Gabrielle Lord

In January 1997, Senator Cory Booker LAW ’97, Noah Feldman LAW ’97, Ben Karp ’95, Michael Alexander GRD ’99 and Rabbi Shmully Hecht gathered in apartment 5Q of the Taft Apartments for the inaugural meeting of the Chai Society. Now known as Shabtai, the Chai Society’s intention upon its founding was to serve Yale’s community as an “open” leadership society for discourse and debate. While informed by Jewish values imparted by co-founder Hecht, the Society’s stated goal was to be a space welcoming to all religions and perspectives.

Today, despite being primarily composed of Yale students and faculty, Shabtai has no official affiliation with Yale. Still, its proximity to Yale’s campus — the organization’s current home is the historic John C. Anderson Mansion on 442 Orange St. — and the nature of its student-focused outreach have forged strong ties between Shabtai and Yale’s community.

These ties have, in recent years, mired both Rabbi Shmully Hecht and Yale in controversy. This week, Shabtai invited right-wing Israeli politician Itamar Ben-Gvir to speak at the Anderson Mansion, sparking protests across Yale’s campus and outside the Shabtai mansion on Wednesday.

Today, Shabtai’s notable affiliates and alumni include Booker, former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy LAW ’13 and political strategist Nicolas Muzin LAW ’05. Yale professors and administrators like professor Timothy Snyder, professor Jed Rubenfeld, Dean of Yale College Pericles Lewis and Sterling professor Robert Post have spoken at Shabtai events and participated in its weekly dinners. 

In recent years, Shabtai has expanded to a global scale, operating chapters in Tel Aviv, New York, Boston, Washington and Chicago. However, its proximate relationship to Yale continues to define its organizational proceedings and external outreach, which poses the question: where is the line drawn between Shabtai as an independent organization and Yale as an institution?

Tracing Shabtai’s origins

In September 1996, Hecht moved to New Haven. Fresh out of rabbinical school in Australia, Hecht said he came to the Elm City with a “dream of doing Jewish outreach at Yale.” Raised within the framework of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement — a branch of Orthodox Judaism that champions outreach to all Jews, regardless of religious observance — Hecht said he arrived with a vision of creating a “leadership society” with a “strong Jewish anchor.” 

“I grew up in the largest rabbinical family in the world, in a household where we were taught by the Rebbe that the most important thing a person could do was to educate Jews about their Judaism, about the Jewish people, Jewish culture and Jewish civilization,” Hecht told the News. “I came to New Haven because I had family here, but also because I wanted to spend my life on a college campus with intelligent people who changed the world.”

On his very first day in New Haven, Hecht met student Karp in the nave of Sterling Memorial Library. The two connected immediately, quickly realizing that they shared similar goals of creating a Jewish society on Yale’s campus. 

Karp recruited close friend Alexander, whom Hecht jokingly referred to as “Mickey Bones,” to help flesh out the idea. Neither Karp nor Alexander could be reached for comment.

The three began reaching out to other potential interested students, including law students Feldman and Booker, who both had just returned from studying abroad at Oxford. Notably, during their time in England, Feldman and Booker were involved with the L’Chaim Society, an organization that functioned very similarly to Hecht and Karp’s vision of a Jewish society at Yale.

Feldman, now Felix Frankfurter professor of law at Harvard University, said he believed it was his and Booker’s connections to L’Chaim and his “close relationship” to Shmuley Boteach, a Chabad rabbi who led L’Chaim, that made them ideal partners to kickstart what would come to be the Chai Society at Yale.

By late fall 1996, the group regularly met at a local bar to brainstorm ideas for the development and progression of the newly coined Chai Society — named for the Hebrew word for “life.” 

To Hecht, the founders’ initial vision was to cultivate a space that operated outside of the “secret society” paradigm that defined Yale’s social scene at the time. Hecht was set on this goal, despite having no personal ties to the University.

“Contrary to the private clubs, the secret societies at Yale, which were members only, our ambition was to totally change the notion of a society into a space where the members’ responsibility and privilege was to bring the world together,” Hecht said.

In January 1997, the five co-founders met in New York to sign a rental lease for apartment 5Q in the Taft, which would become Shabtai’s first official headquarters in New Haven. 

