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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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Berlin rabbi makes history as first European to head Conservative rabbis’ association
(JTA) — BERLIN — Gesa Shira Ederberg was not yet a rabbi when she was tapped to lead a seder, to teach Hebrew, and to organize an egalitarian minyan in her home city of Berlin. She happened to be in the right places when help was needed, recalls Ederberg, who was pursuing a degree in Jewish studies at the time. She wondered: Could she be doing more?
Three decades later, Ederberg is a veteran rabbi of Berlin’s first official egalitarian congregation on Oranienburger Strasse — and this month she reached a new milestone.
She was installed last week as the international head of the Conservative/Masorti movement’s Rabbinical Assembly, the organization representing more than 1,600 rabbis worldwide. For the first time, the group is being led by a European rabbi.
Her installation marks another milestone as well. “As far as the Rabbinical Assembly is aware — Rabbi Ederberg is the first Jew by choice to serve as president,” said a spokesperson for the organization.
For observers of Jewish life in Germany, the moment carries symbolic weight.
“This is quite an extraordinary deal, actually, because there’s never been a non-American or non-Israeli to head the Rabbinical Assembly,” said Deidre Berger, an American who has lived in Germany for more than 40 years and serves on the boards of both the German and worldwide Masorti organizations.
“It’s also a major step forward in relations between a broader group in the American Jewish community with Germany — with being willing to acknowledge that postwar Jewish life did get relaunched in Germany and is here to stay,” added Berger, the former head of the American Jewish Committee office in Berlin.
Rabbi Jacob Blumenthal, CEO of both the Rabbinical Assembly and the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, said Ederberg’s election also reflects the movement’s embrace of Jews by choice.
“Welcoming converts is one of the ways in which our communities are growing and thriving,” he said. “So to have a colleague who made this choice to lead a Jewish life and then to become a rabbi is certainly something to celebrate.”
Ederberg’s installation took place in two parts: last week at Congregation Beth Sholom in Teaneck, New Jersey, followed by a second ceremony on Tuesday in Berlin, where her synagogue received a Rabbinical Assembly Torah mantle that remains with each president during their term.
“I will see it every time we open the ark,” she said. “It will be a reminder of my new responsibilities.”
Born in 1968 in the German city of Tuebingen, Ederberg grew up in a Lutheran family. Her father was in charge of his church’ youth exchanges with Israel, and Israeli teenagers often visited the family home. She traveled to Israel for the first time at age 13, an experience that helped cement what she said was “a deep connection” with the country and its people.
Ederberg later earned a master’s degree in Protestant theology. But her involvement in Jewish-Christian dialogue deepened her interest in Judaism, leading her to pursue Jewish studies in Berlin and eventually convert in 1995 at the Jewish Theological Seminary there.
Her decision grew partly out of her fascination with Jewish texts. “I was loving the texts,” she recalled early in her rabbinic career.
But it was also theological. She had come to believe that “the anti-Jewish tradition was an intrinsic part of Christianity,” she said at the time, and rejected interpretations portraying Judaism as obsolete.
Conversion, she added, was “a long and difficult process. You only get there if you really want it.”
Ederberg was ordained in 2002 at the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem. Her husband, Nils Ederberg — whom she met when both were Protestant students of Jewish studies — is also a rabbi. Ordained at Berlin’s Abraham Geiger College in 2014, he now serves as a military chaplain in Hamburg. The couple has three children.
After serving her first pulpit in Weiden, Ederberg returned to Berlin in 2007. There she became the first woman to serve as a rabbi in the city since Regina Jonas, a Liberal rabbi ordained in 1935 who was murdered by the Nazis, and only the second woman to hold a synagogue pulpit since the Holocaust.
She has helped build institutions for Germany’s small Masorti movement, founding Berlin’s Masorti elementary school in 2018 and serving as a founding member of Germany’s General Rabbinical Conference for non-Orthodox rabbis. She also served as a rabbinic adviser to the Zacharias Frankel College Conservative seminary at the University of Potsdam.
At the same time, she rose through the leadership ranks of the Rabbinical Assembly, serving in several voluntary roles before being elected vice president two years ago. She was elected president in December, succeeding Rabbi Jay Kornsgold of New Jersey, becoming the third woman to hold the role.
