• File: James Buck
• Celebrating the original Burlington Pride Parade at last year's event

Last year, Leah Wittenberg was a grand marshal of Burlington's Pride Parade. She cofounded the annual celebration of gay culture in 1983, when just 300 or so people marched through the Queen City.

This year, though, as thousands of people prepare to gather in Burlington on Sunday, September 8, Wittenberg said she feels like persona non grata with the Pride Center of Vermont, the organization that puts on the parade. For the last several months, she and a contingent of queer Jews say they have been ignored, silenced and sidelined by the Burlington-based nonprofit. Three Jewish members of the center's seven-person board have resigned.

The schism stems from a statement the organization's staff released in December — without consulting the board — about the war in Gaza. The statement, which was posted on the center's website and social media pages, featured a Palestinian flag and called for a ceasefire while condemning the "ongoing assault on Palestine." The statement, headlined "No Pride For Some of Us Without Liberation For All of Us," did not mention Israel.

"Our commitment to anti-oppression extends to all corners of the world and to all people being harmed by the myriad manifestations of the violence of colonialism and white supremacy," the statement said. "As we know from our own history, silence = death," it added, referencing a slogan from the AIDS epidemic during the 1980s and '90s.

When three board members — and, separately, Wittenberg — asked the center's executive director, Phoebe Zorn, to meet to discuss the post, Zorn refused or did not respond, they said. They thought the statement oversimplified the conflict and noted that it made no mention of the 250 hostages taken during Hamas' surprise attack on Israel on October 7 that killed 1,200 people. And they believe the political statement marked an inappropriate departure from the mission of the center, which was founded in 1999 as an LGBTQ community center originally called RU12?.

Wittenberg, 73, acknowledged that there is a wide spectrum of perspectives among American Jews on the war in Gaza. While some wholeheartedly support Israel, in Vermont and elsewhere, some Jews have been among the most demonstrative opponents of the war. As the Holocaust and the creation of Israel as a Jewish state in 1948 slip further into history, she said she recognizes a generational divide in the way many view the current conflict. But the center's failure to engage with the board and community before or after the statement went out, Wittenberg said, flies in the face of the inclusivity that the Pride Center preaches. She said that all she hopes for is peace — abroad and at home.

"We're living in such a polarized time that I wanted our Pride Center to be able to provide the kind of leadership that would bring us together, not divide us further," Wittenberg said. "If there's a complicated and divisive issue, [the executive director's] job is to put your own feelings aside a little bit and say, 'How do I support all these differences in a way that we can make a center?'"

The rift demonstrates how the war in Gaza has fractured institutions in the U.S. — nonprofits, universities and philanthropic organizations — and touched even left-leaning ones meant to provide welcoming spaces for marginalized people. The LGBTQ movement has hardly been above the fray: Placards declaring "Queers for Palestine" are not uncommon at peace demonstrations, while supporters of Israel have long pointed to certain legal protections afforded gay and transgender people in that country as evidence of its tolerance, compared to the rest of the Middle East.

Caryn Olivetti and Daniel Zeese, who were the cochairs of the Pride Center's board, and another Jewish board member, Wendy Beinner, were shocked by the post. All resigned in March.

"The staff decided we have a policy now of supporting Palestine, and that's what that post is," Beinner said. "And staff don't have the authority to make policy decisions that should have gone to the board."

Wittenberg ultimately met with Zorn of the Pride Center in May — about five months after the statement was released — and the dispute died down. But it could flare up again at this weekend's festivities. Rabbi David Edleson, who is gay, said members of his congregation at Temple Sinai in South Burlington would like to march in the Pride Parade while waving Israeli pride flags: the Star of David with rainbows on the borders. The plan depends on recruiting enough marchers to feel safe, Edleson said. He expects other groups will be carrying pro-Palestinian signs or messaging.

"We felt that we were not going to be sidelined by this, and we have an obligation to speak out for what our beliefs are — including those that are supportive of Israel — and that's what we've decided to do," Edleson said.

Edleson, 63, noted that the post made no mention of Hamas, the armed Islamist group that controls Gaza, whose fighters are accused by Israel of using civilians as human shields. Consensual same-sex conduct is outlawed in Gaza, and LGBTQ life exists out of public view, as in much of the Arab world.

"The desire to boil it down to, Israelis are colonizers and Palestinians are oppressed indigenous people, is ridiculous and not helpful," Edleson said. He said he was offended by the center's post and considers it antisemitic.

• File: James Buck
• Leah Wittenberg, left, at the 2023 Pride Parade

Zorn initially agreed to an interview with Seven Days, then canceled and provided emailed statements.

"We feel that our post calling for a ceasefire in Palestine was not anti-Semitic," she wrote. "We feel that supporting Palestine and being against anti-Semitism go hand-in-hand, because all systems of oppression reinforce one another, and that speaking out against all kinds of oppression is in clear alignment with our values as an organization."

The resignations of Olivetti and Zeese, Zorn wrote, were at the behest of the center's staff and related to "ongoing patterns of harm" that "far predated" the Palestine post.

"The Center's staff take pride in decision making that is guided by our core values and equitable processes, rather than individual viewpoints," Zorn wrote. "As we approach Pride Week, we see the heightened attention to this matter as an important opportunity to reaffirm our commitment to inclusivity, even amidst challenging conversations."

Zorn noted that "symbols of all kinds of ethnic/religious identities have always been welcomed at Pride and will continue to be.

