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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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VIDEO: Memories of the Workmen’s Circle in Montreal
מער ווי הונדערט יאָר לאַנג האָט דער אַרבעטער־רינג געשפּילט אַ וויכטיקע ראָלע אין דעם ייִדישן לעבן פֿון מאָנטרעאָל. די אָרגאַניזאַציע איז געווען איינע פֿון די וויכטיקסטע וועלטלעכע ייִדישע כּוחות אין דער שטאָט און האָט אין משך פֿון לאַנגע יאָרן אַנטוויקלט אַ רײַך קולטור־ און געזעלשאַפֿטלעך לעבן.
אין דער רעקאָרדירונג וועט איר זיך באַקענען מיט שלום (סאָל) עדלשטיין, וואָס האָט אָנגעפֿירט דעם אַרבעטער־רינג אין מאָנטרעאָל אין אירע לעצטע יאָרן. מיטן שמועס פֿירט אָן אלי בענעדיקט פֿון דער ייִדיש־ליגע.
אין די ערשטע יאָרן פֿונעם 20סטן יאָרהונדערט זענען געווען אַ ריי אַרבעטער־רינג-„ברענטשעס“ איבער קאַנאַדע, וואָס האָבן געפֿירט אַ רײַכע קולטור־אַרבעט, אַרײַנגערעכנט שולן, טעאַטער־טרופּעס און כאָרן. במשך פֿון די יאָרן האָבן זיך די „ברענטשעס“ צו ביסלעך פֿאַרמאַכט, און די פֿאַרבליבענע אַקטיוויטעטן האָבן זיך צונויפֿגעקליבן אין איין הויז אין מאָנטרעאָל. אין דעם לעצטן יאָר האָט זיך אויך דאָס הויז פֿאַרמאַכט. אין דעם שמועס וועט שלום עדלשטיין דערציילן וועגן די „ברענטשעס“, וועגן דעם לעבן און די אויפֿטוען אין דעם הויז, און וועגן זײַנע אייגענע איבערלעבונגען דאָרט.
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Facebook suspends radio broadcaster’s account over video of Holocaust survivor
Facebook has abruptly banned a Jewish broadcasting executive in Minnesota after he posted a link to a video of a 104 year-old Holocaust survivor in Texas sharing his story, prompting the Minnesota Attorney General to intervene.
Joel Glaser, CEO of AMPERS, a group of community radio stations across Minnesota, received an email from Facebook last month informing him that his personal account had been suspended because it violated the platform’s “child sexual exploitation” policies.
Because Glaser also administers the account for an AMPERS radio series titled MN90: Minnesota History in 90 Seconds, Facebook also took down that account, which has more than 10,000 followers.
The video produced by an NBC affiliate in Dallas and shared by an ABC affiliate in the Twin Cities, featured a talk by Walter Levy, a survivor who fled Germany in the late 1930s and still tells his story about how his family survived Kristallnacht and struggled with whether to flee to then-British mandated Palestine or America. His family eventually joined relatives in Arkansas.
“How it got flagged as being child sexual exploitation is absolutely beyond me,” said Glaser, who unsuccessfully appealed.. “It did not give me the opportunity to explain anything, ask any questions, provide any screenshots, do anything at all.”
Facebook has said the case has been “flagged for the team” and is “looking into this.”
Glaser initially speculated that an antisemite, Holocaust-denier, or a bot operating on their behalf had flagged his post. But then he started leaning toward the notion that it was probably just artificial intelligence run amok.
“I guess Meta’s AI isn’t smart enough to differentiate between child sexual exploitation and a legitimate news story,” he said.
Because Glaser also oversees AMPERS’ news coverage, losing access to Facebook has made his job more difficult.
“I’m being hindered from doing that,” Glaser said. “They need to fix it.”
Experts say Glaser’s experience is not unusual, underscoring a need for significant work on content moderation systems, as well as transparent correction mechanisms. Without seeing Meta’s internal enforcement signals, it’s impossible to know why the system acted to suspend Glaser’s accounts.
On the morning of June 25 Glaser received an email from Facebook saying that his personal account was being suspended and he had 180 days to appeal. While the platform attributed the suspension to a violation of child sexual exploitation standards, it did not specify what content of Glaser’s had violated those standards. The video of Levy just happened to be his most recent post.
Glaser appealed right away, taking the required nine photographs of his face to prove it was him. Facebook denied the appeal that afternoon and permanently banned him with no opportunity for additional appeals.
Glaser contacted Minnesota’s Attorney General, a standard recourse for Facebook subscribers in a number of states who have
unfairly had their accounts suspended. Brian Evans, press secretary for Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, told Glaser that the office has interceded with Meta previously regarding their “heavy-handed approach to account deactivation.”
The Attorney General’s Consumer Action team will work to get Glaser’s two accounts reactivated, he wrote.
“The Minnesota Attorney General’s Office has received numerous complaints from consumers about moderation decisions that appear to have been made in error by Facebook,” Evans said.
Minnesota State Rep. Ginny Klevorn, a Democrat who represents the suburbs northwest of Minneapolis, has also asked that the state party’s liaison to Meta look into the matter, noting that AMPERS is partially funded by the state of Minnesota.
