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The exclusive Chautauqua Institution wrestles with antisemitism inside its gates

The elite resort in Western New York has failed to respond to Jewish stakeholders worried about antisemitism in the institution’s senior staff

For nine weeks each summer, a small plot of land on the shores of Chautauqua Lake, in Western New York, becomes a utopian gathering place for Americans whose ideal summer vacation includes lectures, interfaith services and symphony performances — alongside kayaks, pickleball and, always, lots of ice cream. 

The Chautauqua Institution is the kind of place where the visitors, many of whom have been spending summers there for decades, look up from their books to wave at passersby from the porches of their colorfully painted Victorians. Everyone rides a bike, but no one locks them up. 

Chautauquans consider this cultural community located an hour and a half southwest of Buffalo to be one of the nation’s best-kept secrets. Its easygoing, harmonious spirit is part of the institution’s foundational ethos. We get along here, the thinking goes; we can debate and disagree and still like each other! 

That peaceful illusion was shattered in 2022, when the novelist Salman Rushdie was stabbed onstage during a lecture by a man linked to Iranian-backed terrorists. The stabbing was “an attack on the very foundation of who we are and what we stand for,” Chautauqua Institution President Michael Hill said at the time. “At the core, for us, it was an attempt at silencing.”

The community was not silenced, nor was Rushdie, who made an emotional reappearance at Chautauqua in 2023 and last year published a book on the attack. “Chautauqua and Sir Salman will forever be linked because of this tragedy and because we stand as symbols of the importance of freedom of expression to our democratic way of life,” Hill wrote last year. Chautauqua emerged defiant, confident that the Institution’s commitment to community and free expression had survived unscathed.

Now, the institution’s values are again being put to the test. But this time, there is no clear path forward as controversy surrounding the Israel-Hamas war and accusations of antisemitism threaten to splinter this idyllic summer community. 

The leaders of Chautauqua’s Jewish community claim that Hill and other executives at Chautauqua have for months been ignoring their concerns about antisemitism among the institution’s senior staff. The tension culminated earlier this month when Hill publicly praised an essay written by Rafia Amina Khader, the institution’s director of religion programs, in which she called Oct. 7 a “momentous” day and refused to condemn Hamas. Khader has declined to retract or clarify those views in the weeks since. 

The institution has responded to these concerns about antisemitism with lofty statements about its deeply held values of dialogue and nuance. That may be the Chautauqua way, but Jewish community members are saying it isn’t enough. 

“The time for dialogue is over,” the presidents of Chautauqua’s Chabad house, its egalitarian congregation and its nondenominational Jewish community center wrote in a joint email to Chautauqua’s board of trustees on Jan. 26. “We need resolution, and we need resolution quickly.” 

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To the Hall of Philosophy, Recognition Day, Chautauqua Institution. (Sepia Times/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Chautauqua Institution announced in August 2023 that it had hired Khader, an interfaith activist who worked in the Muslim philanthropy world, as its director of religion programs. As Chautauqua’s first full-time Muslim employee, she would oversee summer programming related to religion. It was a major statement for an organization that was founded as a distinctly Christian institution, although in recent decades it had made efforts to diversify its religious programming.

Daily afternoon interfaith lectures throughout the summer can draw crowds in the hundreds. Speakers in 2024 included Greg Epstein, the humanist chaplain at MIT and Harvard; Miroslav Volf, director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture; and Rabbi Sharon Brous, founding rabbi at the nondenominational Jewish congregation IKAR in Los Angeles. 

Yet weeks before the summer season kicked off last year, the leaders of Chautauqua’s Jewish organizations grew concerned after seeing a blog post Khader wrote about how Oct. 7 had affected her thinking around a new interfaith cohort for young adults that she was overseeing. 

In the essay, which Khader has since deleted from her blog, she questioned whether “being in the same room as a Zionist” meant she was “giving up on my commitment to my Muslim community.” 

“I was nervous about how I would interact with the Jewish members of the cohort, knowing that at least one of them worked for a Zionist organization that has made very problematic outreach within the U.S. Muslim community,” she wrote. 

The Jewish leaders also took issue with some of her picks for afternoon lectures as the summer progressed, particularly as she insisted that the institution bring a Palestinian speaker. Worried her personal views on the war in Gaza were affecting Khader’s ability to build bridges with Chautauqua’s Jewish community, they requested a meeting with Chautauqua’s leadership team.

In September, the institution’s executive staff met with Rabbi Zalman Vilenkin of Chabad Lubavitch of Chautauqua; Leslie Adler and Esther Northman, the president and past president of the Hebrew Congregation of Chautauqua; and Peter Silberstein and Richard Spivak, the director and president of the Everett Jewish Life Center in Chautauqua. 

Chautauqua’s leadership agreed that Khader’s “political and personal positions should not be part of her actions,” according to minutes of the meeting shared by Vilenkin. But they made clear Khader would keep her job. The group agreed to schedule another meeting in January. That meeting never happened. 

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Section of Amphitheater, Chautauqua Institution. (Sepia Times/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

If not for the article Khader published in December 2024, this is likely how things would’ve continued: slowly, bureaucratically, behind closed doors. No one wanted a public fight with the institution, where they vacation with their kids and grandkids.

But then came Khader’s article in Interfaith America, which was riddled with dubious data about the toll of the war in Gaza and erroneous assertions about Zionism and Judaism. “My faith exhorts me to seek the truth and not be afraid of speaking it,” Khader wrote. Months after Jewish leaders first raised concerns about her incendiary language, she doubled down. 

