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Jewish students wanted to bring J Street to Sarah Lawrence. Why did the student senate say no?
(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.
The post Jewish students wanted to bring J Street to Sarah Lawrence. Why did the student senate say no? appeared first on The Forward.
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The real reason Clavicular is in Israel
Clavicular is partying in Tel Aviv this week.
If you don’t know who that is, first of all, I’m happy for you. Clavicular is a looksmaxxer, part of an online male subculture that subscribes to the idea that becoming as hot as possible is the main, perhaps the only, meaningful thing to do with one’s life, and the only road to success. To achieve peak hotness — “ascend,” in looksmaxxing lingo — followers of the doctrine engage in such activities as hitting themselves in the face with a hammer to supposedly sharpen their jaw line (“bone-smashing”), or taking steroids and meth to improve their physique.
The last time Clav — as people call him, though his real name is Braden Peters — went viral, it was for getting turned down repeatedly by French women during Paris fashion week. The time before that was for dancing with a bunch of far-right influencers, including noted antisemite Nick Fuentes and manosphere titan Andrew Tate, to Kanye West’s Führer-sampling song “Heil Hitler” and singing along to the offensive lyrics.
Which is why Clavicular’s sudden appearance in Israel was such a surprise — and a controversial one. In one video, the bouncer at a Tel Aviv club kicks him out, saying no one who hates Israel is welcome inside. Several Israeli feminist influencers have also decried his visit, pointing to his bad behavior with women. And, of course, countless users online have accused him of normalizing genocide, including mega-popular streamer Hasan Piker. But others are excited by his presence; a female IDF soldier is also appearing in his videos (she’s now facing disciplinary action for the collab), as is Chabad influencer, Yossi Farro and he’s drawn excited crowds in Tel Aviv.
Farro was perhaps the first Jewish influencer to court Clavicular after the “Heil Hitler” incident; his usual schtick is wrapping tefillin with celebrities. But he made a video last month feeding the looksmaxxer the traditional Ashkenazi Shabbat stew cholent — Clav said it was good — and it went viral in the Jewish world, where people decried the effort at rehabilitation. But the clip also went viral with antisemites: Fuentes said he wanted to hang a mezuzah and get in with Jews, too.
The first announcement that Clavicular was in Tel Aviv also came with a post from Farro, crossposted by several large Jewish social media accounts. In the video, Farro gifts Clav a memento that could not be more of our times: a necklace featuring an OpenAI logo with a Star of David in the middle. Later, he posted a video of a conversation with Clavicular calling the biblical Joseph the first looksmaxxer. It felt surreal.
That’s the whole point. Clavicular is just as obsessive about his fame as he is about his looks. Clicks boost accounts no matter whether they’re from haters or followers; monetized social media pays the same amount for adoring comments as it does for ones calling Clavicular evil and praying to spit on his grave. Engagement is engagement. (Farro, who didn’t reply to a request for comment, seems to be operating by the same philosophy.)
The simple answer as to why he was in Israel was because it would be controversial — which it was — and controversy earns him money and eyes. Clavicular said that he noticed everyone was talking about the nation, but almost no influencers were going. He figured he would go viral if he bucked the trend. It’s not by accident that Clav’s one-time publicist, Mitchell Jackson, specializes in cancelled figures of all political persuasions, including Candace Owens, Caroline Calloway and an OnlyFans model named Adam22. The point is attention, not adulation.
In an interview with The Free Press, Clavicular said he did not see his visit as political; he came to party. And he criticized the idea that a young influencer should have any political take, or that the outlet should even ask about his views. He doesn’t know about anything but looksmaxxing, he wrote in a post, and believes it’s irresponsible for him to talk about anything else. While one could say advising teens to take steroids and meth is also irresponsible, he’s not wrong about his ignorance of geopolitics.
But many Israelis and Jews are happy to have him, despite his “Heil Hitler” singalong. Israel has been short on positive PR, and Clav has called the country beautiful and fun. Never mind that Clavicular is followed by at least as many haters, watching out of Schadenfreude, as he is fans, and hardly brings uncomplicated good vibes to Israel with him. At least someone popular among the youth, who are increasingly critical of Israel, said something good about the nation. Many Israelis seem desperate enough for global goodwill that they’re willing to overlook Clav’s antisemitism. People are even claiming he’s Jewish now. (And maybe he is; he hasn’t confirmed or denied, but he’s certainly never mentioned it before.)
And, of course, Clavicular does have adherents who believe anything he does is cool, that he’s always “mogging” (dominating via his powerful aura, more or less). So even if he proclaims he has no political opinion, everything is politics and his presence serves to cast Israel in a more positive light, even if it’s the nihilistic glow of an amoral influencer who cares about looking good above all else. He may be cringe, but he’s popular. Maybe that’s enough for some, but it highlights how low the bar is for Israel’s public image in this moment.
For Clavicular, though, it’s all a game. He doesn’t care about Israel’s image or the war in Gaza or settlers or Palestinians. His only side is his own, and even then he doesn’t need to be popular; he only needs to be seen. He said he plans to stream in Russia next.
The post The real reason Clavicular is in Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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Another Graham Platner potential replacement now says Israel committed genocide in Gaza
(JTA) — Graham Platner concluded his Senate bid on a pro-Palestinian note on Friday, in the last lines of a letter to Maine’s secretary of state formally withdrawing his candidacy.
