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U. of Vermont agrees to improve antisemitism training, ending federal case and capping a tumultuous year
(JTA) – A year of strained relations between the University of Vermont and its Jewish community has led to the school resolving a federal antisemitism complaint and pledging to do more to protect its Jewish students — including from anti-Zionist rhetoric.
The university and the U.S. Department of Education announced Monday that they had reached a resolution to the complaint, which the department took up last fall after it was filed by students and pro-Israel groups. The complaint alleged that the institution had not properly responded to Jewish students’ allegations of antisemitic discrimination. Investigators determined that the university “received notice, but did not investigate” several claims of antisemitic behavior on campus, and that the steps it ultimately took did not adequately address students’ concerns.
Notably, the department’s office of civil rights determined that one of the ways the university’s Jewish students had been discriminated against was through “national origin harassment on the basis of shared ancestry,” reflecting a controversial argument promoted by pro-Israel groups that anti-Zionist rhetoric is harmful to all Jews because the Jewish people share Israel as an ancestral homeland. The resolution of the complaint also reflects a sharp change in course for the school, which had initially denied wrongdoing and blamed the accusations on an orchestrated external campaign — a response that upset the campus Jewish community.
“This complaint was overwhelmingly dealing with the antisemitism that masks as anti-Zionism, and what the resolution demonstrates is how seriously [the office] is taking that kind of antisemitism,” Alyza Lewin, president of the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency after the ruling. A pro-Israel legal group that often involves itself in campus disputes, the Brandeis Center was one of the organizations that filed the initial complaint on behalf of mostly anonymous students.
The Department of Education responded to a JTA request for comment by pointing to its letter of resolution with the university. Its civil rights office has fielded several challenges to anti-Zionist rhetoric since the Donald Trump administration expanded the department’s mandate around antisemitism in 2019 under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. The office of civil rights is fast becoming a favorite tool for pro-Israel activists: It also announced this week it would open an investigation into allegations of a professor’s antisemitic behavior at George Washington University, a week after the university’s own investigation cleared the faculty member of charges brought by another pro-Israel group.
In the agreement, the University of Vermont pledged to revise its policies for reporting discrimination and to train its staff on how to specifically respond to discrimination complaints. The Department of Education will also review the university’s records regarding its response to last year’s allegations of antisemitism. One of the areas in which the university said it would train staff is on how to recognize “the Title VI prohibition against harassment based on national origin, including shared ancestry.”
Among the allegations: cases of unofficial student groups denying admission to “Zionist” students (including a support group for sexual-assault survivors); one graduate teaching assistant who had mused on social media about lowering the grades of Zionist students; and a group of students who’d reportedly thrown an object at the campus Hillel building (the complaint claimed it was a rock; Hillel staff told JTA it was a puffball mushroom). More than 20% of the university’s student body is Jewish, according to Hillel International.
Evan Siegel, a Jewish junior at the University of Vermont, poses in his off-campus housing in Burlington, October 13, 2022. Siegel was initially critical of his school for its handling of a federal antisemitism investigation, but praised its eventual resolution. (Andrew Lapin/Jewish Telegraphic Agency)
The agreement marked a sharp change from how the university first responded when the government announced its intent to investigate the complaint last fall. Back then, the university’s president, Suresh Garimella, issued a combative statement in which he said the university “vigorously denies the false allegation of an insufficient response to complaints of threats and discrimination.” He also issued a point-by-point refutation of the allegations in the complaint.
Garimella further charged that the complaint had been orchestrated by “an anonymous third party” that had “painted our community in a patently false light.” In addition to the Brandeis Center, the complaint was filed on behalf of students by the watchdog group Jewish On Campus, whose antisemitism-tracking methodology has been criticized by other groups.
Garimella’s combativeness at the time was an unusual move for the leader of a university accused of violating Title VI law, which prohibits discriminatory behavior at federally-funded programs or institutions, such as public universities. Groups like the Brandeis Center have increasingly leaned on Title VI in federal complaints to argue that pro-Israel students face discrimination. Title VI cases have become a central component of litigating multiple kinds of Israel discourse on campus, ranging from a pro-Israel student body president being targeted at the University of Southern California to a resolution passed by pro-Palestinian law student groups at the University of California, Berkeley.
In Burlington, where the university is located, some liberal Jews were initially dubious of the complaint. Felicia Kornbluh, a history professor on campus who often teaches American Jewish history, told JTA she was concerned about “playing into the narrative” of a conservative, pro-Israel agenda set by the Brandeis Center, whom she described as “allies of the Trump wing of the Republican party.” (The center’s founder, Kenneth Marcus, served as assistant secretary of education for civil rights under Trump.)
