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Connecticut College replaces president mired in antisemitism scandal with interim president who has one of his own
(JTA) – Jewish students at Connecticut College celebrated in March when they successfully pressured their school’s president to step down over her plans to host a fundraiser at a golf club with an alleged antisemitic and racist history.
But some recoiled this week when they learned who their new interim leader would be: a university administrator holding antisemitism baggage of his own.
The liberal arts college in New London announced Thursday thay it was appointing Leslie Wong, a member of its board of trustees, as its interim president beginning July 1 until the board identifies a permanent hire. Jewish student activists noted a key point on Wong’s resume: his seven-year tenure as president of San Francisco State University, which was marred by accusations that the school had propagated “institutional antisemitism.”
“I find it unbelievable that Connecticut College chose to hire an antisemitic interim president right after our previous antisemitic president resigned,” Davi Schulman, a Connecticut College undergraduate and co-president of the university Hillel, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“I feel extremely disappointed in the administration’s continued disregard toward students of all identities, and Jewish students in particular,” Schulman said. “I worry about what the incoming Jewish students will think when they learn about their new president’s history.”
Wong is a Chinese-Mexican psychologist who has worked in higher education for more than four decades, and led San Francisco State from 2012 to 2019. During that time, local Jewish groups charged, he failed to respond forcefully enough to a series of incidents affecting Jewish life on campus, including a protest by anti-Zionists who had disrupted a campus visit by the mayor of Jerusalem, and a school information fair for marginalized students that had deliberately excluded the campus Hillel from participating.
An investigation by J. The Jewish News of Northern California showed that, while Wong had decried these incidents, ordered investigations into the school’s handling of them and met several times with Jewish representatives, he also resented spending so much time addressing Jewish concerns. The investigation found that he partially blamed Hillel for the incident involving the mayor of Jerusalem’s visit, and told Jewish groups he would “not play favorites.”
In a 2017 interview with the paper amid the controversy, Wong also declined to say whether Zionists were welcome on campus, saying, “Am I comfortable opening up the gates to everyone? Gosh, of course not. I’m not the kind of guy who gets into absolutes like that.” He later apologized for his comments.
Students at the university Hillel wrote an email to Wong saying the school had “a problem with institutional anti-Semitism,” and that he had failed to address it; the Hillel’s executive director, the local Jewish Community Relations Council and a Jewish studies professor on campus also spoke out against him. California State University’s chancellor and the state’s Jewish legislative caucus also got involved; pro-Israel students also filed a lawsuit against Wong and the university, which was settled in 2019.
That year, Wong retired from university leadership and joined the Connecticut College board.
The college defended his appointment in a statement to JTA. “Dr. Wong is a nationally respected leader in higher education whose commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion has been evident throughout his academic career,” it said, noting the board “considered the entirety of his tenure at SFSU and determined that when difficult issues arose on campus, they were handled professionally, including through extensive direct dialogue with the affected parties.”
The college added, “These efforts allowed concerned parties to be heard, provided accountability, and enabled the university to move forward.”
Wong will assume the interim presidency at a time when Jewish students on campus are on edge — and newly organized. The campus Hillel leaders had helped found a coalition of student groups who organized against the previous president, Katherine Bergeron, over the golf club fundraiser controversy and a litany of other complaints tied to administrative support of campus diversity initiatives. To oust Bergeron, the students had staged a 10-day sit-in on a campus administrative building. The campus Hillel building also served as a gathering place for student activists staging actions against Bergeron.
Whether that kind of activism can be repeated with Wong is unclear, Schulman said. The college is now on summer break, making organization a challenge. Wong will only be in this leadership role for a short while. And he comes in with a strong track record of promoting diversity and inclusion in other matters, including serving in a diversity-focused role with the NCAA board of governors.
“I think that the Jewish population has the most reason to be angry,” Schulman said. “I’ll be interested to see: Does everyone come together in the same way we did when all marginalized students were under attack? I think it’s possible.”
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UCLA student government condemns campus Hillel for hosting former hostage
A campus event featuring freed Israeli hostage Omer Shem Tov drew the condemnation of UCLA’s student government on Tuesday. In an open letter, the UCLA Students Associated Council said that bringing Tov to speak to students “served to legitimize and normalize” atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon.
Shem Tov, 23, was kidnapped from the Nova music festival in Southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and held hostage in Gaza until his release in a prisoner exchange in February 2025. UCLA hosted him on April 14 for a Yom HaShoah event.
“While we affirm the humanity of all people impacted by violence, we reject the selective platforming of narratives that obscure the broader reality of ongoing state violence,” the student government letter wrote in the letter, which was addressed to the UCLA administration and UCLA Hillel among others. “Israel is currently continuing to carry out what has been widely identified by human rights advocates as a genocide in Gaza, while also expanding its illegal military campaign into Lebanon.
“In this context, elevating a single narrative, absent of critical political and humanitarian framing, serves to legitimize and normalize these ongoing atrocities.”
Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, UCLA Hillel’s director emeritus, called the statement “completely ridiculous.”
“You can’t present the narrative of your experience without it being called ‘one sided,’” Seidler-Feller said. “There has to be a counter-story to persecution. Is there a counter-story to killing people?”