"We are confident that Pride will continue to be a place that is welcoming and affirming to all members of the LGBTQ+ community, despite possible differences of opinion," she wrote.

Olivetti, 70, joined the board in summer 2021, shortly after retiring from her career as a middle school counselor in South Burlington. A departing member of the Pride Center board recruited her to join, and Olivetti, who had cofounded a queer-straight alliance at her school, thought it would be a great fit.

"I loved the opportunity of helping support the pride community," Olivetti said.

When she started, she said, broader tensions and mistrust existed between the board and staff members over earlier incidents she described as racially charged. She declined to elaborate, citing confidentiality.

One of the center's biggest recent challenges arose in February 2023, when its executive director left. The board struggled to hire a new one and was unsuccessful until it elevated Zorn to the role in November 2023. She'd begun working at the center three years before.

"We could not be more appreciative of Phoebe's continued commitment to this organization and her eagerness to collaborate on shaping this role and the center as a whole," Olivetti and Zeese said in a press release announcing her hire.

Around the same time, staff started to use a version of "2STLGBQ+" in some official communications instead of "LGBTQ+." 2S stands for "two-spirit" and is a phrase that encompasses a wide range of gender identities in some Native American cultures. The board was left out of that decision, too, the former members said.

Less than a month after Zorn was hired, the Palestine post was published.

Olivetti quickly got on the phone with Zeese, her board cochair.

"We were shocked they didn't even discuss it with us," Olivetti said.

Olivetti said she emailed Zorn and respectfully requested a meeting. The executive director told Olivetti she felt "unsafe" having such a talk — something Zorn confirmed to Seven Days, without providing examples of why she had felt that way.

Zorn told Seven Days that she also put off Wittenberg because the center needed to "move through the conflict resolution process internally before responding to" her concerns.

With matters at a standstill, the sides hired a conversation "facilitator" who could help the board and staff "learn to respectfully communicate around difficult issues and build conflict resolution processes," according to Zorn. There were three sessions: one for staff, one for the board, and one for both. Discussion of the Palestine post, before and during the sessions, was off-limits by order of the facilitator, according to Olivetti, Zeese and Beinner. The three were surprised because that was the most urgent and recent example of a communication problem.

At one session, the facilitator asked how many board members were Jewish, which Olivetti and Zeese said they found concerning. At another, held on Zoom, Beinner said the facilitator repeatedly muted her. A staff member, meanwhile, said that "other generations need to leave the board," according to Olivetti.

"It was supposed to be about building trust and communication, but we didn't," said Beinner, 61. "All it did was inflame things."

According to Zeese, the facilitator's notes from the sessions, provided later to participants, said that the board members "needed to heal our ancestral traumas as Jewish people" and suggested a workshop to do so.

Shortly afterward, on March 5, five staff members signed a letter — which made no mention of the rift over Gaza — asking Olivetti and Zeese to resign. The missive accused the board cochairs of "ongoing unacceptable behavior and lack of accountability" and various "harms" to staff and the organization: "persistent ongoing misgendering of staff and community members, racial and gender-based microaggressions, and a repeatedly demonstrated tendency to respond to constructive feedback with denial and increasingly inappropriate and dismissive responses."

Olivetti said she'd never felt so disrespected. She admitted to having accidentally misgendered people — then immediately correcting herself and apologizing — but said the rest of the accusations were untrue. She and Zeese said they felt that the letter blamed them for broader, long-standing issues at the center, without providing any specific examples of things they'd done wrong — or the opportunity to discuss them.

The letter felt "really charged with scapegoating a lot of issues that the center was going through on the Jewish board members who were asked to leave," Zeese told Seven Days.

Still, they both chose to resign.

"If I'm going to volunteer for an organization, I want to be at an organization that is willing to hear different points of view and operate from a place of kindness," Olivetti said. "This was not what was happening there. So I left because it wasn't a healthy place for me to be."

Said Olivetti, "I felt stereotyped. I experienced ageism. I experienced antisemitism. And they did not acknowledge any of that."

• File: James Buck
• At Pride 2023

Beinner, who had joined the board in winter 2018, left shortly afterward.

"I am not exaggerating when I write that I'm terrified and devastated that antisemitism has infiltrated our queer organization," she wrote to Zorn in her resignation letter, which she provided to Seven Days. "The public post sends a clear message to the Vermont community and beyond that Pride Center is now anti-Jewish and no longer welcomes Jewish queer folx."

None of the former board members plan to march in the Pride Parade.

Along with Temple Sinai, members of another local synagogue, Ohavi Zedek in Burlington, plan to participate. The Ohavi Zedek board consulted about the issue with a national organization, A Wider Bridge, that says it works "to fight antisemitism and support Israel and its LGBTQ community."

"Through this process we decided to march at the parade as a demonstration of our support for LGBTQ+ rights and individuals," Ohavi Zedek board member Lynda Siegel said in a statement. "We have also sought to work with Burlington's Pride organizers towards prioritizing safety for all who participate."

Zeese, 36, said they didn't know whether they would ever be "totally done" with the Pride Center, even after the dispute. Zeese is executive director of another nonprofit, Burlington's Frog Hollow Craft Association.

Before joining the Pride Center board in December 2022, Zeese had signed up to give the organization a small, recurring, monthly donation that was automatically pulled from their bank account. Shortly after resigning, though, Zeese noted something strange: Someone had canceled it.

"So," Zeese said, "now I guess I'm totally done."