But the complaint also landed in the aftermath of a contentious Burlington city council meeting at which, Kornbluh and others said, pro-Palestinian protesters became hostile to Jews. The meeting featured a council resolution to endorse the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions campaign against Israel, and resulted in a raucous scene where pro-Palestinian groups shouted down Jewish students singing prayers for peace. Kornbluh described the atmosphere there as “really scary,” and “a little like Nuremberg.” Vermonters for Justice in Palestine, a local activist group, held multiple rallies on campus in support of the administration after the antisemitism complaint was publicized.
Against this backdrop, Garimella’s dismissiveness left the university’s Jewish community frustrated and angry. During a Jewish Telegraphic Agency visit to Burlington after the president’s initial statement, Jewish students and faculty said they felt like university administration was not taking their concerns seriously.
“I feel like we’re not being supported here,” Evan Siegel, a Jewish junior who is involved with student government, told JTA while sitting in off-campus housing adorned with Jewish summer camp memorabilia. “And that sucks.”
Employed as a campus tour guide, Siegel wondered, “How am I supposed to give tours and be like, ‘UVM is the best,’ when my president is being an ass?”
Other Jewish students told JTA at the time they had no intention of supporting the university financially or otherwise after they graduated, and wouldn’t advertise the fact that they were alums.
Matt Vogel, executive director of Hillel at the University of Vermont, where one of the alleged antisemitic incidents had taken place, also reluctantly played a role in the drama of the last year, after hoping he would be able to keep his focus on Hillel’s student programming. As the fall semester was starting, he sent an email home to parents reading, “Antisemitism keeps me awake at night.” Throughout the semester, Hillel also became more active in calling out antisemitism on social media.
“Just by default, we’re at the center of it,” Vogel told JTA last fall in the Hillel building, as student volunteers chopped vegetables for that evening’s Shabbat dinner in the next room. “I’ve overheard a student saying, like, a Hillel sticker on their water bottle might turn into a political conversation about Zionism in the first two seconds.”
Matt Vogel, executive director of Hillel at the University of Vermont, prepares for Shabbat in his Burlington office, October 14, 2022. Vogel praised the university for ultimately resolving its federal antisemitism complaint in April 2023 after months of tension. (Andrew Lapin/Jewish Telegraphic Agency)
Soon, Kornbluh decided that the administration’s response to the allegations was unacceptable, and penned a local op-ed opposing it that was later shared by her faculty union in a show of solidarity.
“I was stunned by the tone and content” of Garimella’s letter, Kornbluh wrote in the piece. Accusing the university of “gaslighting,” she added, “I do know that one persistent rhetorical strategy of antisemites in Europe and the United States has been to say that there is no antisemitism.”
Garimella reversed course following weeks of criticism, a strongly worded letter from more than a dozen Jewish groups including the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee and news of several high-profile antisemitic incidents nationally. In October, the university published a website intended to support Jewish students — accompanied by a new statement from Garimella, who now condemned antisemitism unequivocally.
“I have listened to members of our campus community who experience a sense of risk in fully expressing their Jewish identity,” he wrote. ”I want my message to be clear to the entire campus community: antisemitism, in any form, will not be tolerated at UVM.”
This time, Garimella pledged not only to investigate individual reports of antisemitism, but also to work to change the campus community’s approach to the issue. He committed to further anti-bias training and building a streamlined bias reporting system for students, and said the university’s diversity office would work to build and maintain “meaningful actions that ensure our Jewish students and community members feel support and care.”
After Monday’s resolution, Garimella was fully supportive of the findings of the Department of Education’s investigation.
“The resolution reflects an important step in UVM’s engagement with our students, faculty, staff, alumni, and the surrounding community,” he wrote in a message to the campus. “It also reflects numerous conversations we have had with our campus Jewish community and important local and national voices on the consequential and complex issue of antisemitism.”
In response to a JTA request for comment, a university spokesperson sent copies of the letters from the president and provost. (Throughout the year, the president’s office had declined multiple JTA interview requests.)
Jewish groups, including the university Hillel, celebrated the resolution. “The President and senior leadership’s new statements today represent tangible and accountable steps forward,” Vogel told JTA in a statement. “We hope this ensures that no Jewish student or any student at UVM experiences discrimination or harassment because of their identity.”
The Hillel building at the University of Vermont in Burlington, October 14, 2022. Hillel found itself at the center of a federal antisemitism complaint against the university. (Andrew Lapin/Jewish Telegraphic Agency)
Also celebrating the ruling was Jewish on Campus, a subsidiary of the World Jewish Congress and one of the groups that brought the initial complaint. “Today’s announcement is a victory for the safety and security of Jewish students,” Julia Jassey, the group’s CEO and a University of Chicago undergraduate, said in a statement.
