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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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Soccer helped my family survive the Nazis. Our community has lost sight of that story’s meaning
A new exhibit at the Holocaust Museum LA should be telling my great-grandfather’s story as part of its study of soccer, Jews and the Holocaust. But it won’t, because the museum failed to internalize the great moral lesson that my family learned from surviving the Holocaust: to never value the safety of one group over that of others.
The museum describes The Beautiful Game: The Untold Story, which opened this week, as an exploration of “the deep and often overlooked relationship between Jewish life and the global game.” It could have been curated specifically to tell my family’s story, because it was soccer that saved them from the Holocaust.
Pavel Mahrer, my great-grandfather, was a Jewish professional soccer player for Czechoslovakia. He played for teams in Teplitz and Prague, as well as at the 1924 Olympics. In the 1920s and 1930s he moved across the Atlantic to play for the Brooklyn Wanderers and for a Jewish team, New York Hakoah. His son Jerry was born during that time; eventually, the fact that Jerry held American citizenship would save much of the Mahrer family from the Holocaust.
During the Shoah, Pavel became the star player in the league at the Theresienstadt ghetto. He once wrote to his wife, as they were imprisoned separately, “tell our boys that I played soccer again and even played well and was successful.” Soccer brought him joy during those years of total despair. He avoided transport to Auschwitz — possibly because he was a famous athlete — and eventually reunited with his family in New York after the war.
The Holocaust Museum LA exhibit doesn’t tell that story, but it wanted to. My family pulled out of the exhibit because we didn’t want our story told by an institution that we think has faltered in holding true to the back half of its stated mission of inspiring “a more dignified and humane world.”
‘Never Again’ for whom?
We had already been in contact with the exhibit curators when the museum became entangled in a public relations crisis last fall over an Instagram carousel featuring a cover image of six interlocking arms of different colors with the text: “’Never Again’ can’t only mean never again for Jews.”
Further slides added: “Jews must not let the trauma of our past silence our conscience” and “To be Jewish is to remember and act.”
Finally, I thought, a Jewish institution that will stand against genocide and violence, full stop. Not just genocide and violence against Jews.
Over the past few years, I’d watched the Jewish institutions I grew up respecting make excuses for or ignore Israel’s assault on Gaza. At best, they remained silent as Israel killed innocent civilians in the name of the Jewish people. At worst, they supported Israel’s actions unreservedly.
But here was one Jewish institution that was sending the right, albeit subtle, message.
My family agreed that this was a museum that was teaching the history and lessons of the Holocaust in a way we wanted to support. We had told the museum of our interest in loaning them Pavel’s 1924 Paris Olympics jersey and photos of his soccer career for the exhibit, and grew more excited for the collaboration.
But not everyone had the same reaction to the post that we did. Comments flooded the museum’s page claiming that the phrase “Never Again” was only for Jews, and criticizing the museum for generalizing the Holocaust — as if Jews have a monopoly on being victims of genocide. I figured the museum must have been prepared for some backlash, but had decided it was worth upsetting some to show that they cared for all.
I was wrong.
The museum deleted the post, then issued an apology, calling the post “easily open to misinterpretation by some to be a political statement reflecting the ongoing situation in the Middle East.” To us, it read as if they were apologizing for giving the appearance of caring about Palestinian lives. The apology post drew outrage as well — although not in the comments section, which was disabled.
A humane world for everyone
The apology felt like cowardice to me and my family. So we asked to meet with Beth Kean, the museum’s CEO. By the time we connected with her over Zoom in October, the apology post had been deleted as well. We wanted to understand what was behind their decision to post, remove, apologize and then act like none of it ever happened.
After the meeting, we understood that the museum hadn’t expected the response to the first post; some museum staff, horrifyingly, had received death threats. But we didn’t get a good answer as to how capitulating to hateful comments and violent threats aligned with the stated mission of the museum. We were promised an updated public statement that would specifically state the museum’s humanitarian goals; but if one was ever published, I didn’t see it.
We decided that we no longer felt comfortable lending the material that told Pavel’s story to the museum. I take pride in being the descendant of Holocaust survivors, and I’m especially proud that my family has always told our story in a way that emphasizes that the safety of all peoples is and has always been intertwined. I don’t think Pavel would be proud to see his story used to help suggest in any way that Jewish lives should be valued over others.
