by Heather Benjamin and Andy Simon
Joanna Grossman is a candidate for Vermont State Senate running in the Democratic primary in the Chittenden Southeast District. She has painted herself as one of the most progressive candidates in the race, emphasizing environmental action, education investment, and healthcare access. In fact, her current public presence and insurgent candidacy might lead one to believe that her politics are uniformly progressive. Yet Grossman’s progressivism ends when it comes to Palestine, in ways that could harm our rights to free speech and assembly. Prior to launching her campaign, Grossman painstakingly deleted her abundant public posts on X (formerly Twitter) and Reddit and vaporized a pro-Israel organization she started after Israel began its assault on Gaza.
Shortly after Israel’s genocide in Gaza began, Grossman took a primary leadership role opposing Vermont’s local movement in support of Palestine. She did this on her own social media accounts, and also created “Jewish Action Vermont,” an organization that, among many other pro-Zionist talking points, claimed to defend Jewish safety against alleged and unsubstantiated antisemitism in the pro-Palestine movement, a move that mirrored arguments the right wing of Vermont’s Jewish community has made. This framing aligns with part of the far-right Project 2025 plan known as Project Esther, which aims to dismantle progressive activism and free speech in the U.S. by using Palestine as a wedge issue. It also dovetails nicely with Grossman’s stance as an embattled defender of the Jewish state. Sometime after October 7th, she claimed on Reddit, where she went by “joeyinvermont,” a handle still used on her Bluesky and Substack accounts, that Jews in the US are living “behind enemy lines” because “[w]e don’t have Israel and the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] hugging us and protecting us.”
Posts like this and many others, however, are now gone from public view, saved only by screenshots. Thanks to various contributors and to reporting from Vermont activist James Marc Leas on Substack, we can see more of the record that Grossman is attempting to hide.
A candidate completing a full social media cleanse before running for office should raise alarm bells about what exactly they are hiding, and speaks to how broadly unpalatable she knows some of her beliefs are to voters in the present moment. Regardless of her attempted erasure, voters have a right to know her history before they head to the polls.
In Grossman’s case, her social media purge is hiding a history of sharing harmful disinformation and leveling baseless accusations against activists leading peaceful efforts to bring about an end to the genocide. These efforts have been multifaith and diverse, with a strong contingent of Jewish Vermonters saying this war is “not in our name”. Yet for three years Grossman has publicly questioned whether Jewish organizers are actually Jewish and has called local efforts to end Israel’s violence antisemitic, highlighting her inability to separate antizionism from antisemitism. In December 2023, she wrote on X: “There are multiple groups who use “Jews” and “Jewish” in their name and are largely not Jewish. Yes, folks marching and rallying with assets identifying them as Jewish to outside observers when they are not. Meanwhile the real Jewish community itself is struggling deeply.”
In frequent posts, she set herself up as the arbiter of Jewishness, defining victimhood as the key component. “Call me when your parents grew up with neighborhood kids throwing pennies at them,” she wrote. “Then you’ll be Jewish.”
Under Grossman’s leadership, Jewish Action Vermont subverted Vermont’s principles of direct democracy and Burlington’s local ordinances, which state that, at a municipal level, residents can petition for ballot questions by collecting signatures from at least 5% of registered voters. Though enough signatures were collected two years running to get the non-binding “Apartheid Free Community” measure on the city ballot twice, Grossman and her organization, among other pro-Israel organizations, successfully lobbied to have the issue deemed “too controversial” for a public vote. In January 2024, after the city council, on a party-line vote, denied the petition for the first time, she celebrated that “we won the vote to stop a toxic, antisemitic, anti-Israel…measure from being printed on every ballot in Burlington.”
On her social media accounts, Grossman has repeatedly referred to Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) efforts in our community as antisemitic and “collective punishment”. In this way, she has equated the killing and maiming of tens of thousands of Gazans with the non-violent strategy of boycotting the perpetrators of the genocide.
This false equivalency does not end here. After a horrifying and brazen “Zoom bombing” of a Burlington City Council meeting in 2024, in which the white supremacist and antisemitic organization known as the Goyim Defense League escalated its harassment campaign, including sending threatening letters to council members, Grossman seized the moment to falsely blame BDS and Apartheid-Free Communities advocates for these horrific and hateful actions. She went so far as to ludicrously and libelously claim on Reddit that “the Nazis love anti-Zionism… These are JVP’s BFFs.”
If Grossman had directly asked activists, including members of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), a US-based Jewish-led organization calling for Palestinian liberation, about the “Zoom bombing” event, instead of making such a horrific accusation, she might have understood that activists calling for BDS were similarly incensed at white supremacist hate and harassment. It is odious to suggest that calling attention to our own state and towns’ material support to Israel, using a tried and tested non-violent tactic to use economic levers to persuade a state to end harmful practices (see BDS and its use in South Africa), could be painted as colluding with and inviting the attention of a known hate group.
Would Grossman similarly believe Black civil rights activists were responsible for the KKK escalating its violence? Or blame migrant rights groups for bringing ICE to our state?
