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U. of Vermont agrees to improve antisemitism training, ending federal case and capping a tumultuous year
(JTA) – A year of strained relations between the University of Vermont and its Jewish community has led to the school resolving a federal antisemitism complaint and pledging to do more to protect its Jewish students — including from anti-Zionist rhetoric.
The university and the U.S. Department of Education announced Monday that they had reached a resolution to the complaint, which the department took up last fall after it was filed by students and pro-Israel groups. The complaint alleged that the institution had not properly responded to Jewish students’ allegations of antisemitic discrimination. Investigators determined that the university “received notice, but did not investigate” several claims of antisemitic behavior on campus, and that the steps it ultimately took did not adequately address students’ concerns.
Notably, the department’s office of civil rights determined that one of the ways the university’s Jewish students had been discriminated against was through “national origin harassment on the basis of shared ancestry,” reflecting a controversial argument promoted by pro-Israel groups that anti-Zionist rhetoric is harmful to all Jews because the Jewish people share Israel as an ancestral homeland. The resolution of the complaint also reflects a sharp change in course for the school, which had initially denied wrongdoing and blamed the accusations on an orchestrated external campaign — a response that upset the campus Jewish community.
“This complaint was overwhelmingly dealing with the antisemitism that masks as anti-Zionism, and what the resolution demonstrates is how seriously [the office] is taking that kind of antisemitism,” Alyza Lewin, president of the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency after the ruling. A pro-Israel legal group that often involves itself in campus disputes, the Brandeis Center was one of the organizations that filed the initial complaint on behalf of mostly anonymous students.
The Department of Education responded to a JTA request for comment by pointing to its letter of resolution with the university. Its civil rights office has fielded several challenges to anti-Zionist rhetoric since the Donald Trump administration expanded the department’s mandate around antisemitism in 2019 under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. The office of civil rights is fast becoming a favorite tool for pro-Israel activists: It also announced this week it would open an investigation into allegations of a professor’s antisemitic behavior at George Washington University, a week after the university’s own investigation cleared the faculty member of charges brought by another pro-Israel group.
In the agreement, the University of Vermont pledged to revise its policies for reporting discrimination and to train its staff on how to specifically respond to discrimination complaints. The Department of Education will also review the university’s records regarding its response to last year’s allegations of antisemitism. One of the areas in which the university said it would train staff is on how to recognize “the Title VI prohibition against harassment based on national origin, including shared ancestry.”
Among the allegations: cases of unofficial student groups denying admission to “Zionist” students (including a support group for sexual-assault survivors); one graduate teaching assistant who had mused on social media about lowering the grades of Zionist students; and a group of students who’d reportedly thrown an object at the campus Hillel building (the complaint claimed it was a rock; Hillel staff told JTA it was a puffball mushroom). More than 20% of the university’s student body is Jewish, according to Hillel International.
Evan Siegel, a Jewish junior at the University of Vermont, poses in his off-campus housing in Burlington, October 13, 2022. Siegel was initially critical of his school for its handling of a federal antisemitism investigation, but praised its eventual resolution. (Andrew Lapin/Jewish Telegraphic Agency)
The agreement marked a sharp change from how the university first responded when the government announced its intent to investigate the complaint last fall. Back then, the university’s president, Suresh Garimella, issued a combative statement in which he said the university “vigorously denies the false allegation of an insufficient response to complaints of threats and discrimination.” He also issued a point-by-point refutation of the allegations in the complaint.
Garimella further charged that the complaint had been orchestrated by “an anonymous third party” that had “painted our community in a patently false light.” In addition to the Brandeis Center, the complaint was filed on behalf of students by the watchdog group Jewish On Campus, whose antisemitism-tracking methodology has been criticized by other groups.
Garimella’s combativeness at the time was an unusual move for the leader of a university accused of violating Title VI law, which prohibits discriminatory behavior at federally-funded programs or institutions, such as public universities. Groups like the Brandeis Center have increasingly leaned on Title VI in federal complaints to argue that pro-Israel students face discrimination. Title VI cases have become a central component of litigating multiple kinds of Israel discourse on campus, ranging from a pro-Israel student body president being targeted at the University of Southern California to a resolution passed by pro-Palestinian law student groups at the University of California, Berkeley.
