(JTA) — After Oct. 7, Sarah Lawrence College student Emilyn Toffler felt something was missing on campus.

“My campus blew up with pro-Palestinian activism,” Toffler recalled. “I was encouraged to see my classmates engage with the issue, many for the first time, but I looked around campus and saw that there was no space for students to have conversation or nuanced dialogue.”

Last fall, Toffler and another Jewish student tried to change the situation. They decided to form a campus chapter of J Street U, the college arm of the liberal pro-Israel group. With the help of a faculty advisor, they tried to make the club a campus reality.

Nearly two dozen such J Street U chapters have formed nationwide since Oct. 7, as students have sought to promote the group’s self-described “pro-Israel, pro-Palestinian and pro-peace” outlook as an alternative to anti-Israel activism surging on campuses — as well as to hawkish campus pro-Israel activism.

But when the students applied to the student government at Sarah Lawrence, an elite progressive liberal arts college in New York’s Westchester County, to make J Street U an official club, they encountered fierce resistance.

After voicing their strong opposition to the group, the Student Senate rejected the J Street U application — the first time a J Street campus chapter has ever been rejected anywhere, according to the group. (The final vote tally was not included in the meeting minutes.) When the students appealed the decision, the senate rejected the appeal, too. And though some faculty and alumni supportive of the students have tried to lobby Sarah Lawrence’s administration to intervene, the college leadership has so far chosen not to.

The Sarah Lawrence J Street rejection offers a window into how campus politics around Israel have evolved since Oct. 7. Two years after anti-Israel protests roiled campuses, even Jewish groups that support Palestinian statehood and sharply oppose Israeli government policies can be treated as beyond the pale.

According to several Sarah Lawrence students and faculty members, it’s rare but not unprecedented for the student senate to reject a student club application. But what happened in deliberations over the J Street U application, they said, was shocking.

Student senators compared recognizing the group to approving “a white supremacist organization,” according to an audio recording and transcript of the meeting obtained by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

One senator said they were concerned about “the whole Zionist language” of the group “that’s still furthering the same logic of Israeli sovereignty and self-determination when there is no existence or security for Israel that’s not contingent on Palestinian displacement, on apartheid, on genocide.”

The application was rejected. The Jewish students appealed to the same body. In March, their appeal was rejected, too.

The Student Senate did not return several JTA requests for comment.

The case, according to J Street, marks the first time a J Street U campus chapter has been blocked from forming.

“We are proud of the work students do to create spaces for dialogue and diverse perspectives on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict,” Jeremy Ben-Ami, J Street’s president, told JTA in a statement. “J Street has long opposed efforts to curb speech and free expression on campus, and we encourage Sarah Lawrence’s administration to approve the chapter’s application.”

At other schools where student governments have recently taken aim at Jewish groups — such as when The New School’s student government tried to block funding to the campus Hillel last month — administrators have rejected their decisions.

Sarah Lawrence’s senate bylaws allow for the intervention of the school’s dean or other leadership to “grant … recognition of the organization” in cases “when it is in the best interests of the college.” Despite prodding from local J Street allies, President Crystal Collins Judd has not stepped in. On Monday, faculty members delivered a petition to Judd, drawing on those bylaws in calling on her to intervene to permit the campus J Street U chapter. Yet so far, the president has opted not to take action.

Sarah Lawrence’s administration “does not intervene in the process unless there is a clear violation of policy,” the school’s dean of students, Dave Stanfield, told JTA. Stanfield also said it was “not unusual for organizations to be denied recognition.”

He suggested that students hoping to form a J Street U chapter should explore other means of activism or try again next year.

“For students who may be disappointed by this outcome, including those nearing graduation, there are multiple avenues for community-building, programming, and engagement on campus,” he wrote in an email. “For students returning next academic year, they can reapply for organization recognition.”

Toffler graduated on Friday. “I am sad that we never got recognition as a club,” they said. “I think we could have positively contributed to the political conversation on campus.”

Jewish faculty, too, were upset about how the J Street students were treated.

“I was immediately alarmed,” Matthew Ellis, an endowed chair of Middle East studies at the college, told JTA when he heard about the rejection. “That just smacked of very obvious, blatant political discrimination.”

For the past few years, Ellis said, he had already been struggling to promote responsible campus dialogue about “the complexities of Zionism.” Some students have been receptive, he said, but a hardline pro-Palestinian contingent “has taken up all the space on campus.”

