A rabbi fired a month into her job at Emory University’s Hillel says she was dismissed over her fiancé’s criticism of Israel and pro-Palestinian activism. Hillels of Georgia, the nonprofit that runs the campus group, disputes that, saying it lost confidence in her honesty and judgment soon after she started in the role.
The rabbi, Nikki Golomb, 31, says she applied for the job in March and started at Emory on July 1, after graduating this spring from the Hebrew College rabbinical school in Massachusetts, a century-old institution that describes itself as having “a strong commitment to pluralism.” On Aug. 3, Rabbi Larry Sernovitz, the CEO of Hillels of Georgia, called her into his office in suburban Atlanta and told her she was being fired because she was in a close relationship with someone who speaks disparagingly about Israel, she said in an interview with the Forward.
When she asked which relationship he meant, Sernovitz showed her two printouts, she said: a photo of her and her fiancé, Sam Stein, and what she believes was a screengrab from one of his videos. Stein, 32, posts about settler and military violence in the West Bank to Instagram, where he has more than 59,000 followers.
She said she was fired immediately.
Her account — first reported Thursday by Jewish Currents and later picked up by the Jerusalem Post — contradicts statements from Hillels of Georgia.
In a statement posted to social media Friday, the organization said it learned shortly after her start date of “information about her personal conduct and activities that would affect her ability to fulfill the role of a spiritual and ethical advisor to Jewish students,” and that her termination was “in no way based on the activities of her fiancé.”
A new statement sent to the Forward Sunday evening goes further, accusing Golomb of “ongoing false and misleading statements.” It says Hillels of Georgia vetted her during the hiring process, reviewed her social media and found nothing “indicating a misalignment with Hillel’s mission, programmatic goals or Jewish values.” She “disclosed no potential conflicts” when asked direct questions in multiple interviews with students and staff. Shortly into her tenure, it says, “this changed dramatically,” showing she had not been “truthful or transparent.” Leadership lost confidence in her “judgment and integrity,” it says.
The statement does not say what they believe she failed to disclose. It added: “A campus rabbi must be morally above reproach and demonstrate the highest ethical behavior. Rabbi Golomb did not meet that standard and was dismissed as a result.”
Asked whether she had any reason to believe the firing wasn’t about Stein, Golomb said no. “They never mentioned anything that I did, nor did they ask me any questions,” she said on Sunday.
“I’m shocked, and I’m honestly really angry,” she added. “It’s a blatant lie, unless they fired me for reasons that they did not tell me.”
The firing occurred as American Jewish institutions debate how much room to allow for dissent about Israel, especially among younger Jews. A survey released in August found that nearly 40% of young Jewish adults have pulled back from or become more selective about participating in Jewish spaces in recent years, many citing hostile conversations or a lack of room for nuance about Israel and the Palestinians. Hebrew College, Golomb’s alma mater, said her firing “has the potential to set a dangerous precedent.”
Golomb says she signed an employment letter, not a contract, and was an at-will employee. Georgia law allows an employer to fire such an employee “with or without cause.” Her attorney, Abby Kelman, told Jewish Currents that Hillels of Georgia was within its legal rights to fire her.
A posted job description for campus rabbi at Emory — which has roughly 1,500 Jewish students — includes leading Shabbat, teaching and pastoral care, and says nothing about a staff member’s political views, though it ties Hillel’s mission to students’ “enduring connection to Jewish life and Israel.”
A long-running fight over Israel at Hillel
Hillel International, the umbrella group for campus chapters, says it is “steadfastly committed” to Israel. Its guidelines bar chapters from working with or hosting groups or speakers who deny Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state, support boycotting it, or seek to “delegitimize” it.
The same guidelines say Hillel welcomes a range of student views on Israel and objects to excluding students for their beliefs. They say nothing about staff members or their families. A Hillel International spokesperson declined to comment on the record about the Emory firing.
The rules have been contested for more than a decade. In 2013, the student board at Swarthmore College’s Hillel voted to reject the guidelines, the first chapter to do so, and Vassar’s Jewish student group followed in 2014 as part of a movement called Open Hillel.
Since the Oct. 7 attacks, Jewish professionals have described losing jobs over criticism of Israel. Maura Finkelstein, a Jewish tenured professor at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania, was fired in 2024 after sharing a pro-Palestinian post on social media.