Ederberg’s installation comes at a challenging time for what was once America’s largest Jewish denomination, but has for years faced declining membership. As a centrist movement committed to what has been called “tradition and change,” it sits between a growing Orthodoxy on one side and a liberal Reform movement that has historically been far swifter to innovate.
Her installation also comes as broader changes in attitudes toward Jewish life in Germany have shifted. For decades after World War II, many American Jewish institutions viewed Germany as an unlikely place for Jewish communal revival.
Ederberg’s mentor, Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, the former chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America who encouraged her to pursue ordination, described her as “both the agent and the symbol of the potential of Conservative Judaism to flourish once again in Germany.”
That revival has taken place alongside a transformation of Germany’s Jewish population. Before World War II, about 500,000 Jews lived in the country. After the Holocaust only a small community remained, but immigration from the former Soviet Union beginning in the late 1990s helped rebuild Jewish life. Today roughly 100,000 Jews belong to congregations in Germany, with a similar number unaffiliated.
There are currently two Masorti congregations in the country: Ederberg’s in Berlin and another in Cologne.
Her congregation meets upstairs in a chapel attached to the New Synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse in former East Berlin. The mid-19th-century building was heavily damaged during World War II; its windows overlook the empty courtyard that once held the synagogue’s Torah ark and pews. Today, congregants gather in restored spaces, including a hall above what once served as the women’s gallery.
While other synagogues now offer egalitarian services, Ederberg’s congregation once served as an incubator, giving many women their first opportunity to read Torah from the bimah.
“On the one hand, it’s an intimate setting in her synagogue,” Blumenthal said. “But also you see the depth of both knowledge and commitment of the folks who are part of her community.”
Ederberg knows that for some people, her German Christian background remains a hurdle. Jewish identity in Germany today often reflects complicated family histories shaped by the upheavals of the 20th century.
Not only are there numerous converts like herself; there also are many Jews with a mother or grandmother who survived the Holocaust and a father or grandfather who served in the Wehrmacht, she noted. The question of Jewish identity in Germany, Ederberg said, “is a broader question about individuals and their family history.”
Her own family history reflects that complexity: Both of her grandfathers served in World War II, one dying at Stalingrad and the other working as a mechanic.
Ultimately, she said, the mentorship she received from three German-born Jewish figures — Schorsch as well as Israeli educators Alice Shalvi and Zeev Falk — proved decisive.
Back when she was an accidental rabbi, called upon to lead seders and services and to teach in a pinch, Ederberg hadn’t made up her mind whether to pursue ordination. She might have chosen to become a diplomat, she says, if it had not been for those three mentors who took her by the hand.
“Their encouragement, their push towards rabbinical school, their push towards, ‘Yes, you should go back to Germany and do what you’re doing,’ was really crucial,” she said.
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Fox’s Bible story miniseries puts women front and center
Depending on where you start the clock, the founding of the Jewish nation was partially born of an act of extreme cruelty.
When Sarah welcomed Isaac, after decades of trying for a child, she persuaded Abraham to send away her handmaiden Hagar and her son by him, Ishmael. That God provided for the child and his mother in the wilderness, and made a great nation of Ishmael’s descendants, was a worthy consolation. But could Sarah have known this blessing would come to pass?
In the first installments of Fox’s shiny new six-part, Sunday school miniseries, The Faithful: Women of the Bible, debuting March 22, it is Hagar (Natacha Karam) who narrates the story of Sarah. Though their dynamic was complicated — the OG Handmaid’s Tale — Hagar concludes that Sarah was a friend, and through the ages, “came to symbolize motherhood” as the “first of the great matriarchs.”
The mission statement of The Faithful, devised by an interfaith team and written by Star Trek alum René Echevarria and directed by Danny Cannon (CSI, Judge Dredd, Geostorm), is to foreground the stories of women in the biblical narrative. To that end, Sarah —played by Minnie Driver, using her natural British accent, forcing Yank Jeffrey Donovan’s Abraham to match her Received Pronunciation — has more agency than she did in Genesis.
It is Sarah (then still Sarai) who tells the pharaoh that Abraham is her brother and dodges the monarch’s advances with the help of some divine intervention. Leaving the palace, she manages to liberate Hagar, who was enslaved there.