UCLA Hillel executive director Daniel Gold dismissed the criticism in Tuesday’s letter as antisemitic.
“Hillel at UCLA and Students Supporting Israel UCLA would like to apologize…for absolutely nothing,” he wrote in a statement. “Members of UCLA student government have once again shown they are anti-dialogue, anti-learning, anti-truth, anti-student and antisemitic.”
The USAC did not respond to a request for comment.
As college campuses across the country became a hotspot for pro-Palestinian activism following the Oct. 7 attack, UCLA, with an activist history and a large Jewish population, stood out as a major flashpoint. Its student encampment was the site of a riot in April 2024 and eventually cleared by police in riot gear.
The USAC has sided with pro-Palestinian protesters throughout. In a Feb. 2025 letter titled “We Are All SJP,” the USAC, which is democratically elected by the roughly 30,000-member UCLA student body, condemned Chancellor Julio Frenk’s suspension of Students for Justice in Palestine. The letter referred to Israel only as “the Zionist state” or put the country’s name inside quotation marks.
The University of California has since been sued by the Department of Justice, which said that UCLA created a hostile work environment against Jewish and Israeli faculty in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
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Trump extends ceasefire with Iran, even after Iran balks at new round of negotiations
(JTA) — President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that he would unilaterally extend the U.S.-Israeli ceasefire with Iran, even though Iran had not agreed to his conditions or even to return to the negotiating table.
Trump announced the decision on Truth Social just hours before the two-week-old deal was set to expire. Citing Iran’s “fractured” leadership, Trump wrote that he had been asked by Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to “hold our Attack on the Country of Iran until such time as their leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal.”
Vice President JD Vance’s planned trip to Islamabad, where talks were set to take place, was postponed indefinitely after Iran failed to confirm its participation in negotiations.
Trump added that the United States would maintain its naval blockade of Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz, despite Iran’s repeated calls for the restrictions to be lifted.
The announcement marked a sharp departure from the president’s statements earlier in the day, telling CNBC that, if a deal was not made before the deadline, “I expect to be bombing.”
In a statement Tuesday, Sharif thanked Trump for his “gracious acceptance” of Pakistan’s request to extend the ceasefire, adding that the country would “continue its earnest efforts for a negotiated settlement of the conflict.”
The announcement adds to uncertain about the war’s future, including for Israelis who lived through six weeks of Iranian bombing, and renews questions about Trump’s commitment to achieving his war goals, which have varied and included blunting Iran’s nuclear ambitions, achieving regime change, and destroying Iran’s stockpile of ballistic missiles. He said earlier this week that he was asking Iran to limit its nuclear program for 20 years, five years longer than was required by the deal struck by Barack Obama in 2015. Trump exited that deal in 2018.
Last week, Trump announced a different ceasefire, between Israel and Lebanon, on Truth Social, contradicting Israel’s claim that the Iran ceasefire would not apply to its fighting with Hezbollah, an Iran-backed proxy in Lebanon.
Trump’s announcement of the ceasefire extension came during the night in Israel, after Israelis began their celebration of Independence Day. It drew criticism from one of his staunchest pro-Israel supporters, the Zionist Organization of America, whose national president Morton Klein said in a statement that “interminable delay is the standard Islamic Iranian regime negotiating tactic” and that acceding to it represented a victory for Iran. The statement did not mention Trump.
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Alan Dershowitz quits Democratic Party, calling it ‘most anti-Israel party in U.S. history’
(JTA) — Alan Dershowitz, the prominent pro-Israel attorney whose clients have included Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, announced on Monday that he was leaving the Democratic party and registering as a Republican.
Describing himself as a “lifelong Democrat,” Dershowitz wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that he had decided to “bite the bullet and register as a Republican,” citing Democratic support for an arms embargo on Israel last week and the Michigan Senate candidate Abdul el-Sayed’s anti-Israel rhetoric.
“There is no denying that the hard left, anti-Israel wing of the Democratic Party has moved from the fringe to the mainstream,” Dershowitz wrote, adding that “Republicans have their own antisemitic fringe, but for now it remains a fringe.”
The announcement formalized a political evolution for Dershowitz, who defended Trump during his first impeachment and has increasingly broken with Democrats over Israel in recent years.
In 2021, Dershowitz nominated Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and Avi Berkowitz, Trump’s top Middle Eastern envoy during his first administration, for the Nobel Peace Prize over their hand in shaping the Abraham Accords.
Dershowitz — who has recently faced scrutiny over his ties to Epstein, and previously denied allegations of sexual misconduct made by one of Epstein’s accusers — panned the Democratic Party as the “most anti-Israel party in U.S. history” in the op-ed.
“I believe that the Democratic Party’s hostility to Israel represents a deeper and more dangerous shift away from the center and toward a radical approach that is bad for America and the free world,” Dershowitz wrote, adding that he intended to “work hard to prevent the Democrats from gaining control of the House and Senate.”
Dershowitz’s comments are in line with Trump’s statements about Jews and the Democratic Party. He has repeatedly expressed amazement at how any Jews could vote for the Democrats considering his own record when it comes to Israel.
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