the president. And Trump himself has moved between suggesting the conflict could end “very soon” and insisting that the United States has not yet achieved “ultimate victory.”
Tulsi Gabbard, who was Kent’s boss in her role as director of national intelligence, once sold campaign merchandise with the slogan “No War With Iran” but has reportedly remained largely silent during the current war while being sidelined within the administration.
Vice President JD Vance, closely aligned with the party’s isolationist wing, reportedly expressed private objections about the Iran war but appears to have been overruled and has yet to publicly voice that view in public.
Meanwhile, Rubio, a longtime foreign policy hawk, has emerged a key advisor to Trump, who has privately surveyed insider opinion about Rubio emerging as heir in 2028.
Kent’s nomination to lead a top counterterrorism agency was contentious from the start. A retired Green Beret and former CIA officer, Kent had twice run unsuccessfully for a House seat in Washington state. In his first bid, Kent was interviewed by a neo-Nazi YouTuber and also met with Fuentes, who has denied the Holocaust. Kent later disavowed Fuentes.
Amy Spitalnick, chief of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, cautioned liberal opponents of the Iran war not to welcome Kent as an ally. “He’s an extremist with deep ties ot Nazi sympathizers and Holocaust deniers who never should have been in this role in the first place,” Spitalnick said in a statement. “Of course, Kent’s own post announcing his resignation is riddled with antisemitic tropes under the guise of blaming Israel.”
Trump, who nominated Kent to his post in the administration and previously supported him, sought to cut bait in comments to reporters in the Oval Office Tuesday afternoon.
“I always thought he was weak on security — very weak on security,” Trump said. “It’s a good thing that he’s out.
The post Joe Kent, Trump official with white supremacist ties, resigns over Iran war and blames Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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Dueling letters from Jewish groups dispute prevalence of antisemitism at UCLA
More than 100 Jewish faculty and staff at the University of California, Los Angeles published a letter Monday disputing the Trump administration’s claim in a federal lawsuit against the university that the school has fostered a hostile climate for its Jewish employees.
Following an investigation launched just weeks after Trump’s inauguration, the U.S. Department of Justice filed the case last month, arguing that “UCLA failed to live up to its systemwide commitment to diversity and equal opportunity when it stood by as Jewish employees were subjected to harassment.”
But signatories to the letter dispute this characterization and say that the lawsuit mischaracterizes pro-Palestinian speech and activism as expressions of antisemitism that would justify a federal civil rights case.
“A ‘hostile work environment’ under Title VII is one where we are being harassed so severely or pervasively as to alter our conditions of employment,” the letter states. “It would be legally unprecedented for a court to rule that any category of faculty and staff faces such a hostile work environment primarily on the basis of student speech.”
The lawsuit and letter come on the heels of reporting by ProPublica, the Chronicle of Higher Education and the Los Angeles Times that described deep apprehension among career lawyers within the Department of Justice over the Trump administration’s investigations into the University of California system and its legal claims against UCLA.
Several government lawyers told the publications that the White House directed them to find evidence that UCLA and other campuses in the statewide system had allowed antisemitic discrimination to take place, rather than conducting open-ended investigations to determine whether any legal violations had occurred.
Not all Jewish faculty at UCLA have opposed the lawsuit, and the members of UCLA’s antisemitism task force — which had been critical of the school’s handling of antisemitism claims in its 2024 report — did not sign the open letter.
UCLA was the site of some of the most dramatic scenes and allegations during the Gaza solidarity encampment movement in the spring of 2024. Pro-Israel groups claimed that pro-Palestinian protesters had banned Jewish students from central areas on campus, pointing to bans on “Zionists” entering areas around the encampment. Some members of the local Jewish community subsequently attacked the encampment with pepper spray, fireworks and sticks in one of the most violent incidents of its kind.
The Jewish Faculty Resilience Group at UCLA told the Los Angeles Times that they were not opposed to claims made by the Trump administration: “The DOJ lawsuit reflects the experiences reported by Jewish faculty who described serious harassment, exclusion, and retaliation based on their Jewish identities,” the group said.
The lawsuit focuses on similar allegations as previous federal claims against the school, including that it allowed Jewish faculty and staff to be barred from certain areas of campus by student protesters.
The open letter was signed by 132 Jewish faculty and staff at the university. It is not clear how many faculty are represented by the resilience group, or how many total Jewish employees work at UCLA.
The post Dueling letters from Jewish groups dispute prevalence of antisemitism at UCLA appeared first on The Forward.