In Burlington, where the university is located, some liberal Jews were initially dubious of the complaint. Felicia Kornbluh, a history professor on campus who often teaches American Jewish history, told JTA she was concerned about “playing into the narrative” of a conservative, pro-Israel agenda set by the Brandeis Center, whom she described as “allies of the Trump wing of the Republican party.” (The center’s founder, Kenneth Marcus, served as assistant secretary of education for civil rights under Trump.)
But the complaint also landed in the aftermath of a contentious Burlington city council meeting at which, Kornbluh and others said, pro-Palestinian protesters became hostile to Jews. The meeting featured a council resolution to endorse the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions campaign against Israel, and resulted in a raucous scene where pro-Palestinian groups shouted down Jewish students singing prayers for peace. Kornbluh described the atmosphere there as “really scary,” and “a little like Nuremberg.” Vermonters for Justice in Palestine, a local activist group, held multiple rallies on campus in support of the administration after the antisemitism complaint was publicized.
Against this backdrop, Garimella’s dismissiveness left the university’s Jewish community frustrated and angry. During a Jewish Telegraphic Agency visit to Burlington after the president’s initial statement, Jewish students and faculty said they felt like university administration was not taking their concerns seriously.
“I feel like we’re not being supported here,” Evan Siegel, a Jewish junior who is involved with student government, told JTA while sitting in off-campus housing adorned with Jewish summer camp memorabilia. “And that sucks.”
Employed as a campus tour guide, Siegel wondered, “How am I supposed to give tours and be like, ‘UVM is the best,’ when my president is being an ass?”
Other Jewish students told JTA at the time they had no intention of supporting the university financially or otherwise after they graduated, and wouldn’t advertise the fact that they were alums.
Matt Vogel, executive director of Hillel at the University of Vermont, where one of the alleged antisemitic incidents had taken place, also reluctantly played a role in the drama of the last year, after hoping he would be able to keep his focus on Hillel’s student programming. As the fall semester was starting, he sent an email home to parents reading, “Antisemitism keeps me awake at night.” Throughout the semester, Hillel also became more active in calling out antisemitism on social media.
“Just by default, we’re at the center of it,” Vogel told JTA last fall in the Hillel building, as student volunteers chopped vegetables for that evening’s Shabbat dinner in the next room. “I’ve overheard a student saying, like, a Hillel sticker on their water bottle might turn into a political conversation about Zionism in the first two seconds.”
Matt Vogel, executive director of Hillel at the University of Vermont, prepares for Shabbat in his Burlington office, October 14, 2022. Vogel praised the university for ultimately resolving its federal antisemitism complaint in April 2023 after months of tension. (Andrew Lapin/Jewish Telegraphic Agency)
Soon, Kornbluh decided that the administration’s response to the allegations was unacceptable, and penned a local op-ed opposing it that was later shared by her faculty union in a show of solidarity.
“I was stunned by the tone and content” of Garimella’s letter, Kornbluh wrote in the piece. Accusing the university of “gaslighting,” she added, “I do know that one persistent rhetorical strategy of antisemites in Europe and the United States has been to say that there is no antisemitism.”
Garimella reversed course following weeks of criticism, a strongly worded letter from more than a dozen Jewish groups including the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee and news of several high-profile antisemitic incidents nationally. In October, the university published a website intended to support Jewish students — accompanied by a new statement from Garimella, who now condemned antisemitism unequivocally.
“I have listened to members of our campus community who experience a sense of risk in fully expressing their Jewish identity,” he wrote. ”I want my message to be clear to the entire campus community: antisemitism, in any form, will not be tolerated at UVM.”
This time, Garimella pledged not only to investigate individual reports of antisemitism, but also to work to change the campus community’s approach to the issue. He committed to further anti-bias training and building a streamlined bias reporting system for students, and said the university’s diversity office would work to build and maintain “meaningful actions that ensure our Jewish students and community members feel support and care.”
