At Chautauqua, Antisemitism at the Top

Chautauqua is a quintessential American institution, dating from the 19th century. Every summer, adults and young people gather for nine weeks to hear lectures in a bucolic setting on a lake in western New York, and to engage in academic study: a blissful time to learn, discuss, debate, but without exams or degrees. It offers not just resident lecturers, but visiting lecturers as well. It is perhaps the first example of what we now know as Adult Education, or Lifelong Learning, though the institution now also admits teenagers to what has become its youth program. But not all is well on the shores of Lake Chautauqua. In recent months there has been a serpent loose in this garden — the serpent of antisemitism. More on what’s roiling Chautauqua can be found here.

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.”

Hill made no mention of the fact that the stabber was a Muslim, determined to kill Salman Rushdie because of the fatwa issued in 1989 by the Ayatollah Khomeini. That was the year that Rushdie had published The Satanic Verses, with its fictionalized account of the prophet Muhammed’s life, which was perceived as disrespectful and sacrilegious by many in the Islamic world.

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.”

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….

Given that the Muslim contingent at Chautauqua is likely infinitesimal or even nonexistent, it is curious that a Muslim, Rafia Amina Khader, was chosen to oversee all “summer programming related to religion.” Clearly the institution’s director, Michael Hill, wanted to make a bold statement about — you guessed it — Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. But what if the person you hire does not believe in inclusion, because she has been raised “not to take Christians and Jews friends, for they are friends only with each other”? What if that person has had drummed into her since childhood the belief that Muslims are the “best of peoples” and non-Muslims “the most vile of created beings”? Did Michael Hill know a thing about the texts and teachings of Islam before he hired Rafia Khader? Has he informed himself since? And did he not realize that her previous experience as an “interfaith activist” allowed her to learn how best to appeal to, and deceive, the Infidels, by hiding the true nature of Islam?