Avi Zatz, the only University of Vermont student on the initial complaint who has made their identity public, is himself an employee of Jewish on Campus. Citing antisemitism in Vermont, Zatz recently transferred to the University of Florida — in a state that may soon pass legislation that, critics say, could harm Jewish studies on all its public campuses.
“I can’t have hoped for a better resolution,” Zatz, a junior, told JTA from his new school in Gainesville, Florida. While he said he was still glad to have left Vermont, he added, “I finally feel a sense of closure.”
Kornbluh, for her part, said the resolution was “a start,” but criticized the university for not voicing a stronger commitment to Jewish studies or meeting with Jewish faculty.
Reached by phone from Madrid, where he is studying abroad this semester, Siegel said he was “proud, determined, ready for more” following the university’s agreement.
“This resolution was really, in a respectful way, a slap in the face to the university to do better,” he said. “I, for one, am ready to get back on campus and continue my work as hard as I can.”
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Why I already miss Rev. Jesse Jackson
I first met Rev. Jesse Louis Jackson Sr. in 1979, not long after I joined the staff of the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs (JCUA). Rev. Jackson was an early friend of the organization, which was founded in 1964 by Rabbi Robert Marx out of the Civil Rights Movement to combat poverty, racism and antisemitism. Jackson and Marx met when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. moved to Chicago with the goal of bringing the Civil Rights Movement north.
Rev. Jackson was an aide to Dr. King. He subsequently founded Operation Breadbasket, later renamed Rainbow PUSH (People United to Save Humanity). JCUA’s early work in Chicago was focused on building partnerships throughout Chicago with groups predominantly in the Black and Latinx communities and among the most oppressed in Chicago. Since those early years, Rainbow PUSH and JCUA have worked together, organizing communities and building coalitions, tackling rampant racism in housing, schools, businesses and the police, all while working to try to end political corruption, ensure voting rights, and explicitly envision a just city and world.
My introduction to Rev. Jackson came at a shaky time for the Black and Jewish coalition. As minorities in America, the Black and Jewish communities, having experienced systemic discrimination, had forged common ground during hard-fought campaigns for civil rights, winning new rights and protections for all minorities with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Our communities’ bond is often remembered and personified by the courageous work of three young civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, Black and Jewish, who tragically were murdered by the KKK while traveling together to work on behalf of voting rights.
By 1979, however, breaches in the communities’ relationship were visible and tensions had emerged. Some in the Jewish community were angry that Rev. Jackson had met with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Meanwhile, in Chicago, leaders and residents from the Black community were angered by conditions facing Black families newly arrived to the south and west sides of Chicago following the exodus of Jewish families from these same communities. Some of the new Black residents were particularly incensed by former Jewish residents who retained control as landlords, shop owners and political bosses.
With all this as a backdrop, Milt Cohen, then JCUA’s Executive Director, and Rev. Jackson convened a meeting in our then-tiny offices, inviting leaders from both communities to air their grievances, find common ground, and renew the alliance. Jackson and Cohen sought to identify joint actions for local social justice issues where there remained strong agreement.
A press conference followed the meeting, where we announced our plan to strengthen Chicago’s Black and Jewish coalition and jointly tackle inequities involving schools and housing. I was in awe, overwhelmed by Rev. Jackson’s powerful presence. Even though I was the youngest person at the press conference, both Milt and Rev. Jackson pushed me forward to speak. This was just the first of many occasions when Rev. Jackson would encourage my participation, leadership, visibility, and partnership.
After that first up-close experience almost 50 years ago, I enjoyed many opportunities to answer Rev. Jackson’s invitations as he exhorted me to speak, participate in programs, and join him and PUSH in actions. In engaging me, he was also consciously choosing to include JCUA and bring a Chicago Jewish presence to the work.
I spoke at PUSH’s weekly Saturday forums and served as a panelist on Rev. Jackson’s Upfront cable show. With JCUA members and diverse coalitions from across Chicago’s communities, we marched through the streets of Chicago and Washington D.C. We joined Rev. Jackson when he took on the corrupt Chicago political machine, then led by Mayor Jane Byrne, and as he launched a raucous and successful boycott of Chicagofest, the Mayor’s favorite lakefront festival, and lucrative gift to her political cronies.
We spoke of the dangers of Reaganomics that threatened the elimination of schoolchildren’s lunches, we got out the vote and elected Harold Washington, Chicago’s first Black and progressive Mayor. We spoke out against the Trump administration and MAGA’S attacks against hard fought and won civil and human rights.
