Letter to the Editor: On the Layoff of Rabbi Shahar Colt

The following was originally read aloud at the faculty meeting last Friday. This is an edited version of the original statement.

Last week the two of us, Judy Frank and Catherine Epstein, were on a Zoom call attended by some 30 people that Shahar Colt, the recently-laid off rabbi at Amherst College, convened to talk about what she learned in Minneapolis, when she responded to a call to clergy to converge on the city.   

As you know, the Jewish community is deeply divided politically, and that was the case for the rabbis and activists who traveled to Minneapolis. Many came because they were haunted by the Holocaust. One said, “I’m trying to protect my neighbors because my grandparents’ neighbors didn’t do this for them.” There was also a large presence from Rabbis for Ceasefire, who have honed their skills in protesting occupation for some time now.

An activist on one of the panels that Shahar attended explained to the audience that in this current emergency, we are going to have to learn to work with people with whom we disagree. And indeed there were rabbis there, Shahar said, that she never anticipated she’d be working with. 

We were both on that Zoom call. If you know us at all, and our positions on Israel/Palestine, you know that we too never anticipated that we’d be working together. But even before this Zoom call, the two of us sat together reading and thinking about the Zionist movement in a reading group that Shahar convened to discuss a book she was excited by, about the branch of the Zionist movement that sent Russian Jews to Galveston, Texas. 

Shahar knew from the moment she accepted a position at Amherst that she was going to be walking on thin ice. She understood that trying to bring Jews at Amherst together in community was, at this historical moment, a job that would entail pretty constant critique and complaint. She was actively trying to cultivate Jewish space for all Jews on campus, not advocating for one or another kind of politics; she was teaching Jewish values and spirituality, and trying to provide pastoral support during this truly horrible historical moment.

Shahar went through a long and thorough interview process before being hired by the College, and was laid off after two years. She was the assistant director for Religious and Spiritual Life (RSL) for a period when there was no director, so RSL was effectively rudderless. Indeed this is the experience of several of the resource center staff who were recently fired. They were working in understaffed and chaotic offices — and then deemed by senior administration not to be serving students. Religious and Spiritual Life is undertaking an external review this semester; Shahar was laid off before the review.

We were immensely lucky to have a rabbi so well matched to our community, and we wish to express our sadness and our outrage that Shahar is no longer working here. The college has been bending over backward trying to protect itself from the Trump administration’s bad-faith attacks on antisemitism in higher education. And now it has laid off its pluralistic, bridge-building campus rabbi. At the very least, this dismissal suggests a shocking indifference to Jewish students, faculty, and staff on campus at a time in which  the American Jewish community is subject to both antisemitic acts and to silencing by the weaponization of antisemitism. The damage is done, and our faith in the senior administration’s support of our community has been gravely undermined. 

We can only hope that should another talented rabbi be willing to work at the college, RSL and Student Affairs will provide a supportive working environment for them, one that allows them to work boldly and creatively, without the feeling that at any moment, the ground could drop out from under them. They deserve a position and salary commensurate with the challenges they will face. We trust and expect the administration to support a vibrant Jewish community on campus — one that can hold different viewpoints, including about Israel/Palestine. In these fraught times for American Jews, anything short of full support for a Jewish leader who can help build such a community is unacceptable. 

Catherine Epstein

Henry Steele Commager Professor of History

Judith Frank 

Eliza J. Clark Folger Professor of English