After Monday’s resolution, Garimella was fully supportive of the findings of the Department of Education’s investigation.
“The resolution reflects an important step in UVM’s engagement with our students, faculty, staff, alumni, and the surrounding community,” he wrote in a message to the campus. “It also reflects numerous conversations we have had with our campus Jewish community and important local and national voices on the consequential and complex issue of antisemitism.”
In response to a JTA request for comment, a university spokesperson sent copies of the letters from the president and provost. (Throughout the year, the president’s office had declined multiple JTA interview requests.)
Jewish groups, including the university Hillel, celebrated the resolution. “The President and senior leadership’s new statements today represent tangible and accountable steps forward,” Vogel told JTA in a statement. “We hope this ensures that no Jewish student or any student at UVM experiences discrimination or harassment because of their identity.”
The Hillel building at the University of Vermont in Burlington, October 14, 2022. Hillel found itself at the center of a federal antisemitism complaint against the university. (Andrew Lapin/Jewish Telegraphic Agency)
Also celebrating the ruling was Jewish on Campus, a subsidiary of the World Jewish Congress and one of the groups that brought the initial complaint. “Today’s announcement is a victory for the safety and security of Jewish students,” Julia Jassey, the group’s CEO and a University of Chicago undergraduate, said in a statement.
Avi Zatz, the only University of Vermont student on the initial complaint who has made their identity public, is himself an employee of Jewish on Campus. Citing antisemitism in Vermont, Zatz recently transferred to the University of Florida — in a state that may soon pass legislation that, critics say, could harm Jewish studies on all its public campuses.
“I can’t have hoped for a better resolution,” Zatz, a junior, told JTA from his new school in Gainesville, Florida. While he said he was still glad to have left Vermont, he added, “I finally feel a sense of closure.”
Kornbluh, for her part, said the resolution was “a start,” but criticized the university for not voicing a stronger commitment to Jewish studies or meeting with Jewish faculty.
Reached by phone from Madrid, where he is studying abroad this semester, Siegel said he was “proud, determined, ready for more” following the university’s agreement.
“This resolution was really, in a respectful way, a slap in the face to the university to do better,” he said. “I, for one, am ready to get back on campus and continue my work as hard as I can.”
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The post U. of Vermont agrees to improve antisemitism training, ending federal case and capping a tumultuous year appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Facebook suspends radio broadcaster’s account over video of Holocaust survivor
Facebook has abruptly banned a Jewish broadcasting executive in Minnesota after he posted a link to a video of a 104 year-old Holocaust survivor in Texas sharing his story, prompting the Minnesota Attorney General to intervene.
Joel Glaser, CEO of AMPERS, a group of community radio stations across Minnesota, received an email from Facebook last month informing him that his personal account had been suspended because it violated the platform’s “child sexual exploitation” policies.
Because Glaser also administers the account for an AMPERS radio series titled MN90: Minnesota History in 90 Seconds, Facebook also took down that account, which has more than 10,000 followers.
The video produced by an NBC affiliate in Dallas and shared by an ABC affiliate in the Twin Cities, featured a talk by Walter Levy, a survivor who fled Germany in the late 1930s and still tells his story about how his family survived Kristallnacht and struggled with whether to flee to then-British mandated Palestine or America. His family eventually joined relatives in Arkansas.
“How it got flagged as being child sexual exploitation is absolutely beyond me,” said Glaser, who unsuccessfully appealed.. “It did not give me the opportunity to explain anything, ask any questions, provide any screenshots, do anything at all.”
Facebook has said the case has been “flagged for the team” and is “looking into this.”
Glaser initially speculated that an antisemite, Holocaust-denier, or a bot operating on their behalf had flagged his post. But then he started leaning toward the notion that it was probably just artificial intelligence run amok.
“I guess Meta’s AI isn’t smart enough to differentiate between child sexual exploitation and a legitimate news story,” he said.