Rev. Jackson magnetically built alliances across faith, race and ethnicity. Untiringly, brilliantly, he literally changed the face, policies and politics of Chicago, the nation and the world. He sought to overturn injustices, shatter obstacles to change and non-violently revolutionize the social order. He galvanized millions to act. He commanded every room. His astute in-depth analyses turned meetings into classrooms and calls to action.
By 1984, Rev. Jackson was a leading national and global figure. Barack Obama said that Jackson’s two presidential runs in 1984 and 1988 laid the groundwork for his own election. At the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, as part of the Harold Washington Favorite Son delegation, we listened carefully as Rev. Jackson delivered his convention speech, one that resonated so powerfully that it would become known as the “Peace Speech.” He regaled, quieted, then inspired thunderous roars from the room.
“Our flag is red, white and blue, but our nation is a rainbow — red, yellow, brown, black and white, and we’re all precious in God’s sight,” Rev. Jackson said. “America is not like a blanket, one piece of unbroken cloth, the same color, the same texture, the same size. America is more like a quilt, many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread. The white, the Hispanic, the Black, the Arab, the Jew, the woman, the Native American, the small farmer, the businessperson, the environmentalist, the peace activist, the young, the old, the lesbian, the gay, and the disabled make up the American quilt.”
Rev. Jackson’s speech was among the most profound, insightful and powerful addresses I had ever heard. He offered an extraordinary vision, calling upon our better selves to rise to the occasion and illuminating the roads we could take together. Inspired by his outreach and challenge, I was deeply moved. I was grateful for the opportunity to express my choice and to stand with our delegation to vote for Rev. Jesse Jackson for president.
As Rev. Jackson became a global celebrity, a position he used strategically and effectively to wield exceptional influence and carry out extraordinary actions such as negotiating the freedom of political prisoners around the world; he exhibited warmth and kindness to strangers and the powerless. He famously made the children of local neighbors feel seen and appreciated; he listened to their stories and took them to baseball games.
When I brought Yingxi, one of my students who was visiting from Mainland China, to Rainbow PUSH, Rev. Jackson noticed her and warmly welcomed her. He invited her into his office, took time to get to know her and to listen, responded thoughtfully to her questions. Yingxi has told me that, to this day, she still treasures the time she spent with him. On so many occasions, I saw the light in his eyes, from afar and up close, as he greeted young people and old, engaging them, ensuring they were seen. I felt that same connection even as I was just one of many thousands of activists who crossed his path.
In March 2021, Rev. Jackson’s and my friend, Rabbi Robert Marx passed away. I asked Rev. Jackson to speak at a memorial, even though I was aware that this would not be easy, as he was already showing signs of the Parkinson’s-like illness that made his once booming, eloquent voice more difficult to hear. However, he enthusiastically accepted the invitation, and shared heartfelt memories at the service. “We have always been together. I love him so much. I miss him already,” he said of Marx.
In recent years, I grew increasingly fond of Rev. Jackson as he never stopped fighting for justice and acting with compassion. Even as he found it difficult to speak, he kept drawing all of us in.
A few years ago, Rev. Jackson asked me to bring a busload of people to the annual reenactment of the march in Selma across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. He didn’t give me much time to get a bus together, but I was able to get a carload of religious and community leaders, including an imam and a Baptist minister. We sat in the Brown Chapel AME Church, where services were reenacted, and we protested, prayed and sang before we marched together across the bridge. Rev. Jackson led, pulling me upfront to join him. With the diverse crowd from across the country, we marched, all astutely aware that the job is not yet finished.
Rev. Jackson grew from a student with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to a global leader, gaining followers while infuriating leaders and the status quo. But he could not be ignored, would not be ignored. He was somebody, and made sure you knew you were somebody, too.
While movement leaders have courageously fought and sacrificed over the years, many in time moved to the background. Rev. Jackson, on the other hand, passionately, powerfully, brilliantly and strategically, stayed the course. Even in his last weeks, he persevered from his wheelchair, determined to remain a force, to continue the fight and , famously, to Keep Hope Alive.
I have much to be grateful for in reflecting on the life and work of Rev. Jesse Louis Jackson, Sr. including the friendship he extended, his outsized impact on our lives, on our communities, our country, and, given his legacy, into the future.
I already miss him.
The post Why I already miss Rev. Jesse Jackson appeared first on The Forward.
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Senate rejects effort to rein in Trump’s power to fight Iran alongside Israel
(JTA) — The Senate late Wednesday rejected a measure that would have required President Donald Trump to get congressional approval to continue fighting against Iran.
