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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 Pitt’ tackled the trauma of the Tree of Life attack. Here’s how survivors of the synagogue shooting reacted to the episode.
When Audrey Glickman, a lifelong Pittsburgher and a survivor of the Tree of Life massacre, sat down to watch The Pitt Friday morning, she knew exactly what was coming. And still she found herself moved by it.
On Thursday’s episode of the HBO Max medical drama, which is set in Pittsburgh, a patient arrives at the emergency room with a burn. It’s the Fourth of July. Fireworks crackle outside. In her kitchen, the woman had been using a samovar — a traditional metal urn often used in Jewish homes to heat water — when the sudden noise startled her and she dropped it.
The scalding water spilled onto her leg.
When her doctor asks what happened, she offers an explanation that reaches further back than the holiday. “I was on my way inside,” she says. “October 27, 2018.”
She doesn’t need to say more.
The episode never recreates the Tree of Life synagogue shooting, the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history. There are no gunshots, no flashbacks, no swelling score. Instead, the trauma surfaces the way it often does in real life: indirectly, years later, triggered by noise, memory, or the body’s refusal to forget. The scene assumes the audience already carries the weight of that day. That restraint reflects how the show has handled Jewish moments.
In its first season, The Pitt established – not through backstory but through behavior – that its protagonist, Dr. Michael “Robby” Rabinovich (played by Noah Wyle), is Jewish. In one episode, after a brutal shift, he sits on the floor of a makeshift morgue, clutching a Star of David and reciting the Shema prayer. The moment is brief and unresolved; he later admits he isn’t even sure he believes the words he’s saying. It’s not a declaration of faith so much as a reflex — what surfaces when language runs out.
In the new episode, the survivor, named Yana Kovalenko and portrayed by actress Irina Dubova, asks Dr. Robby where he goes to synagogue.
“Rodef Shalom,” he replies, naming an actual Reform shul in Pittsburgh.
Kovalenko says she is a Tree of Life member and was at the synagogue on the day of the attack.
“They’re rebuilding,” Dr. Robby says.
“Yes, something new,” she says, adding, “Remember, rebuild, renew,” echoing the same phrase Tree of Life uses on its website.
That exchange gains more meaning if you know that Tree of Life is, in fact, rebuilding on its original site — and that, for now, its congregation meets in Rodef Shalom’s building. That insistence on local specificity extends beyond the script. Wyle, who is Jewish and whose parents met while attending college in Pittsburgh, has said authenticity is key to the series, which was inspired by the city’s Allegheny General Hospital.
Glickman said friends texted her about the episode Friday morning, so she was prepared for the reference but was still affected by how it unfolded.
“It’s really delightful,” she told the Forward. Not because every detail was perfect — she laughed about the accents, and the samovar struck her as more inherited than typical — but because the episode captured something truer than procedural accuracy.
“They do a lot of calling out of Pittsburgh,” Glickman said. “They treat it the way other shows treat New York or San Francisco. It lends authenticity, and it’s kind of exciting.”
Television often treats trauma as singular and spectacular, something that happens once and violently to one person at a time. The Pitt depicts it instead as communal and environmental, something that hums in the background long after the event itself has passed. “There is no clock on how long it takes,” Dr. Robby tells his patient.
Barry Werber, another Tree of Life survivor, knows that trauma personally. Werber was in the basement with his fellow congregants when they heard gunfire. He escaped into a storage room with two others, Carol Black and Melvin Wax. “We couldn’t find the light switch,” he later recalled. “It was pitch black.”
After a few moments, Wax, who was hard of hearing, thought the shooting had ended, so he took a fateful step outside the storage room and was instantly shot dead. His body fell back into the storage room, and the shooter, Robert Gregory Bowers, stepped inside. Through the darkness, Werber said, Bowers could not see Black hiding behind the door or himself toward the back of the room.
“To this day, I can’t go into a room and sit with my back facing the door,” he told the Forward.
Years later, that vigilance remains. Werber is still in therapy. He avoids crowds. He instinctively scans buildings for security. He attends synagogue services now via Zoom — partly because his wife is ill, and partly because being in a room full of people still doesn’t feel safe. “It took a lot out of me,” he said.
Werber, who worked for nearly 40 decades for the healthcare company that inspired the show, has yet to see the episode. He doesn’t subscribe to Max. “I spend enough on cable,” he said. “I don’t think we’ll get HBO. I’ll see if any of my friends have watched it.”