Billed in the first episode title as “The Woman who Bowed to No One,” this Sarah is strong-willed, petitioning the almighty, with screams and some hurled offerings, to open her womb. As in scripture, it is her idea to give Hagar to Abraham to produce an heir. Only in this iteration there’s a quid pro quo: If Hagar gives Abraham a child, Sarah will help her return to her homeland. When the baby comes, Hagar reneges, sparking Sarah’s jealousy and the pretense that Hagar is not Ishmael’s real mother.
When Isaac arrives, heralded by three hooded strangers who stop by Abraham’s tent before firebombing Sodom and Gemorrah, the friction between Ishmael and his younger, legitimate brother is too much for Sarah.
“Cast them both out,” she tells Abraham. “We have to protect Isaac no matter the cost.”
The scene is uncomfortable. The actor playing Ishmael is brown with a different accent than Driver or Donovan. The child actor playing Isaac is blond, and Abraham hoped he’d have his mother’s light eyes.
Josephus and Jewish tradition regard Ishmael as the founder of the Arab nation. In Islam, he, not Isaac, is Abraham’s heir and the son who experienced the would-be sacrifice of the akedah. It will perhaps be difficult for some to watch white actors settle Canaan and exile people of color and not recall the narrative now surrounding Israel, and the meme of just about everything being promised to Jews 3,000 years ago.
But The Faithful is too dull to be truly provocative.
A common refrain has Abraham describing his wish to stand with his bride, “shoulder to shoulder, no matter what.” We see their early courtship beginning when Abraham (then Abram) helps her to disrupt an arranged marriage and gifts her a blue shawl — the fact that they may have been half-siblings is duly glossed over. It’s Tanakh by way of Nicholas Sparks.
Making Hagar a passive protagonist is an interesting twist, but the proceedings are too rooted in the mythic to fully capture the human drama at the story’s core. (Her journey, in which she grabs a rock from her homeland, and decades later places it on Sarah’s grave, dubiously suggests the origins of a familiar Jewish custom.)
The series has reasonable production values — which will go on to track Rebekah, Rachel and Leah — and since it’s based on the most popular book of all time, there’s a built-in audience that could certainly overlook some hackneyed writing and soap opera acting. As far as entertainment of this ilk goes, the show is of the highest caliber, admittedly faint praise.
The tales were meant to be retold, and we see Abraham developing the Jewish oral tradition, speaking of Eden and the Tower of Babel around the campfire. One night he teases the story of Sarah’s cunning escape from Pharaoh’s court.
Sarah laughs, chiding him for presenting the incident “as if it were one of the sagas.”
“Who knows,” Abraham all but winks at the viewer, “it might be one day.”
It is, but not all tellings are created equal.
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Israeli couple killed by Iranian cluster bomb as Israel continues assassinating Iranian officials
(JTA) — A couple in their 70s were killed overnight Tuesday by an Iranian missile, apparently as they tried to reach a bomb shelter, amid an especially intense barrage of missiles aimed at the Tel Aviv area.
Yaron and Ilana Moshe were killed near their home in Ramat Gan, an upscale suburb of Tel Aviv; a walker found near their bodies suggested that they were on their way to shelter but could not move quickly, officials said. Damage from the cluster munitions, which shed smaller bombs as they land, was also reported at other sites including a main train station in Tel Aviv.
The barrage, Iran said, was retaliation for the killing the day before of Ali Larijani, the country’s security minister and a close ally of its assassinated supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Shortly afterwards, Israel announced that it had assassinated another top official, intelligence minister Esmaeil Khatib. The Israeli military said in a statement, “Khatib played a significant role during the recent protests throughout Iran, including the arrest & killing of protestors and led terrorist activities against Israelis & Americans around the world.”
Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, warned that “significant surprises” would be ahead as Israel continued to pummel targets in Iran.
A Wall Street Journal story published Wednesday details how Israel says it is choosing its targets, describing an extensive list of sites and people who are in its crosshairs. Israel knew security officers would gather in sports complexes after their offices were destroyed, then bombed the complexes once they were full, for example, according to the story, which says Iranians say order is beginning to fray on the streets but the regime appears far from falling. Israel said earlier this week that it had three more weeks of targets to work through.
Israel has also stepped up its campaign in and around Beirut, where it is targeting forces affiliated with Hezbollah, the Iranian proxy that operates out of Lebanon and has been bombing Israel since earlier this month.
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