That same month, the society hosted its first meeting, a Friday night Shabbat dinner. The five founders and several of their close friends were in attendance. By May, though, there was no longer enough room in the apartment to accommodate the number of people who wanted to attend Shabbat dinners and “have serious conversations for hours,” Hecht said.

Shabtai’s growth and evolution

With the end of that spring 1997 semester, however, came Feldman and Booker’s graduation from Yale. In 1999, Alexander also graduated. As its initial founders went forth into the professional world, Hecht remained in New Haven to continue building the organization alongside his wife and co-director, Toby Hecht, who joined him in New Haven in 1997.

In those early years, under the Hechts’ sole leadership, came subtle shifts in the organization’s identity. 

First, to accommodate more attendees for society events, the Hechts bought a new headquarters building on Crown Street. Second, following pressure from alumni funders to incorporate a Yale-specific marker of “Eli” into its name, the Chai Society renamed itself to Eliezer in the early 2000s.

Alongside the traditional structure of Shabbat dinners, the Hechts also began to invite speakers to present their ideas to the community, a practice which continues to define the society today. 

The organization’s proceedings also became more markedly religious after the original founders’ departure. Weekly Torah and Talmud readings began to accompany Shabbat dinners and speaker events. 

In 2010, then-law student Ramaswamy, who ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, began attending Eliezer events and forged a close relationship with Hecht. He has since cited Hecht as one of his “closest friends alive” and continues to herald the organization as an essential influence in his personal and professional development.

A spokesperson for Ramaswamy wrote to the News that Ramaswamy and his wife Apoorva Ramaswamy “fondly remember their great times at Shabtai attending the Shabbat dinners animated by spirited discussions that often went late into the night and cemented new friendships that have lasted for years.” 

In 2014, Eliezer encountered a definitive turning point as an organization. Benny Shabtai, an Israeli businessman mired in controversy due to accusations of an alleged relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, donated $1.7 million to endow the group. 

Hecht explained that Shabtai was a “longtime friend” of his who “understood the importance of having a Jewish presence in different pockets of the world.” Hecht added that Shabtai was very intrigued by what he was building at Yale for the Jewish community.

Benny Shabtai affirmed this statement in an interview with the News, stating that he met Hecht when the rabbi was only 13 years old. Hecht “came to his office every Friday to put tefillin” on him, Shabtai said. 

“I was really not as religious before him as I was after, and Shmully inspired me to be more deep in the religion and in the Jewish faith,” Shabtai said of Hecht. “That’s why when he reached the age of 22, he gave me the initial idea of what he wanted to do, I definitely supported it.”

Shabtai financed the Hechts sporadically throughout the initial stages of the Chai Society and Eliezer’s growth, but he decided to make his $1.7 million donation in 2014 to ensure that the organization could thrive in a larger space.

His donation effectuated the name change of Eliezer to the Shabtai family name “as a token of our appreciation of their gift,” Hecht said. The donation allowed the Hechts to buy a new property for the society — the Anderson Mansion on Orange Street, built in 1882 and listed in the National Registry of Historic Places.

The relationship between Benny Shabtai and the Shabtai society, though, grew tense with time. Indeed, in July of 2019, Benny Shabtai alleged in a federal lawsuit against Shabtai Inc. that the terms of his donation had been violated and that his funds had been “misapplied.”

Benny Shabtai stated in the complaint that the original terms of his donation mandated that Hecht complete the following tasks: purchase and renovate the Anderson Mansion, rename the LLC from Eliezer Inc. to Shabtai Inc., designate the Mansion as “Beit Shabtai,” vote Benny Shabtai in as a trustee of the organization and raise an additional $16.5 million to renovate the Orange Street property and endow Shabtai Inc. He alleged that Hecht had failed to uphold the agreement by improperly renovating the property and by failing to name Benny Shabtai as a trustee of the organization.

But just one month later, in August 2019, Benny Shabtai withdrew the lawsuit. According to a New Haven Register article, Hecht shared in a statement at the time that he and other directors of Shabtai Inc. were “extremely puzzled as to why Mr. Shabtai filed suit against his eponymous institution to begin with,” but were glad to see the suit withdrawn.