Because Glaser also oversees AMPERS’ news coverage, losing access to Facebook has made his job more difficult.
“I’m being hindered from doing that,” Glaser said. “They need to fix it.”
Experts say Glaser’s experience is not unusual, underscoring a need for significant work on content moderation systems, as well as transparent correction mechanisms. Without seeing Meta’s internal enforcement signals, it’s impossible to know why the system acted to suspend Glaser’s accounts.
On the morning of June 25 Glaser received an email from Facebook saying that his personal account was being suspended and he had 180 days to appeal. While the platform attributed the suspension to a violation of child sexual exploitation standards, it did not specify what content of Glaser’s had violated those standards. The video of Levy just happened to be his most recent post.
Glaser appealed right away, taking the required nine photographs of his face to prove it was him. Facebook denied the appeal that afternoon and permanently banned him with no opportunity for additional appeals.
Glaser contacted Minnesota’s Attorney General, a standard recourse for Facebook subscribers in a number of states who have
unfairly had their accounts suspended. Brian Evans, press secretary for Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, told Glaser that the office has interceded with Meta previously regarding their “heavy-handed approach to account deactivation.”
The Attorney General’s Consumer Action team will work to get Glaser’s two accounts reactivated, he wrote.
“The Minnesota Attorney General’s Office has received numerous complaints from consumers about moderation decisions that appear to have been made in error by Facebook,” Evans said.
Minnesota State Rep. Ginny Klevorn, a Democrat who represents the suburbs northwest of Minneapolis, has also asked that the state party’s liaison to Meta look into the matter, noting that AMPERS is partially funded by the state of Minnesota.
“Why is a public service network that deals with factual historic events being banned?” she said. “I think they owe Joel some sort of explanation.”
The post Facebook suspends radio broadcaster’s account over video of Holocaust survivor appeared first on The Forward.
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Artists are boycotting a show about Israel. The run’s already sold out
In the third act of Jonathan Spector’s Birthright, the character Izzy delivers the closest thing the play has to a thesis.
“I can go up on the bimah at my parents’ shul and I can say I am married to a woman, I can say I don’t keep kosher, I can say I don’t believe in God,” the character, a former J Street employee played by Molly Bernard, says. “The one thing that would get me kicked off the bimah, kicked out of the shul, kicked out of my family is if I say I am an anti-Zionist.”
There is an unspoken flipside to this equation: Just as Jewish communal life has instituted litmus tests, the pro-Palestine movement also has its dogma.
Jewish organizations once accepted all comers — gay, bacon-eating, atheist — Spector told me in an interview the day the show, tracking six members of a Birthright group over 18 years, opened at MCC Theatre. Recently, though, when it comes to the Jewish state, “there’s been a similar kind of shift away from tolerance from people on both sides of that divide.”
As if one needed more proof of Spector’s assertion, the group Theater Workers for a Ceasefire announced on Tuesday a call to boycott the production for “normalization,” even though the show is, at press time, sold out.
In an open letter, the organization outlines its concerns. “Normalization includes any plays, festivals, and other kinds of cultural activities that are based on the false premise of symmetry between oppressors and oppressed or which assume colonizers and colonized are equally responsible for the ‘Israel/Palestine conflict.’”
Birthright, they argue, meets this definition in its third act, when Izzy and Chaya (Zoë Winters), a former Obama staffer, debate the Gaza War in the aftermath of Oct. 7. “Chaya and Izzy perpetuate the fallacy that genocide has two equally legitimate sides,” the Theater Workers wrote. “The play does not challenge Chaya’s beliefs — it privileges them.”
But does it? We learn Chaya resigns from her job at the domestic nonprofit she founded over a pressure campaign by her staffers, who share an offensive text she sent via Instagram. The text: “Maybe they should spend a week in Gaza, and then come back and tell us if the rapes are real or not.”
In an Instagram carousel, Artists For Ceasefire describes this as “a text accusing Palestinians of being rapists.” This is a distortion, but reveals a familiar taboo in certain pro-Palestinian activism: the acknowledgment that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad committed sexual violence.
