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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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The BBC Tried to Blame Israel — but Exposed Hezbollah Instead

Men carry Hezbollah flags while riding on two wheelers, at the entrance of Beirut’s southern suburbs, in Lebanon, Nov. 27, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Thaier Al-Sudani

It is well established that Hezbollah has not only turned southern Lebanon into a base for terrorism targeting Israel but also embedded itself deep within Beirut’s civilian suburbs.

Yet when the BBC reports from those same areas, it appears determined to obscure that reality.

That may not be surprising. As HonestReporting previously documented, Hezbollah tightly controls access and information available to foreign journalists. What reporters see — and therefore what international audiences are shown — is often filtered through Hezbollah’s interests.

When a Sky News crew reported from Lebanon earlier this year, journalists openly acknowledged the restrictions imposed on them. Hezbollah limited where they could go and what they could film following Israeli airstrikes, likely to conceal evidence of terrorist activity.

So, when BBC reporters arrive in Lebanon two months later and somehow fail to find evidence of Hezbollah’s presence, it is hardly coincidental.

The “BBC traces how 10 minutes of Israeli bombing brought devastation to Lebanon” investigation attempts to portray Israel as deliberately targeting Lebanese civilians. But the report itself repeatedly undermines that narrative.

The very case study the BBC highlights gives the game away.

In Beirut’s Hay el Sellom suburb, a BBC journalist interviews Mohammed, whose son Abbas was killed in an Israeli airstrike on an apartment building in April 2026.

Mohammed claims that, had he known Hezbollah operatives were nearby, he would have left. But that admission directly undermines the BBC’s broader framing. It reinforces the reality that Israel’s operations are linked to Hezbollah’s presence, not random or indiscriminate attacks against civilians.

Another interviewee claims Israel is bombing Lebanon in an attempt to “take over” the country. Yet the report’s own details point to something else entirely: a campaign directed at Hezbollah infrastructure and operatives in an effort to restore security along Israel’s northern border.

According to the IDF, the April 8 strikes that reportedly killed Abbas also targeted more than 250 Hezbollah terrorists.

Ironically, while touring the suburb, the BBC journalist also filmed martyr posters of Ali Mohammed Ghulam Dahini, reportedly killed in the same strikes — corroborating Israeli media reports identifying him as a Hezbollah operative.

Yet the BBC still avoids acknowledging the obvious implication: these strikes were targeting Hezbollah personnel embedded within civilian areas.

Civilian deaths in war are tragic. But tragedy alone does not determine intent.

Under the laws of armed conflict, counterterrorism operations require assessing proportionality — weighing anticipated military advantage against potential civilian harm. In each example highlighted by the BBC, evidence of Hezbollah’s presence at the strike locations is difficult to ignore.

The report itself notes that Mohammed expressed support for Hezbollah in Arabic-language interviews, praising the group for “defending Lebanon.” But Lebanon would not require “defending” from repeated wars had Hezbollah not transformed civilian neighborhoods into military infrastructure.

The BBC acknowledges that Mohammed gave pro-Hezbollah views when speaking to local media. Yet Mohammed presents himself differently to international English-speaking audiences. That discrepancy raises an obvious question: why?

The answer may lie even closer to home.

Investigative journalist David Collier revealed that Mohammed’s son, Abbas Khair al-Din, was himself affiliated with Hezbollah, citing martyr posters and Hezbollah imagery at his grave.

Had the BBC acknowledged these Hezbollah ties, its central framing — that Israel was recklessly targeting civilians — would have become far more difficult to sustain.

This is not the first time the BBC has minimized or erased Hezbollah’s presence in Lebanon.

By omitting Hezbollah’s systematic use of civilian infrastructure, the outlet constructs a narrative in which responsibility falls almost exclusively on Israel while Hezbollah’s role fades into the background.

Most remarkably, despite the evidence presented throughout the report, the BBC still repeats Hezbollah’s denial that it embeds itself among civilians.

The contradiction is striking: the BBC’s own reporting repeatedly points to Hezbollah activity within civilian areas, yet the outlet still amplifies Hezbollah’s denials with minimal scrutiny.

Not all Lebanese civilians support Hezbollah. But the BBC’s inability — or unwillingness — to feature meaningful Lebanese criticism of the terrorist organization reveals how selective the report truly is.