I didn’t expect the museum to change its mind because of a thirty minute Zoom call with my family, but its willingness to, in my eyes, bend on its principles left me disheartened. If we can’t take stories of Jewish suffering and strength — like that of my family — and apply their lessons to the suffering that is occurring to this day around the world, what is the point of telling them?
I’m a soccer player myself. Every time I score a goal or make a tackle I think of how I wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t for this beautiful game. I feel a kinship with other players, other soccer fans, because we share that love of the game. It brings us joy, it brings us hope.
I find my family’s story compelling not just because it is a story about Jews during the Holocaust, but because it is a story about survival — a story about luck, talent and both good and terrible timing. The drive to survive, and the need to ensure others’ survival, should be universal. If the message that our Jewish institutions send is that Jewish survival matters most, who is that message for? How can we expect the rest of the world to care about our safety if we don’t do anything to prove that we care about theirs?
Dani Mahrer is a former Jewish educator who now works in renewable energy in Los Angeles.
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Eliya Smith says plot is what happens when you’re busy doing nothing
Eliya Smith’s dad has seen her play Dad Don’t Read This. He’s kvelled at its every iteration.
“He’s always like, ‘Are people gonna know that I’m Dad?’” Smith, 28, said on the day of the Knicks Victory Parade. The streets of the West Village, where we met for coffee, were teeming with orange and blue; she was wearing a baseball cap with some sort of bird, a heron or maybe a penguin, swallowing a fish.
“I always think it’s funny that he’s like, ‘I’m here and I have no complicated feelings.’”
Smith’s father isn’t the title character of the piece, which is about four high school friends, the computer game The Sims and the existential angst of adolescence, but technically he is. Smith started writing the show about a decade ago, during Thanksgiving break from Harvard. She needed the pages printed and emailed them to her father with the injunction as a kind of title page. (The following page read, “If you’re reading this page, it means you started to read. Stop reading.”)
The play is a work of fiction, as are all its characters. But the real-life command became a guiding principle — and the first lines — of the show.
“There is like a sort of frame of, ‘This play isn’t for you,’” said Smith, a former Forward editorial fellow who, last year made her Off-Broadway debut with the play Grief Camp. “I think the audience should reckon with the experience of watching it. Not that I’m like, ‘Fuck you for coming to my play,’ I’ll always be grateful, but I think my favorite parts of the play are when it really feels like they’re like doing the play for each other.”
Dad Don’t Read This is what Smith calls her first real, full play. Unsatisfied with her earlier attempts, she took a crack at writing what she knew: boredom and Ohio (in her mind synonymous) and the endless hours she spent in her basement chatting with friends. That and The Sims, the life simulator where players construct the world and circumstances of flailing, gibberish-spewing suburbanites.
“When I was in high school, I feel like I would sometimes play The Sims and be like, ‘If only it were this easy,’” Smith said. She had a cheat code that could defy Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: When a Sim had to pee, you could drag the need away. She found herself thinking, “’I wish I could do that for myself, that I could just like drag away the sadness.”
In the show, this sentiment is embodied by Mal (Amalia Yoo, hot off her turn as another high schooler in the midst of a best friend breakup in John Proctor is the Villain), who tries to manipulate her friends the way she does her pixilated people.
Smith isn’t Mal, but the character’s Ohio ennui (Smith’s from Columbus) and some of her feelings are true to her high school self. OK, Smith’s like her in one way: She, like Mal, had a cousin who gave her a Sims cheat code for unlimited money.
The connection between the world of The Sims, and the control it signifies, has a natural extension in playwriting.
“You become a playwright because you have control issues,” Smith conceded. “When I’m writing it on the page, I can manipulate the characters how I want, and then we start rehearsing it, and I lose a little more control, and then it’s like the more the play becomes its own thing.
“I think it is actually the reason I became a playwright, because I love the moment where my desire to control everything is sort of overruled,” Smith said. Still, it’s often painful for her to be present as her words are performed.
About the hat — the one with the bird — she often feels the need to wear one when she sits in the audience, not to be incognito (she’s been told it makes her more conspicuous) but to block some of her field of vision so she doesn’t have to see some patron sigh or look at their phone.
Smith and I move from the coffee shop — whose vibe she compares, no shade, to the fast fashion brand Brandy Melville — over to the Greenwich House Theatre, where Dad Don’t Read This just transferred from St. Luke’s Theatre in midtown, earning a New York Times Critic’s Pick.
We plop into swivel chairs in the dressing room and catch up. Eliya left the Forward in 2021 to go to grad school at UT Austin. She’s only really been living in New York full time for about a year, calling Park Slope home. Life in Austin, she said, felt almost like an extension of high school in Ohio. She’d drive around bored with her friends. She misses the heat.