The measure was initiated by Democrats, who have raised questions about the process by which Trump initiated the war alongside Israel on Saturday. The War Powers Act requires U.S. presidents to seek congressional approval for wars in advance or shortly after their start unless there is an imminent threat to the United States. Trump and his administration officials have given mixed signals about whether a threat was considered direct and imminent.
The vote took place along largely partisan lines, with two exceptions. Rand Paul, the Republican from Kentucky, who tends to oppose international intervention, backed the measure. John Fetterman, the pro-Israel Democrat from Pennsylvania, voted no.
The House is expected to vote on a similar measure today. The House also has a slim Republican majority.
The votes come as multiple polls have shown that a majority of Americans, about 60%, oppose U.S. participation in the war.
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Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Broadway opus debuts in the U.S. — nearly 80 years late
In 1954, the Oscar-winning composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold staged a European homecoming with a new operetta. How this came to pass — and how his planned comeback failed to materialize — is even more convoluted than the piece’s farcical plot.
Korngold, a wunderkind and Jewish refugee from Vienna, first came to Hollywood to adapt Felix Mendelssohn’s music for Max Reinhardt’s 1935 film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Until then Korngold, a piano prodigy who began writing music at age 7 and had his first hit with a ballet he wrote at 11, had mostly composed for concert halls and opera houses. His ensuing career in Hollywood transformed film music by treating motion pictures as if they were “operas without singing.”
Korngold’s work on the swashbuckler Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood and later King’s Row (whose fanfare John Williams lifted for Star Wars) created a template for symphonic scores. But by the late 1940s, chafing under the Hollywood system, he set to work writing an original operetta, The Silent Serenade, that he hoped would premiere on Broadway.
The show collapsed. It’s never had a full staging in the United States or even in English.
As chronicled by the Korngold Society, the composer went through a litany of librettists to refine this tale of a love triangle and its improbable political fallout. After passing through a number of hands in English, Korngold returned it to Raoul Auernheimer, Theodor Herzl’s nephew and the original writer of the story on which the operetta was based, to translate it back to German. Korngold disagreed with the excessive demands of the producers, the Schubert Brothers, and left the project, leading the Broadway impresarios to fruitlessly search for a new composer.
Korngold, who with Reinhardt had previous success on Broadway with arrangements of other composers’ work, decided to resume a career in Europe with the piece. After delays owing to his health — a 1947 heart attack — a German version debuted on radio in 1951 and was followed by a staging in Dortmund in 1954. It bombed.
“We’re not exactly sure who it was for,” said Cris Frisco, music director at the Mannes School of Music at the New School, who is conducting the U.S. debut of The Silent Serenade at Mannes Opera. “It seems like it was given to the wrong public.”
That Germans in the post-war weren’t attuned to the piece’s sensibilities speaks poignantly to Korngold’s journey, which began at the center of Austrian high culture, orbiting names like Mahler and Artur Schnabel. “We thought of ourselves as Viennese,”said Korngold, the son of a music critic father. “Hitler made us Jewish.”
His exile in Hollywood realigned his sonic universe. As much as he changed film music, it — and America — left an impression on him.
“It is obviously influenced by Hollywood. It’s obviously coming out of those ’30s and ’40s musicals,” said director Emma Griffin, Mannes Opera’s managing artistic director. “It is a piece that is living between film and theater and opera and musical theater and operetta. It’s so emblematic of Korngold’s life, of how many different pieces of the 20th century he influenced, and this particular show is a crazy quilt of all of those influences.”
The plot of the show is, in Griffin’s words “daffy,” focusing on a Neapolitan actress, her would-be dress designer lover and her fiancé, the prime minister. Singing shopgirls, a tabloid journalist and a media circus round out the cast who perform tuneful numbers imbued with an MGM je ne sais quoi, while remaining rooted in Korngold’s post-romantic, classical mode. While Korngold’s symphonic stylings beefed up adventure films, the orchestration here is sparer, hinting at the Broadway pit for which the piece was devised.
The Mannes staging is part of a resurgence of interest in Korngold in the classical world, following decades of dismissal for his contributions to Hollywood.
It’s ironic that Korngold, who died at the age of 60 in 1957, had in Silent Serenade a profound professional frustration, given how buoyant and frothy the work is.
“It’s heartbreaking to think that he did not fully perceive the massive impact of his artistry,” said Griffin. Though he lived through hard times, Griffin says, his music has been a balm for the performers.
“The students have talked about it several times,” Griffin said, “how happy they are to be working on something where the source is joy.”
Mannes Opera’s production of The Silent Serenade debuts March 13 and 14 with an on-demand recording to follow. Tickets and information can be found here.
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