“Why is a public service network that deals with factual historic events being banned?” she said. “I think they owe Joel some sort of explanation.”
The post Facebook suspends radio broadcaster’s account over video of Holocaust survivor appeared first on The Forward.
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Artists are boycotting a show about Israel. The run’s already sold out
In the third act of Jonathan Spector’s Birthright, the character Izzy delivers the closest thing the play has to a thesis.
“I can go up on the bimah at my parents’ shul and I can say I am married to a woman, I can say I don’t keep kosher, I can say I don’t believe in God,” the character, a former J Street employee played by Molly Bernard, says. “The one thing that would get me kicked off the bimah, kicked out of the shul, kicked out of my family is if I say I am an anti-Zionist.”
There is an unspoken flipside to this equation: Just as Jewish communal life has instituted litmus tests, the pro-Palestine movement also has its dogma.
Jewish organizations once accepted all comers — gay, bacon-eating, atheist — Spector told me in an interview the day the show, tracking six members of a Birthright group over 18 years, opened at MCC Theatre. Recently, though, when it comes to the Jewish state, “there’s been a similar kind of shift away from tolerance from people on both sides of that divide.”
As if one needed more proof of Spector’s assertion, the group Theater Workers for a Ceasefire announced on Tuesday a call to boycott the production for “normalization,” even though the show is, at press time, sold out.
In an open letter, the organization outlines its concerns. “Normalization includes any plays, festivals, and other kinds of cultural activities that are based on the false premise of symmetry between oppressors and oppressed or which assume colonizers and colonized are equally responsible for the ‘Israel/Palestine conflict.’”
Birthright, they argue, meets this definition in its third act, when Izzy and Chaya (Zoë Winters), a former Obama staffer, debate the Gaza War in the aftermath of Oct. 7. “Chaya and Izzy perpetuate the fallacy that genocide has two equally legitimate sides,” the Theater Workers wrote. “The play does not challenge Chaya’s beliefs — it privileges them.”
But does it? We learn Chaya resigns from her job at the domestic nonprofit she founded over a pressure campaign by her staffers, who share an offensive text she sent via Instagram. The text: “Maybe they should spend a week in Gaza, and then come back and tell us if the rapes are real or not.”
In an Instagram carousel, Artists For Ceasefire describes this as “a text accusing Palestinians of being rapists.” This is a distortion, but reveals a familiar taboo in certain pro-Palestinian activism: the acknowledgment that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad committed sexual violence.
“Birthright emphasizes Chaya’s victimhood, whereby her own personal and professional losses in the wake of October 7th are greater than that of any Palestinian,” the letter continues. “Izzy is depicted as immoral for caring more about Palestinian strangers than her friend.”
This smacks of a bad faith reading. Once again we are in the realm of depiction not equalling endorsement. Cherries are being picked. That the play doesn’t “challenge” every argument, or “encourag[es] audiences to empathize with” an Israeli character’s “subjectivity” is seen as morally deleterious, rather than what it is: a play, with characters, not a debate, op-ed or struggle session.
As Spector told me, “plays contain ideas, but plays are about people.”
We needn’t wonder what Theater Workers for a Ceasefire would recommend as counter-programming: on Instagram they argued for an example in Seven Jewish Children by Caryl Churchill, a non-Jewish playwright. That play is more polemic than drama and runs on an engine of Holocaust inversion, which makes sense when you look at their Instagram post.
“Conventional drama demands we present contrasting viewpoints in the name of conflict,” the group concedes, “But how we write the conflict is not an ideological [sic] benign matter.”
The overriding interest is not art, but ideology. Not the mirror up to life, but of the funhouse variety that warps reality to an endless, echo chamber tunnel.
Eli Gelb, an actor in the show, acknowledged the boycott in an Instagram story, wrote “I’ve been outspoken as an antizionist Jew and I remain so. I believe in the show and will be continuing to perform in the production.” Molly Bernard’s Instagram stories Wednesday are of devastation in Gaza.
The letter makes clear “this would not be a boycott of MCC, nor of Jonathan Spector, but of this specific cultural product.” How can you boycott a run that, at press time, has no seats left to buy? Yield your tickets while ye may, someone will gladly snap them up.
In the play, a character, whose identity I won’t reveal due to spoilers, discusses an episode recounted in the Talmud, where a Super Bowl-sized crowd witnesses one priest stab another for the privilege of cleaning up ashes from a ritual sacrifice.
Rabbi Tzadok says all present were responsible for creating the conditions for the attack. But then the father of the stabbed priest retrieves the knife from his son’s back, and tells the crowd that, as he is not yet dead, the knife is still ritually pure. The onlookers cheer.
In the show, the story is cryptic, but speaks to Israel, where the ideal of the state has given way — perhaps irreversibly — to a culture of violence.
“This is how far they had fallen in this period,” the character says, “how far they had strayed, that they valued the laws of ritual purity over human life.” It’s an argument that would seem to align with Artists for Ceasefire, for whom the suffering in Gaza supersedes any gestures at complexity.
In their demands for a purity test, they may have missed it.
The post Artists are boycotting a show about Israel. The run’s already sold out appeared first on The Forward.