“Birthright emphasizes Chaya’s victimhood, whereby her own personal and professional losses in the wake of October 7th are greater than that of any Palestinian,” the letter continues. “Izzy is depicted as immoral for caring more about Palestinian strangers than her friend.”
This smacks of a bad faith reading. Once again we are in the realm of depiction not equalling endorsement. Cherries are being picked. That the play doesn’t “challenge” every argument, or “encourag[es] audiences to empathize with” an Israeli character’s “subjectivity” is seen as morally deleterious, rather than what it is: a play, with characters, not a debate, op-ed or struggle session.
As Spector told me, “plays contain ideas, but plays are about people.”
We needn’t wonder what Theater Workers for a Ceasefire would recommend as counter-programming: on Instagram they argued for an example in Seven Jewish Children by Caryl Churchill, a non-Jewish playwright. That play is more polemic than drama and runs on an engine of Holocaust inversion, which makes sense when you look at their Instagram post.
“Conventional drama demands we present contrasting viewpoints in the name of conflict,” the group concedes, “But how we write the conflict is not an ideological [sic] benign matter.”
The overriding interest is not art, but ideology. Not the mirror up to life, but of the funhouse variety that warps reality to an endless, echo chamber tunnel.
Eli Gelb, an actor in the show, acknowledged the boycott in an Instagram story, wrote “I’ve been outspoken as an antizionist Jew and I remain so. I believe in the show and will be continuing to perform in the production.” Molly Bernard’s Instagram stories Wednesday are of devastation in Gaza.
The letter makes clear “this would not be a boycott of MCC, nor of Jonathan Spector, but of this specific cultural product.” How can you boycott a run that, at press time, has no seats left to buy? Yield your tickets while ye may, someone will gladly snap them up.
In the play, a character, whose identity I won’t reveal due to spoilers, discusses an episode recounted in the Talmud, where a Super Bowl-sized crowd witnesses one priest stab another for the privilege of cleaning up ashes from a ritual sacrifice.
Rabbi Tzadok says all present were responsible for creating the conditions for the attack. But then the father of the stabbed priest retrieves the knife from his son’s back, and tells the crowd that, as he is not yet dead, the knife is still ritually pure. The onlookers cheer.
In the show, the story is cryptic, but speaks to Israel, where the ideal of the state has given way — perhaps irreversibly — to a culture of violence.
“This is how far they had fallen in this period,” the character says, “how far they had strayed, that they valued the laws of ritual purity over human life.” It’s an argument that would seem to align with Artists for Ceasefire, for whom the suffering in Gaza supersedes any gestures at complexity.
In their demands for a purity test, they may have missed it.
The post Artists are boycotting a show about Israel. The run’s already sold out appeared first on The Forward.
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Haley Stevens takes aim at Netanyahu in Michigan Senate debate, as opponent Abdul El-Sayed calls Israel a ‘rogue state’
(JTA) — Viewers of Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary debate on Tuesday night could be forgiven for at times forgetting that one candidate comes with the heavy backing of pro-Israel donors.
“The prime minister of Israel has failed,” Rep. Haley Stevens said when asked about Iran, saying that both Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump had failed to achieve “long-term peace.”
Later, Stevens added that she supported “aid into Gaza” and reiterated that she believed Netanyahu has been bad for American Jews.
“It is very clear that Mr. Netanyahu has not made us safer, has not brought us closer to peace, and he is a danger to Jews in America and around the world,” she said.
The lines represented sharp criticism of Israel’s leadership for a candidate who, according to federal campaign records, has received more than $10 million in support from donors affiliated with AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby that her progressive opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, has excoriated on the campaign trail and during Tuesday’s debate. Regarded as one of Congress’ more reliable pro-Israel Democrats, Stevens made the comments as Democratic voters have largely shed their sympathies for Israel.
El-Sayed, meanwhile, said during the debate that the United States’ foreign policy “has been handed to us” by Israel and AIPAC and called Israel a “rogue state.”