Carol Black, who was hiding in the same basement storage area as Werber during the attack, said the episode’s portrayal of flinching felt immediately familiar. “Every little unexpected sound still makes me jump,” she told the Forward. “If somebody sneezes and I’m not expecting it, I jump.” She said she has learned to live with the reflex. “You’re never going to get over it,” she said. “You just get used to it.”
Black, whose brother Richard Gottfried was among the 11 people killed in the shooting, said she was grateful to see the story reach a wider audience. “I don’t want the story of what we experienced to go cold,” she said. “This is a very popular show. People need to know about this.”
One of the episode’s most quietly revealing moments comes when the patient asks the nurse tending to her burns if she is Muslim. When the nurse says yes, the patient thanks her — not for the care she’s receiving in the room, but for what came years earlier. After the shooting, she recalls, it was the Muslim community that showed up, raised money, and paid for funerals.
Wyle, who also co-wrote this episode, told Variety that the interfaith solidarity “was the most underreported aspect of the story, and perhaps the most hopeful moving forward.” R. Scott Gemmill, an executive producer, added: “You can’t do a medical show, set in Pittsburgh, with a Jewish doctor without addressing that.”
The exchange in the episode is brief, almost awkward. The nurse doesn’t know what to say. The patient waves it off. “Anyway,” she says. “Thank you.” The show doesn’t pause to turn the moment into a lesson. It lets it pass, the way lived history often does.
That restraint resonated deeply with Glickman, who remembers the support across religious lines that followed the attack, and the ache of realizing how rare that feeling now seems. “I hope it means we’re going to get past the divisions we’re having right now,” she said. “We were there before. We can be there again.”
She also laughed at a detail few critics would think to note: Before arriving at the hospital, the patient treats her burns with honey. “That is so us,” Glickman said with a laugh. “That is so Jewish.”
#ThePitt’s Noah Wyle, who wrote Episode 3, talks with @TVLine Senior Editor Ryan Schwartz about revisiting the Tree of Life shooting and the Muslim community’s support and solidarity in the aftermath. https://t.co/KEHiBVeuUu pic.twitter.com/WTDSeL2Gkg
— TVLine.com (@TVLine) January 23, 2026
The post ‘The Pitt’ tackled the trauma of the Tree of Life attack. Here’s how survivors of the synagogue shooting reacted to the episode. appeared first on The Forward.
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Republican Rep. Calls on Georgia Hospital to Cut Ties With Iranian Regime-Connected Physician
Rep. Buddy Carter (R-GA) Source: Youtube
Rep. Buddy Carter (R-GA) has called on Emory University and Georgia medical regulators to fire a physician with familial ties to a top Iranian official, amid international furor against that official for his role in the brutal suppression of protests in Iran.
In a letter dated Jan. 22, the Carter urged Emory University to terminate Dr. Fatemeh Ardeshir-Larijani’s appointment and asked the Georgia Composite Medical Board to revoke her medical license, arguing that her connection to her father, Ali Larijani, poses national security and patient trust concerns. The letter contends that allowing someone with such ties to practice medicine in the United States is “unacceptable,” especially given recent U.S. actions targeting Iran’s leadership and repression apparatus.
“Allowing an individual with immediate familial ties to a senior official actively calling for the death of Americans to occupy such a position poses a threat to patient trust, institutional integrity, and national security,” Carter wrote.
The U.S. Department of the Treasury this month sanctioned Larijani, who serves as Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, for his role in coordinating the Iranian government’s violent crackdown on peaceful protesters that erupted in late 2025 and continued into January 2026. According to the Treasury, Larijani publicly called on security forces to use force against demonstrators demanding basic rights, and his actions are tied to thousands of deaths and injuries.
Those sanctions, announced Jan. 15 by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, target Larijani along with nearly two dozen other officials and shadow banking networks that finance the Iranian regime’s repression and global destabilizing activities. The move is part of a broader U.S. effort to increase economic pressure on Tehran, using executive authorities related to human rights abuses and support for terrorism.
The sanctions designation bars Larijani and the other named individuals from the U.S. financial system and prohibits American persons and companies from conducting business with them. Treasury officials said the measures also aim to disrupt the financial networks that allow Iran’s elite to launder revenue from petroleum and petrochemical sales funds that the U.S. says are diverted to repression and support for proxy groups abroad.