“I feel like there’s a sort of leveling thing that happens,” she said between sips of her iced coffee. “I feel like in New York you like get off the subway and you somehow are supposed to not be sweaty from being like packed in with hundreds of other people underground, and I feel like in Texas it’s so hot that it’s just totally fine, everyone is kind of disheveled and gross, and it’s just like what the vibe is, and I feel like it’s really equalizing, like ‘We’re all like looking not our best,’ and I liked that.”
She has yet to write her Texas play — or her New York one.
“I feel like everything I write is on a five-year delay,” said Smith, whose produced plays often circle the Buckeye State. (Last season’s Grief Camp took place in Virginia, but also followed young people; another play, about Holocaust memory, was called Deadclass, Ohio and, aptly, played at the New Ohio Theatre in Manhattan.) “Until I was like 23 I was like I can only write about being 17.”
Her new projects, Two Girls, a metatheatrical work about a shock porn video, and Biography (her least autobiographical piece to date), are departures.
It’s hard to explain the exact vibe of Dad Don’t Read This. Some have likened Smith’s work to Annie Baker, who she knows from UT Austin. I propose, in moments, it approaches Chekhov at a sleepover. Smith says she would never compare herself to the Russian master, but is happy to sing his praises. Though I meant this as a compliment, it could be seen as critique: On the surface, there isn’t much of a plot.
“I often joke that I don’t like plot,” Smith said. “But that actually isn’t true. I rigorously plot all my plays, it’s just the plot is like: This character is deeply wounded because of the perceived subtext from a line about a soda, and to me, that is plot.”
She also believes Top Gun: Maverick is the best movie ever in part because of how much happens. You can tell she is sincere, while knowing this is somewhat absurd to discuss in the same breath as The Cherry Orchard.
“You can have great art like Top Gun: Maverick, that is very sort of like there’s a story and these are all the beats, and you can also have Chekhov where the plot is like a wound that you couldn’t even name.”
Ineffable feelings are the engine of Dad Don’t Read This. Mal and her friends try and fail to articulate just what is going on in their little lives, where the inconsequential is the only thing that matters.
While firmly of a generation — it’s set in 2014, the actors are a few years younger than Smith — the play has found older admirers. Helen Shaw of The New York Times ranked it one of her top shows of the season. The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik will participate in a “Dad Affinity Night” on June 28.
The key to its connection may well be what’s absent from the stage — smart phones and social media are nowhere to be seen. It’s intentional.
“We like don’t have boredom anymore, because we have phones, and so I’ve been trying to figure out how do I put characters in a situation where they can be extremely bored and where that can be dramatically intriguing,” Smith said. “And also, like, how do I make boredom resonate with an audience that doesn’t experience boredom because we look at our phones, and I do feel like being bored in Ohio is like something that I knew so intimately.”
Onstage at the Greenwich House Theatre, boredom lives. And it’s riveting.
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Shots fired in Jewish neighborhood of Montreal
(JTA) — Montreal police said an alleged shooter in a neighborhood known for its large Jewish population had been “neutralized” after killing one police officer and wounding another officer and a civilian Monday.
“A suspect has been neutralized,” the official police account posted on X after advising residents Côte-des-Neiges to stay indoors. “Two police officers and one citizen have been injured. The police operation is still underway. Continue to avoid the area. Further details to follow.”
The Montreal Gazette later reported that the suspect and the civilian also were dead.
It was not clear if the intended targets were Jewish, but a Chabad emissary in the neighborhood told Ynet, an Israeli news site, that a nearby building was targeted and that he was sheltering about 100 people.
The Yeshiva World News news site posted a video of a SWAT team swarming around a home belonging to a family affiliated with Chabad, the Orthodox Jewish movement.
Côte-des-Neiges was the scene of postwar Jewish settlement as Jewish families ascending from the working to the middle class moved west from the area of St. Laurent Boulevard. The area, with treelined streets studded with duplexes and low-rise apartment buildings, had a friendly neighborhood ambience and lacked the anti-Jewish restrictions some of the wealthier enclaves maintained at the time.
There are a number of Jewish schools and synagogues in the area, including the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue, the oldest congregation in the country, established in 1768 and which moved to the neighborhood in 1947. The neighborhood is now the site of a large Chabad community and a number of Jewish restaurants and delis.
This is a developing story.
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