“F*ck ICE. Free Palestine. Up the Hearts,” Platner wrote before signing off with the valediction, “Solidarity forever.”
The secretary of state, Shenna Bellows, is among the candidates seeking to replace Platner on the ballot, and she soon adopted his stance on Israel. Before becoming secretary of state, Bellows was the executive director of the Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine.
Asked about Platner’s letter on CNN’s “The Source” on Friday, Bellows said she agreed with Platner’s claim that Israel committed genocide in Gaza. “Yes. Israel — the Israeli government is committing genocide in Gaza right now,” Bellows said. “And we should not be sending any taxpayer funds to be conducting that harm.”
Bellows did not immediately respond to a Jewish Telegraphic Agency request for comment on Monday.
Platner, a Democrat, posted the letter nearly two days after announcing that he would leave the race, following sexual assault allegations that caused even his most devoted allies to drop their support. It was a remarkable fall for an oyster fisherman and populist who emerged out of political obscurity to command such a lead that Maine’s governor, Janet Mills, suspended her own campaign in April.
In both the speech his announcing his withdrawal and the letter, Platner has painted his exit as the result of a conspiracy against him and the progressive movement, rather than a consequence of accruing controversies that undercut his ability to win in November.
“All we were asking for was healthcare, was to end the genocide, to use our taxpayer dollars at home to uplift our communities instead of waging war overseas,” Platner said in a Facebook address announcing his exit, two days before sending the formal letter.
Platner’s successor will be selected during a nominating convention on July 25. Since his exit, candidates vying to replace him have staked out their own stances on Israel, with others besides Bellows saying publicly for the first time that they believe Israel committed genocide in Gaza. Israel and its supporters reject the claim, which a recent poll found that half of Democrats believe.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Another Graham Platner potential replacement now says Israel committed genocide in Gaza appeared first on The Forward.
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Rep. Ro Khanna says armed settlers detained him in the West Bank; IDF disputes account
(JTA) — California Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna, who is eyeing a 2028 presidential bid, says he was detained last week by armed Israeli settlers in the West Bank last week — and that Israeli soldiers who arrived “took the settlers’ side.”
The IDF disputed that characterization. The military said in a statement that it received a report of Israeli civilians unlawfully blocking the vehicles of foreign nationals and members of the media near the Palestinian West Bank hamlet of Khirbet Zanuta, and that troops dispatched to the scene “quickly dispersed the Israeli civilians” and reopened the road. Its soldiers, the IDF said, did not take part in blocking the road. The military also said Khanna did not coordinate his visit with the IDF.
The incident took place Wednesday during Khanna’s to the West Bank and broke into public view over the weekend, as Khanna made a number of allegations against the Israeli military while sharing his account.
Khanna’s description of the length of his delay has varied, from about 20 minutes to 90 minutes. Khanna has also claimed the Israeli government and the U.S. Embassy were notified of his trip.
Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter, disputed that on Sunday, saying Khanna’s office had asked only about visas and declined the embassy’s request to coordinate the trip. Leiter also said Khanna’s office had not responded to an offer of meetings with survivors of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack.
The incident is the latest flashpoint in mounting criticism of Israel within the Democratic Party, where Khanna is a leader of the pro-Palestinian left flank.
Khanna has repeatedly pointed out that the settlers carried American-made M4 rifles, which he described as “machine guns.” Khanna has called for a ban on all U.S. weapons sales to Israel, including defensive Iron Dome munitions.
In the wake of Oct. 7, Khanna has evolved from a staunchly pro-Israel Democrat into one of Israel’s fiercest critics in Congress. He went from taking money from the liberal J Street and voting to fund Israel’s Iron Dome in 2021 to securing the backing of Track AIPAC, a group that monitors donations from pro-Israel organizations and issues endorsements and “anti-endorsements” of candidates.
Appearing on “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel is “a country of laws” that prosecutes lawbreakers, and attributed settler violence in the West Bank to roughly 150 “juvenile delinquents” he described as unrepresentative of a mostly law-abiding settler community. He said he does not want “vigilantes of any kind.”
Appearing after him on the same broadcast, Khanna rejected the Israeli account. “The IDF is lying,” he said, calling for an investigation of the four soldiers.
“He said Israel is a country of law and order,” Khanna said about Netanyahu. “Well, let me be very specific. The prime minister needs to open an investigation on these violent settlers who are connected to Yinon Levi, who has destroyed Zanuta’s village and is a known person who has killed Palestinians.”
Levi was indicted last year following the fatal shooting of a prominent Palestinian activist, Awadh Hathaleen, in a village neighboring Kirbeit Zanuta.
Khanna is not the first American to have been detained in the West Bank. In March, CNN’s Jeremy Diamond and his crew were detained for about two hours by Israeli reservists while reporting in the northern West Bank. In that case, in which the crew recorded a soldier assaulting a detainee and making inflammatory comments about Jewish control of the disputed region, the Israeli military suspended the battalion involved and apologized to CNN, with its chief of staff calling the episode a “grave ethical incident.”
In Khanna’s case, no arrests have been made — though the IDF said in its statement that the identity of at least one armed individual is under review.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Rep. Ro Khanna says armed settlers detained him in the West Bank; IDF disputes account appeared first on The Forward.