Grossman also publicly and falsely claimed on Reddit that the grassroots student movements that launched the encampments on college campuses across the country were actually financed by “gobs of cash Qatar is sending to US campuses to advocate for Hamas”. In a Jewish Action Vermont press release about the UVM encampment, she also made unsubstantiated claims of threats against Jewish UVM students during this time and stated, “…this encampment will have exactly zero impact on the war, but is already having a devastating impact on the Vermont Jewish community. Nobody here is empowered to actually negotiate on behalf of Israel and Hamas. This is activist cosplay, and it’s causing real harm.”
If she had spent time in the UVM encampments in 2024 as we did, she would have seen a strong Jewish presence among the diverse student activists that assembled themselves, a zero-tolerance policy for antisemitism, and a peaceful and joyful community that surrounded student activists with support for their righteous call for colleges and universities to divest from the war, which could actually have material impacts on Israel’s war chest, and to support the free speech of students calling to end the genocide. At the encampment, we joined students celebrating Shabbat and leading a Passover Seder. Local children helped make the seder plates and passed them out to a diverse crowd of attendees. We joined rabbinical students, rabbis, and community members of all faiths and ages in song and prayer to call for peace.
At a Democratic candidate forum in South Burlington this July, Grossman, when directly asked by a constituent about her support for Israel during the continued genocide, claimed she was attacked and lashed out, saying, “I hope that none of you ever have the experience of being defamed because of your identity.” She would reiterate this point in her subsequent fundraising appeal.
But it is not Grossman’s identity as a Jewish person that has caused many to question her beliefs and motives; it has been her words, actions, and leadership to prevent progressive activists and peaceful protesters from exercising their free speech and from deploying mechanisms to prevent our state from continuing to finance Israel’s endless wars. Grossman claims she has never supported genocide, yet she has worked hard to block local groups’ efforts to stop it, and even rallied Jewish Action Vermont members to share their concerns with Representative Becca Balint for her vote against continued military aid to Israel.
It’s a chilling prospect, especially when we consider how Vermont has been directly impacted by Israel’s genocide and the Trump administration’s crackdown on free speech, using pro-Palestine activism to push its agenda to erode constitutional rights and increase policing’s unchecked power. Three Palestinians were shot in Burlington in 2023 for wearing keffiyehs and speaking Arabic, and that case will be in the courts in September. In 2025, Moshen Mahdawi, a Vermonter, was arrested and detained by ICE. Today, he faces continued threats of imprisonment and deportation by the federal government for his leadership at the pro-Palestine encampments at Columbia University.
As Jews, we believe in repair. Tikkun Olam, the Jewish principle of our obligation to repair ongoing harm in the world at large, has been a guiding force in our lifelong social justice work. The authors of this letter believe in growth, but we also believe in repair, and repair is required when harm has been caused. It is possible that Grossman’s deletion of her previous posts and obfuscation of her previous organization’s actions and words indicate personal growth, and that would be most welcome. But it is hard to know the truth when Grossman frequently hides behind false cries of antisemitism when her position on Israel is called into question (even when those critiques come from her fellow Jews). Without clear transparency about her current position on the genocide and related repressive federal actions, acknowledgment of the harms she has caused, and yes, repair, it is difficult to know Grossman’s honest political positions. Over the last three years, has she changed her stance on Gaza and her opinions of her neighbors who stand against it, or does she hope she can hide her true agenda until she is elected to office?
In the Vermont Legislature, bills like the recent H.310 have been under consideration, which would enshrine the suppression of free speech in the name of antisemitism. This proposal has had an assist from right-wing organizations like Vermont’s Shalom Alliance and support from legislators who took a free trip to Israel during a genocide. H.310 would classify BDS and any critique of Israel as a Jewish state as antisemitism. It would further Project 2025’s plans to dismantle all social justice activism by weaponizing antisemitism. Grossman has previously voiced her support for such bills and initiatives on a local and federal level, which have codified and conflated antisemitism with antizionism, and have been used to repress the freedom of universities and further the escalating right-wing agenda to dismantle left-wing activism by accusing them of terrorism. These efforts particularly target pro-Palestine, migrant justice, racial justice, and trans rights movements. In her single-minded focus on addressing supposed antisemitism, Grossman seems to have fallen for the far-right playbook on Israel in ways that have broader implications for movements and freedoms that she claims to support.
Given the community she seeks to represent in our state and the ever-increasing unpopularity of her positions on Israel among voters, locally and globally, we must wonder: knowing the Trump administration is using Palestine as the litmus test for democratic values, will Grossman be willing to take the necessary steps to defend and protect Vermonters, social justice movements, and our institutions in this critical moment? Voters deserve to know.
Heather Benjamin lives in Burlington and is a lifelong activist who has worked across gender justice, racial justice, public health, and human rights globally and has expertise in far-right anti-democratic movements.
Burlington resident Andy Simon is a retired teacher and a member of Jewish Voice for Peace VT/NH. He has been a supporter of racial justice, free speech and liberation all his adult life.
Photo at top courtesy Town Meeting TV.