Hezbollah has effectively held Lebanon hostage, exploiting civilians while dragging the country into repeated cycles of conflict.

There is genuine dissent within Lebanon. Many Lebanese are exhausted by Hezbollah’s dominance and want a future free from perpetual war. Yet those voices are almost entirely absent from the BBC’s report.

The BBC intended its report to portray Israel as conducting a campaign against Lebanese civilians.

Instead, it inadvertently documented something else entirely: Hezbollah’s deep entrenchment within civilian infrastructure.

The report repeatedly presents evidence of Hezbollah activity, Hezbollah support, and Hezbollah-linked individuals in the very locations Israel targeted — while simultaneously attempting to deny or downplay the implications.

When media outlets obscure Hezbollah’s use of civilian areas, they do more than distort the story. They sanitize the conditions Hezbollah itself created.

And in this case, the BBC’s own reporting ultimately undermines the narrative it set out to build.

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

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My artist grandmother nearly made aliyah. I don’t know what she’d think of Israel today

With Mother’s Day coming up, I can’t help but think of my maternal grandmother, who passed away six years ago. And whenever I start thinking about my grandmother, my mind almost always turns to her art.

My grandmother, Kayla Silberberg, had a brief period where she showed her work in art shows in California, selling a few pieces, but most of her paintings from the ‘60s and ‘70s decorate my parents’ house. The majority of her art is multi-colored and not concerned with realism, the objects and figures often disproportionate, the people always bending in ways that implied a lack of a skeletal system. Only a few of her pieces are literal, and it was mostly early work. However, after she’d stopped painting in the ‘70s due to a career change and a reported lack of inspiration, she acquiesced to my mom’s request that she do a realistic sketch of me. (And she even did two!)

I’ve always been particularly fascinated with a painting she did of Israel in 1968. She compressed the country’s geography, the Western Wall practically attached to the Dome of the Rock, separated from a body of water by a handful of small buildings. The water is divided by barbed wire and on the other side, in the piece’s foreground, is a desert landscape, covered by bushes with orange-yellow flowers and multi-colored cacti. There also appears to be a person in the very front, their back turned to the viewer, wearing some type of full-body garment, the tie around their head waving in the back. A similarly shaped figure in what is more clearly a tallit floats near the Western Wall.

My grandmother’s compressed image of Israel from 1968. Image by Kayla Silberberg, courtesy of her familu

When I asked my mom about the barbed wire, she didn’t know what the impetus was for my grandmother to put it there. We’re not certain that our interpretation — that the foreground is Palestinian territory — is accurate. Is there anything to say about how she painted the figures on either side of the barbed wire in very similar shapes? Is the fact that she painted it one year after the Six-Day War relevant to why she painted it?

These weren’t conversations we had with my grandmother when she was alive, and these could very well be modern projections. My fascination with interpreting the work is more a reflection of the historical moment I’m living in than trying to guess what my grandmother would say about Israel today.

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I actually have almost no memories of talking to my grandmother about Israel, with the exception of the story of her and my grandfather’s near attempt to immigrate there sometime in the 1960s. (The story goes that when the immigration office told my grandfather, who held a computer-engineering degree, that Israel already had too many engineers, my grandfather was so insulted that he abandoned the plan.)

It wasn’t that my grandmother was apolitical — one of her paintings is titled “Feminism,” a cryptic collage of male and female faces emerging from a colorful cloud. And no one could ever say she lacked strong opinions. It was just one of those conversations we never got around to.

I was 17 when my grandmother died, just on the cusp of being interested in talking about world events with the adults in my life. I imagine that just a couple years later, I would’ve developed more of a consciousness for talking about heavier topics.

That feeling has grown stronger since I moved to New York almost two years ago. My grandmother grew up in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, in a duplex that had her immediate family on top and her grandparents on bottom. The only real story I have of this time in her life is that she used to tell her Orthodox parents she was going to be with her aunt on Shabbat nights, when actually she was sneaking out to go on dates with boys. When I visited Coney Island for the first time last summer, I wondered if she’d often come there herself, and tried to imagine what it would have been like in the ‘40s and ‘50s.

While talking about this story with my mom, she assured me that I was not alone in this. Her grandmother Chaia was 14-years-old when she immigrated to New York from the Pale of Settlement — the area that the Russian government restricted Jews to — in the early 1900s. My mom told me she never asked Chaia about her experiences before and during her immigration.