Larijani’s role in the crackdown has also been highlighted by a former Iranian government insider, who spoke with the IranWire outlet, alleging that Larijani played a central role in orchestrating the January 2026 suppression drawing comparisons to historic violent suppressions and suggesting the strategy was part of internal power consolidation within Iran’s leadership.
Protests that began in Iran in December have left at least 5,000 people dead, more than 7,300 injured and upwards of 26,800 detained, according to the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency. The unrest was initially sparked by rapidly deteriorating economic conditions, skyrocketing inflation, and a plummeting currency. However, the demonstrations quickly expanded into a wider movement opposing the country’s ruling establishment. Iranian authorities released their first official death toll on Wednesday, reporting 3,117 fatalities. The government said 2,427 of those killed were civilians or members of the security forces, while the remainder were labeled “terrorists,” without offering a detailed accounting of civilian versus security force casualties.
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Iran Claims Long-Range Missile Progress as US Boosts Military Presence Amid Deadliest Crackdown Since 1979
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks during a meeting in Tehran, Iran, Jan. 17, 2026. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
Iran claimed this week it successfully tested its first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of striking the US’s East Coast, as Washington bolsters its military presence in the region and tensions soar amid Tehran’s intensifying crackdown on protesters.
According to state-affiliated media, the Iranian government conducted a successful missile launch test this week from an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) base in Semnan, a city in north-central Iran, firing it toward Siberia with Russia’s approval.
Even though the missile was reported to have a range of up to 3,700 miles, it is unclear whether it reached its target, as the launch video shows little beyond a projectile soaring through the clouds.
Last year, a report from the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) warned that Iran could possess up to 60 intercontinental ballistic missiles by 2035, signaling the regime’s growing long-range strike capabilities and the potential future threat to the US and its allies.
“Missile threats to the US homeland will expand in scale and sophistication in the coming decade,” the report said. “North Korea has successfully tested ballistic missiles with sufficient range to reach the entire Homeland, and Iran has space launch vehicles it could use to develop a militarily viable ICBM by 2035 should Tehran decide to pursue the capability.”
Meanwhile, as regional tensions mount over the regime’s brutal crackdown on anti-government protests, the United States has moved a range of military assets into the area — including the USS Abraham Lincoln and its strike group.
In the last few weeks, President Donald Trump has repeatedly warned that he may take “decisive” military action against Iran if the regime continues killing protesters.
“We’re watching Iran,” Trump said on his way back from the World Economic Forum in Davos. “I’d rather not see anything happen but we’re watching them very closely.”
“We have a large fleet moving into the region. We’ll see what happens if we have to use it,” he continued. “We are building a very large force there, and we are closely monitoring their actions.”
For his part, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on Thursday accused the United States and Israel of fueling the widespread anti-government protests, calling it a “cowardly revenge … for the defeat in the 12-Day War.”
IRGC commander Gen. Mohammad Pakpour also threatened Israel and the United States over any potential military action, warning them to “avoid any miscalculations” to prevent what he described as a “more painful and regrettable fate.”
“The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and dear Iran have their finger on the trigger, more prepared than ever, ready to carry out the orders and measures of the supreme commander-in-chief,” Pakpour was quoted as saying by local media.
With pressure mounting at home and abroad, experts say it remains unclear how Tehran will respond — whether by escalating militarily beyond its borders or by offering limited concessions to ease sanctions and mend ties with the West.
The nationwide protests, which began with a shopkeepers’ strike in Tehran on Dec. 28, initially reflected public anger over the soaring cost of living, a deepening economic crisis, and the rial — Iran’s currency — plummeting to record lows amid renewed economic sanctions, with annual inflation near 40 percent.
With demonstrations now stretching over three weeks, the protests have grown into a broader anti-government movement calling for the fall of Khamenei and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and even a broader collapse of the country’s Islamist, authoritarian system.
According to the US-based human rights group HRANA, 4,519 people have been killed during the protests, with another 9,049 fatalities under review. At least 5,811 people have been injured, and 26,314 arrests have been recorded.
Iranian officials have put the death toll at 5,000 while some reports indicate the figure could be much higher.
On Friday, the UN Human Rights Council said that the current wave of violence against protesters is “the deadliest crackdown since the 1979 Islamic Revolution,” citing credible evidence that the actual death toll is “much higher” than official figures, which already run into the thousands.
With Iranian authorities maintaining an internet blackout for over two weeks, the actual number of casualties remains difficult to verify. Activists fear the internet shutdown is being used to conceal the full extent of the crackdown on anti-regime protests.