A 2024 investigation interviewed 18 Jewish professionals at 16 organizations who said they were fired, pushed out or saw their roles disappear over criticism of Israel or support for a ceasefire, including at Hillels in Chicago and Kansas. A Hebrew teacher at an Indiana synagogue said he was fired the day after attending a pro-Palestinian rally.
Also in 2024, after 900 employees of Jewish organizations signed a letter calling for a ceasefire, some said they faced backlash from their employers. At Emory, dozens were arrested at a pro-Palestinian encampment in April 2024. Three professors who were among those arrested sued the university this spring.
Rabbi Mike Rothbaum, a Reconstructionist rabbi in San Diego who led an Atlanta congregation from 2022 to 2025, says that after Oct. 7, Emory students who were critical of Israel came to him saying they had been made to feel they would have no place in Jewish life if they voiced that criticism publicly. “Access to the Judaism we love is conditional on our acceptance of Israeli policies we don’t,” he recalled one student telling him.
A Hillel rabbi in Westchester County, N.Y., from 2006 to 2011, Rothbaum recalls that speakers there had to be Zionist, and he assumes that remains true. “What’s divisive,” he said, “is telling Jews who care about Jewish values their conversation and actually their presence are not welcome.”
Jewish leaders have acknowledged the strain. At a Jewish Federations of North America conference in November, an executive said institutions should lead with public support for Israel while creating internal spaces for honest conversation.
Jewish groups point to the rise of hostility toward Jewish students on campus since Oct. 7. The Anti-Defamation League counted 1,694 antisemitic incidents – including some acts of anti-Zionism in their count – on U.S. campuses in 2024 and 583 in 2025, a 66% drop it attributed in part to colleges addressing antisemitism, though it says the 2025 level is still nearly four times that of 2021.
From Jerusalem to Emory
Golomb was in Jerusalem on Oct. 7, 2023, spending a year at the Pardes Institute as part of her rabbinical training. On Simchat Torah, she was getting ready to walk to services with her roommate when the sirens sounded. Their phones were turned off for the holiday, so they ducked into the nearest shelters without knowing why. It wasn’t until the third or fourth siren, she said, that someone checking his phone told them the country was “at war with Gaza.”
Shortly after the attack, she said, she joined Rabbis for Ceasefire, a group of rabbis calling for an end to the fighting. “I was witness to a lot of deep pain and suffering from both Israelis and Palestinians,” she said. “I am a big believer in peace, and I believed, and I still believe, that a ceasefire is the best and safest option for Palestinians and for Israelis and for Jews around the world.”
Her name was on the group’s public member list on its website before she applied for the Emory job. Asked Sunday if he was aware of this when Hillel hired Golomb, Sernovitz replied, “As far as vetting goes, we used the information we had at the time.”
Golomb says her relationships with both critics and supporters of Israel make her better suited to campus work. “I think the ability to be in a relationship with people who share different views is an asset,” she said.
Golomb and Stein met in September 2023 in Israel at Pardes, where he was also studying. She stayed in Israel until May 2024. From August 2024 to April 2025, Stein worked as a field coordinator in the West Bank for Rabbis for Human Rights, which brings volunteers, mostly Jewish, into Palestinian communities facing settler violence. The practice is called protective presence. The idea, Stein said, is that outsiders’ presence discourages attacks, and if violence happens, they document it. (Mike Huckabee, the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, called the latest attack in the West Bank by settlers a “despicable act of terror,” which left a Washington Post photographer hospitalized for days.)
Stein said it felt horrible that he could be the reason Golomb was fired. “It made me feel like a liability as a partner, like someone that brings trouble,” he said Sunday from the West Bank, where he is helping Palestinian farmers with the fall olive harvest. “Just as a human being, it made me feel like a pariah. It made me feel like a dirty little secret that has to be hid.”
What’s next
Golomb is now job-hunting in Atlanta, a city she moved to for a job she held for a month. She said she has not heard from Hillels of Georgia since going public. After two months of negotiating through her lawyer, she said, the organization offered six weeks’ severance, up from an initial offer of two weeks, and declined to extend her health insurance. She turned down the offer.
Since moving to Atlanta, Stein has been driving for Lyft “to kind of just stay busy and make a tiny bit of money,” he said, while looking for more work. He is due back from the olive harvest in mid-November.
“If we’re able to stay in Atlanta, that would be wonderful,” Golomb said.
“We want to make it work, quite frankly,” Stein said, “because moving sucks.”
They plan to marry next summer.
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