“And then the J Street thing happens,” he recalled. “I just put my palm to my head: ‘Jesus, what is going on?’”

Rejecting the J Street U chapter, the faculty petition argues, violated Sarah Lawrence’s “Principles for Mutual Respect” and its policy to “foster honest inquiry, free speech, and open discourse.” The petition, circulated to a limited number of faculty members, has garnered more than 20 signatures.

“We, the faculty — and I very much include myself — have clearly not been successful in helping students understand that the only community worth belonging to is a community in which everyone welcomes disagreement rather than trying to shut it down,” novelist Brian Morton, a longtime Sarah Lawrence professor, told JTA.

“This should be one of the bedrock ideas of higher education,” he added, “but somehow we’re failing to get it across.”

J Street occupies a complicated place in American Jewish politics.

Founded in 2008 as a liberal alternative to more hawkish pro-Israel organizations, the group has spent years advocating for a two-state solution and criticizing Israeli military operations and West Bank settlement policy. It was rejected from the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations in 2014 amid criticism that it too often sparred with other Jewish groups over Israel.

Since the Gaza war began, J Street has departed even further from the pro-Israel consensus. Last summer, before the Sarah Lawrence students applied to form their chapter, Ben-Ami said he had been “persuaded” by the argument that Israel had committed “genocide” in Gaza, a charge that Israel and its allies fiercely reject.

Last month, the organization announced that it now opposes continued U.S. military aid to Israel, including for the defensive Iron Dome system.

J Street has also criticized the Trump administration’s campus antisemitism investigations and deportation efforts targeting pro-Palestinian student activists.

Many of those stances have set J Street apart from more mainstream pro-Israel groups. But at Sarah Lawrence, student senators said they saw little distinction.

“What the students here are invested in is Palestinian liberation. And there’s no existence or advocation for Israeli or Zionist security that can co-exist with Palestinian liberation,” one student senator told the J Street students, according to audio and a transcript of the meeting where the club was rejected the first time. “The normalization of Zionism and of Israel is what students are opposed to.”

The J Street students tried to explain that they had been misunderstood. According to the official meeting minutes, they “argued that their idea of Zionism aligns fixedly with more of a textbook definition of it, rather than how it has come to be more widely defined around campus.”

In their appeal, they continued the argument. “It is our impression that the decision to not approve J Street U at SLC relies on a caricature of our position as reflexively aligned with an extremist Israeli government and callously indifferent to Palestinian suffering and aspirations to statehood,” they wrote. “That could not be further from how we feel or what our organization hopes to work for.”

In written decisions rejecting the chapter, Sarah Lawrence senators raised concerns about J Street’s lobbying work and questioned whether the student organizers could guarantee that the campus group would remain independent from the national organization.

They also asked whether J Street U “would fulfill a unique political/cultural space on campus that doesn’t already exist across different clubs,” pointing to the anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace, Hillel, a Humanist Jews group and the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.

Toffler, who also served as student president of the campus Hillel board, said the process revealed a profound ignorance about Jewish life and political diversity.

“If you can’t tell the difference between Hillel, JVP and SJP, you’re simply not doing a good job representing the one-fifth to one-fourth of your classmates who are Jewish,” they said.

Supportive faculty, including their advisor, had planned to attend the students’ March appeal meeting. But just before the meeting, according to the advisor, the senate announced that only two people would be permitted at the appeal, and they would only be granted 10 minutes to make their case. (The faculty advisor declined to be identified publicly out of fear of the repercussions for their own standing in academia.)

According to meeting minutes from March, senate chair Nora Tucker-Kellogg reiterated concerns that the chapter could eventually “more closely resemble” the national organization. Tucker-Kellogg also referenced what she described as “widespread concern” about the group. The final vote tally denying the application was, again, not recorded in the meeting minutes.

Tucker-Kellogg is also a co-plaintiff in a legal complaint against the college and a U.S. congressional committee investigating antisemitism, alleging that pro-Palestinian students and faculty have had their First Amendment rights chilled by “false accusations of antisemitism.”

The complaint, which claims the campus is not hostile to Jews, describes Tucker-Kellogg as an organizer involved in campus encampments and building occupations related to pro-Palestinian activism.

An attorney for Tucker-Kellogg did not respond to requests for comment.

Opposition to liberal Zionism on campus predates the students’ J Street U application.

