Chautauqua’s Rafia Amina Khader Displays Open Jew-Hatred

In recent months, an antisemitic controversy has been roiling Chautauqua, where every summer, adults and young people gather for nine weeks to hear lectures in a bucolic setting on a lake in western New York. More on this can be found here.

At Chautauqua, Antisemitism at the Top

Rafia Amina Khader, the Chautauqua Institution’s director of religion programs, once wrote an essay in which she wondered whether “being in the same room as a Zionist” meant she was “giving up on my commitment to my Muslim community.” She wrote: “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.”

Kader thinks the problem of “interfaith outreach” to Jews is “problematic” because so many Jews support Zionism, which for Muslims such as Kader is intolerable. In December 2024, she published an article that was “riddled with dubious data about the toll of the war in Gaza and erroneous assertions about Zionism and Judaism.” She wrote: “My faith exhorts me to seek the truth and not be afraid of speaking it.”

Her Islamic faith caused her to accept not the truth, but rather, every false charge about Israel, ranging from the number of civilians killed in Gaza, to the aims of Zionism (which are not to create a Jewish state from “the Nile to the Euphrates”), to Judaism and certain Torah passages supposedly telling Jews it is okay to deal deceptively with the Gentiles.

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 that’s not how Rafia Amina Khader regarded the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7. Whatever Jews may think of that orgy of rape, torture, and murder, she calls that day “momentous” — in a positive sense — and since then she has only doubled down on the remark after being asked to apologize for it. She added that “wise elders” had told her to condemn Hamas. While those “wise elders,” possibly Chautauqua director Michael Hill himself, had counseled her to condemn Hamas — “just go through the motions, Rafia, so as to shut up those thin-skinned Jews” — she refused to do so. She thinks that her new position will allow her to fashion a pro-Palestinian curriculum for Chautauqua participants, to invite Palestinian speakers, to do “real change-making work” to turn her audiences against Israel, and to justify her praise of Hamas to the captive audience that Chautauqua provide.

Her non-apology apology, in which Khader most notably did not condemn Hamas, and therefore appeared to be doubling down on her praise of the terrorist attack on October 7, only increased the alarm felt by Jewish members of the Chautauqua community.

Hill apologized, but added: “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. 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.”

What kind of “community” consisting of “people of diverging faiths, beliefs and perspectives” can there be when a prominent member of that so-called “community” praises the atrocities — rape, torture, murder — visited on the Jews of Israel by calling them “momentous” and refuses, despite being given many opportunities, to take that language back?

By endorsing Rafia Khader’s writing, including her antisemitic praise of Hamas’ atrocities, Michael Hill has himself become part of the problem. No one who refuses to condemn, but instead praises Hamas, such as Rafia Amina Khader, or who, like Michael Hill, defends those who praise Hamas, has no business running the Chautauqua organization.

And that is where things stand. Rafia Khader has kept her job, even though she had published her appreciation for that the October 7 attack inside Israel by 6,000 Hamas members, who proceeded to rape, torture, mutilate, and murder 1,200 Israelis and kidnap another 251 who were brought back to Gaza. It was, in her words, truly “momentous.” Worse still, the director of Chautauqua, Michael Hill, did not distance himself from her remarks, but instead praised her as the perfect person to direct an “interfaith” program.

Will the Board of Trustees of Chautauqua do the right thing? Will they fire Rafia Khader, an admirer of Hamas’ atrocities? Will they fire, too, Michael Hill, the director of Chautauqua, who found nothing wrong with Khader’s remarks and stood firmly behind her?