She referred to Oct. 7 as a “momentous October day” and described what happened that day not as an act of terror but as “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood,” the title given to the attack by Hamas. And she cited the widely debunked claim, published in an opinion article in the medical journal The Lancet, that 186,000 people had been killed in Gaza — more than four times higher than the number of fatalities published by Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry. (Khader did not respond to a request for comment.) 

Khader described a meeting with a Jewish couple at Chautauqua, where she learned that, for many Jews, “the Holocaust is not just a distant memory. It’s something they have been replaying in their heads over and over. Oct. 7 felt to them like the start of another Holocaust.”

But, she continued, “I know not all Jews feel this way.” She responded to the couple by outlining her own beliefs — that “Israel and Zionism do not represent Judaism and Jewishness.” Khader said “wise elders” had counseled her to condemn Hamas and to “decide whether I want to be an interfaith leader or an activist.” She declined to make that distinction, calling her position at Chautauqua “an incredible opportunity to do real change-making work.” 

Even after Khader’s article was published in early December, the leaders of Chautauqua’s Jewish community would probably have stayed the course of dialogue if not for a Jan. 7 press release where Hill, the institution’s president, shared the essay and praised Khader for leading “us to an increasingly more nuanced understanding of faith with a focus on dialogue.” 

“We are all deeply committed to Chautauqua and its ideals of robust civil dialogue, openness to different perspectives and opinions, and positive interfaith work,” Vilenkin, Adler, Northman, Spivak and Silberstein wrote in a Jan. 18 letter to Chautauqua’s executive team. “Putting an activist like Rafia in the director position is the antithesis of interfaith work. We are very concerned about the implications for Chautauqua which is why we are expressing ourselves so strongly.” 

Hill’s endorsement of her article, the Jewish Chautauquans continued, made others in the Jewish community “feel devalued, disenfranchised, disrespected and is causing people to question their place in Chautauqua.” They said that to avoid further division, Chautauqua’s leaders must remove Khader from the position “before it damages the fabric and culture and openness of Chautauqua beyond repair.” 

On Jan. 24, Khader and Hill sent lengthy responses attempting to mitigate those concerns.

Khader apologized for the hurt she caused and said the moment should “serve as a catalyst for deeper conversations,” now that she better understands “that certain words can inhibit dialogue, which is the opposite of what I intended.” She did not address questions about the language she used to discuss Oct. 7, nor did she condemn Hamas. 

In his own email, Hill apologized for inadvertently causing harm and said he had not meant to endorse the content of Khader’s article. His email avoided referencing any of the substantive issues raised by the Jewish leaders; it did not mention Israel, Oct. 7, Hamas or antisemitism. He responded instead by touting Chautauqua’s values. 

“We have an opportunity to demonstrate — and have for 150 years demonstrated — how people of diverging faiths, beliefs and perspectives can engage and be in community together,” Hill wrote. “We will continue to invite you and all members of our community into dialogue on this and other topics that divide and/or evoke strong reactions.”

This response so alarmed Chautauqua’s Jewish leaders that their next move was the Chautauqua equivalent of pulling the fire alarm: They went public. Vilenkin, the Chabad rabbi, sent an email to the entire Chabad listserv on Monday detailing everything that had happened over the past six months. He issued a plea to community members to write to Chautauqua’s board of trustees to express their concerns before a February board meeting. 

In their own note to the trustees, Vilenkin and the leaders of the Everett Jewish Life Center and the Hebrew Congregation made a last-ditch effort at effecting change. 

“Michael Hill’s endorsement of Rafia’s writing has created an unsafe situation for Jews at Chautauqua and they are questioning if they are welcome,” they wrote on Jan. 26. “The trustees need to recognize the incendiary nature of Rafia’s writings, even if the administration does not.”

A spokesperson for the institution declined to comment in response to a detailed list of questions from Jewish Insider

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Miller Park, Chautauqua Institution. (Sepia Times/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Chautauqua is a community organized around a shared set of values, and that requires buy-in from everyone in the community. The buy-in is not theoretical: All visitors must buy a pass in order to gain access to the institution’s gated grounds, which contributes to the we’re-all-in-this-together sense of camaraderie that reverberates all summer. 

Living out those values also requires trust. That trust was tested three years ago, when a hate-filled outsider with ties to a terror group stormed the stage to attack Rushdie. But the stabbing was easily and quickly understood as an us-versus-them moment. Of course Rushdie’s attacker wasn’t one of us

What happens, though, when defining “us” is less straightforward — when division festers inside a community, bolstered by leaders’ unwillingness to take a stand? 

The Chautauqua Institution is asking Jewish community members to place their trust in that shared set of values. But as the Jewish leaders see it, those values have already been violated, with trust broken along the way. 

The Jewish leaders are now asking Chautauqua to pick a side, arguing the institution must take a stand in order to ensure Jews’ safety and sense of belonging in their beloved summer home.

It’s us versus them, the Jewish leaders are saying. Except in this case, both “us” and “them” are part of the Chautauqua community. 

In his email last week, Hill asked “for the grace and shared commitment of working through this tough issue together.” He wouldn’t take a side. Doing so, he suggested, would be anathema to the “understanding and dialogue” that is Chautauqua’s “distinction and mission.” 

But failing to address the worries of Jewish Chautauquans who reached out to him over a period of several months with genuine concern is not the same as remaining neutral. He made a choice. Just not the one Jewish Chautauquans wanted.

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