Before Oct. 7, former Sarah Lawrence student Sammy Tweedy told JTA he was treated as a “pariah” for having gone to Israel; Tweedy, the son of rock musician Jeff Tweedy, left the school after the Hamas attacks as a result of the hostility he said he faced there. He was targeted, he said, even though he has also opposed “current Israeli government policy propaganda.”

In 2024, students protested then-Forward editor-in-chief Jodi Rudoren, accusing her outlet of being “a hotspot for dangerous Zionist propaganda.”

Earlier this year, New York Times columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein, who himself often criticizes Israel, visited Sarah Lawrence for a public event. Protesters interrupted the discussion, shouting “You like genocide” and calling Klein a “Nazi normalizer.” Toffler said a poster labeling Klein “a Zionist pig” remained posted on a campus bulletin board for weeks.

Following the disruption, according to video of the event, Judd, the college president, joked to Klein, “Welcome to Sarah Lawrence.”

Both demonstrations were organized by the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.

Last week, SJP said some participants in the Klein protest had been disciplined by the school shortly before commencement. According to the group, one student was barred from campus on graduation day while others were prohibited from attending certain events.

The chapter denounced the disciplinary actions as “racialized and Islamophobic attacks” and expressed solidarity with “those resisting ziomerica.”

Stanfield declined to comment on specific disciplinary measures but said the college takes disruptions seriously and seeks to balance free expression with mutual respect.

The atmosphere has alarmed some Jewish alumni. “It makes me very sad, and at the moment a bit angry,” said Jo-Ann Mort, a Sarah Lawrence alum, poet and longtime J Street activist. Mort did not directly advise the J Street U students but had reached out to the president and faculty about the issue as a concerned alum.

“I believe that J Street U is really useful because it can directly challenge, on these campuses, the hypothesis of the anti-Zionist left,” she told JTA. “And they’re not a comfortable fit for those willing to acknowledge there are two peoples living in one place.”

Rachel Klein, executive director of Hillels of Westchester, which serves Sarah Lawrence and nearby campuses, said she was shocked by the senate’s decision and rhetoric.

“I expected backlash and protest after the club was established,” she said. “But I did not expect the student senate, who are supposed to be representatives of the entire student body, to be so biased.”

Klein has spent years clashing with the Sarah Lawrence administration over antisemitism concerns. She said the campus Hillel has not hosted a formal Israel-related event since 2015, when an Israeli soldier’s visit to campus was targeted by protests.

Today, she said, she doubts a Hillel chapter would be approved if proposed from scratch.

In 2024, Klein filed a federal civil rights complaint against Sarah Lawrence — a highly unusual step for a Hillel director to take — after concluding that the administration would not adequately respond to serious concerns about antisemitism.

“I did not want to have to file a federal complaint against one of my campuses,” Klein said. “I wish I had a partner in Sarah Lawrence who believed in the equity of every student.”

The complaint triggered a federal Title VI antisemitism investigation. Sarah Lawrence also figured into a Republican-led House inquiry into campus antisemitism launched in 2025. Internally, Stanfield, the school’s dean, had told the president that Klein’s initial claims of post-Oct. 7 campus antisemitism were “exaggerated and alarmist,” according to emails later published as part of the House committee report.

Some Jews on campus say the student senate’s response to the J Street U petition must be understood in the context of the scrutiny from the federal government.

“Students hear ‘pro-Israel’ and sometimes make assumptions about what opinions that means that don’t apply to J Street,” said Joel Swanson, a Jewish studies professor who said he supported the students’ application.

Swanson himself criticized the congressional inquiry in a Forward op-ed, arguing that Jewish students were uncomfortable being used in national political battles. (He did not mention the J Street U saga in his Forward piece.)

“I wish we could have a more nuanced discussion about this,” he told JTA. “But the way this has been polarized through the federal climate is making that harder.”

Another Jewish professor rebutted Swanson’s defense of Sarah Lawrence in an essay in the Jewish Journal.

“The record at Sarah Lawrence is not thin,” wrote Samuel Abrams, who teaches politics, arguing that administrators had inadequately addressed repeated incidents involving Jewish students.

Toffler, who studied politics and government and spent a year studying abroad in England, said the experience has left them worried about future students who may hold opinions outside the prevailing campus consensus.

“I also worry for the next generation of Sarah Lawrence students,” they said. “Who’s going to be there for them as they strive to express opinions that differ from the mainstream on campus? I don’t know.”

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

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