It’s not just my grandmother I wish I’d been able to have a relationship with as an adult. There’s also my paternal grandfather, who died when I was 14. I think about the conversations I could’ve had with my cousin Reverend Dr. Katie G. Cannon, the first Black woman ordained in the Presbyterian Church of the United States, if she’d lived just two more years, after I took my first sociology and religious studies classes. What would I have spoken about with my grandmother, who had a later career as a college guidance counselor, if she had lived to see me go to Penn? Or if she had been around for my start at the Forward, which she read every week while it was in print?

I’ve previously written about the project I worked on with my parents, where I recorded conversations with them about all the objects in our home (minus the modern appliances). Through that, I got answers to questions I would’ve never thought to ask about my parents’ lives and had many conversations about my grandmother’s art. But these were mostly surface level observations. And none were about the Israel painting, which ironically had to be moved to storage to make room for my grandmother’s other belongings after she died.

Although I wish I’d had the idea for the project while all four of my grandparents were still alive, I still have the chance to ask my paternal grandmother questions about her life — and his own — that I haven’t thought to ask before. Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter what made Kayla paint Israel the way she did. The fact that her paintings bring up so many emotions and questions for me tells me that she still lives on within my heart.

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Miss Israel Melanie Shiraz Says Mamdani’s Wife Snubbed Her Because She’s From Jewish State

Melanie Shiraz being crowned Miss Israel 2025. Photo: Simon Soong | Edgar Entertainment

Melanie Shiraz, who represented Israel in the 2025 Miss Universe pageant, said on Wednesday that the wife of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani refused to take a photograph with her because the beauty queen is from the Jewish state.

Shiraz posted on Instagram a video that features a short clip of herself with Rama Duwaji, the first lady of New York City. The Israel native said in the video’s voice-over that she met Mamdani’s wife by chance in a coffee shop in New York City and the two sat next to each other. Duwaji was willing to take a photo with the beauty queen “until she found out that I was Miss Israel; until I told her that as an Israeli, I was disappointed in seeing the kind of rhetoric she was promoting online,” Shiraz said.

“I told her as part of my ideology as an Israeli is to have productive dialogue in which not one side is constantly dehumanized. But despite that, despite the setting being calm, the moment she found out I was Israeli, she refused to have a conversation with me,” continued the graduate of the University of California, Berkeley.

“If you can publicly apologize for dehumanizing Israelis, but you can’t get yourself to humanize one when you come face-to-face with them in real life, what does that say about you and what does that say about the state of our politics considering that is the wife of the mayor of New York City?” Shiraz added.

A Texas-born illustrator with Syrian roots, Duwaji has previously uploaded or “liked” numerous anti-Israel posts on social media. She has also “liked” several online posts that celebrated the deadly Hamas-led terrorist attack against Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, and even defended the largest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, describing it as Palestinian “resistance.”

It was discovered that Duwaji shared social media posts praising female Palestinian terrorists who participated in plane hijackings and bombings in the 1960s and early 1970s. In 2015, she shared a post in which someone else wrote that Tel Aviv was occupying Palestinian land and “shouldn’t exist.” Duwaji also illustrated an essay co-edited by a Palestinian-American activist author who described the Oct. 7 attack as “spectacular” and called Jewish Israelis “rootless soulless ghouls.”

In April, Duwaji apologized for “harmful” social media posts she made as a teenager, which included anti-gay and anti-Black language, but did not directly address her more recent anti-Israel social media activity.

Mamdani, who has faced his own share of criticism for anti-Israel comments and actions, has previously defended his wife by saying she is a “private person.”

In the caption of her Instagram video, Shiraz said she was “not particularly” surprised by her interaction with Duwaji at the coffee shop in New York City.

“It is easy to apologize without meaningfully changing one’s behavior,” Shiraz explained. “It is easy to claim opposition to dehumanization in principle, but far more difficult to embody that in practice. She was polite throughout. But the shift in demeanor was evident, and the lack of willingness to engage even more so.”

“I approached the interaction with openness to a genuine, respectful conversation. That openness was not reciprocated,” Shiraz added. “And that, perhaps, is the more telling point: how often this disconnect appears, and how normalized it has become.”

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