The former Wayne County health director, whose grassroots campaign has gained momentum as it has increasingly centered anti-Israel rhetoric, did not hold back in his criticism.
Citing “the impact of AIPAC in our politics” as the reason for the joint U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, El-Sayed asserted that the lobbyist’s goals were “to annex Lebanon or to do genocide in Gaza.” He added that Israel was committing “human rights abuses, genocide and apartheid” and called for the United States to “stop funding the Israeli military unilateral blank checks.”
He also tied voters’ economic woes to Israel. “Ask yourself why it is that we are paying $5 gas, why it is that we can’t get out of this quagmire,” he said. “It’s because for too long, our foreign policy has been handed to us by the likes of the state of Israel and AIPAC, who has made sure that both Democrats and Republicans are doing their bidding.”
He further claimed there was no difference between his Democratic opponent and the presumptive Republican nominee, former congressman Mike Rogers, on Israel.
“If Congresswoman Stevens makes it, or if Mike Rogers wins, either way, Israel will win,” El-Sayed said. “AIPAC is perfectly fine with either of my two opponents because they know they will have a comfortable, reliable vote in the U.S. Senate.”
Stevens, who noted that she supports a two-state solution, rejected the line of attack. “No one owns my vote and no one owns my policies,” she said. “Anyone who’s contributing to my Senate campaign is doing so because of my proven record of fighting for Michigan.”
El-Sayed also suggested that Stevens’ sparring with Netanyahu, who is deeply unpopular with American voters, was ingenuine. Earlier in the day, Netanyahu told CNN that he believed Stevens’ previous comments accusing him of making American Jews less safe represented her “probably trying to excuse antisemitism.”
Sayed said he wasn’t convinced the remark was authentic. “I don’t think Benjamin Netanyahu is attacking her to actually attack her,” he said at the debate. “I think he’s attacking her to try and steer away the stink of how staunchly she stands for their policy.”
El-Sayed also attacked Stevens over a June 2025 vote she made in the House to “thank” Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officers. The appreciation was embedded in a resolution condemning the firebombing of a peaceful march for Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colorado. Stevens accused Republicans of having “put in a cynical point” about thanking ICE and El-Sayed of falling into a trap laid by the GOP.
Israel has grown increasingly central ahead of the Michigan primary, set for Aug. 4, in a crucial battleground state with large populations of both Jewish and Arab/Muslim voters. A third candidate who sought to tread a middle ground between Stevens and El-Sayed suspended her campaign earlier this week, ratcheting up anxiety among American Jews around the race.
Stevens’ bid for the Senate comes four years after she ousted Andy Levin, a Jewish progressive congressman who expressed criticism of Israel, in a race that drew more than $4 million in AIPAC-affiliated spending. In the years since, she has remained in a dwindling minority of House Democrats who have voted against all measures that would block or condition military aid to Israel.
El-Sayed’s bid comes as other anti-Israel progressives have prevailed in congressional primaries, shifting campaign discourse about Israel to the left. In an interview with CNN also published Tuesday, El-Sayed took aim at the very idea of a Jewish state.
“Every definition of a Jewish state ends up in some articulation of illiberal values, every single one,” he told CNN. Asked if support for Israel could ever be about more than money, he responded, “Not if you’re a Democrat and you believe in human rights.”
Other Michigan races are also turning into referendums on the Democratic stance on Israel. El-Sayed has cross-endorsed two left-wing congressional candidates, state Rep. Donavan McKinney and activist William Lawrence, who have both said Israel committed genocide in Gaza. Stevens, meanwhile, has endorsed pro-Israel Jewish state Sen. Jeremy Moss for her House seat.
Further down the ballot in Michigan, Democratic activist Abbas Alawieh, a key architect of the 2024 “Uncommitted” movement designed to pressure national Democrats on Gaza, on Tuesday picked up the endorsement of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in his bid for a state senate seat on the party ticket. Alawieh has also met with former Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost Michigan to Donald Trump in the general election after the state’s large Arab and Muslim population expressed strong dissatisfaction with her stance on Israel.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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