When asked about the lawsuit, Benny Shabtai told the News that he filed it because “the building had been completely empty for many years,” while he had bought it for the students to move there.

“I wanted to push it a little bit,” Shabtai said. “And everything worked out, everyone’s happy now.”

Hecht did not comment on the lawsuit to the News. However, when asked about Benny Shabtai’s continued involvement with Shabtai Inc., Hecht shared that his named affiliation with Shabtai would preserve his contributions to the organization indefinitely.

“The living legacy of the Shabtai family, from my perspective, will be the institution,” Hecht said. “I believe it’s a permanent name for the organization.”

Expanding beyond Yale

By the time of Shabtai’s renaming in 2014, the organization had created a cohesive community at Yale and forged a strong alumni network. As more students began to graduate, taking their connections to Shabtai with them into the real world, alumni began to host Shabtai-affiliated events in various hub cities.

“We were always very centered on campus, but we started to do different events if there were interested alumni in Israel, Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, or in New York,” Hecht said. “But it wasn’t a system — it was just more sporadic, and we were very, very busy on campus.”

Hecht soon realized there weren’t many spaces like Shabtai outside of New Haven.

It was at a 2018 Hanukkah alumni event in New York that Hecht began to reflect on how Shabtai could more effectively connect its graduates to each other and current members. 

Ramaswamy, who was in attendance, offered to host the next Shabtai event, which he did the following summer in his apartment in New York. 

“Right away, it was different,” Hecht said. “They had decided that they were going to do something more serious or intellectual and kind of create a real conversation with people invited, from different times and affiliation with the institution who all came together. You could instantly see that this was something that was a platform to springboard future events of that kind in New York and elsewhere.”

Ramaswamy’s salon continued to host organized Shabtai events in New York, while other alumni began to establish concentrated Shabtai chapters in Chicago, Washington, Boston and Tel Aviv.

As a result, for the past six years, the organization has marketed itself not only as a Yale-adjacent group, but also as a “global leadership society.”

Shabtai today

Today, Shabtai continues to operate as both salon and society, hosting a wide range of speakers at the Anderson Mansion for weekly dinners open to invited members of the Yale community. Every year, eight Yale seniors are also chosen as official “members” of the organization, a position that ensures them guaranteed invitation to each of Shabtai’s events.

Typically, Hecht said, about half of these eight members are Jewish, while the other half are not.

Trevor MacKay ’25 is a senior at Yale and a current member of Shabtai. A self-identified Christian, MacKay said that despite the fact that he is not Jewish, he has “been welcomed by a Jewish institution with open arms,” which he said “speaks to the power of what Shabtai has to offer.”

“Every Shabbat dinner is spiritually significant to me,” MacKay said. “I’m Christian, and I don’t go to church every Sunday, but I think of myself as a religious person, and I think that I’ve been able to share spiritual moments of reflection and quietness in the space of Shabtai.”

Simultaneously, for some Jewish students, Shabtai’s reimagining of a Jewish space has allowed them to connect more with their religious identity. Carolyne Newman ’22 continues to remember Shabtai as an essential component of her time at Yale and her connection with Judaism.

“The organizations that I felt really connected to at Yale prior to Shabtai were predominantly focused on robotics and computer science and the sorority I was in,” Newman said. “I always had a very strong connection to my Jewish identity, but it wasn’t really religious, and it wasn’t really spiritual. It was mostly cultural.”

Newman was introduced to Shabtai by two friends during her junior year at Yale. She said that her first time attending, she was struck by the depth of conversation, the welcoming nature of the space and the visceral experience of bringing “the total honesty of yourself” to the Shabbat dinner table, she said.

“I identify so much more with my Jewish identity after being a member of Shabtai,” Newman said. “Now I really care about being Jewish and wanting to spend time with Jewish people and learning about what it means to be Jewish because I’m so moved and inspired by the values of Judaism that I learned about through Shabtai.”

According to Toby Hecht, Shabtai operates within the “Jewish value system” in “a home of Jewish law,” but prides itself on its openness to all “who are curious and looking to find their purpose.” 

How does Shabtai fit in with other Jewish spaces at Yale?

Shabtai’s position as a Jewish-informed space has drawn comparisons between it and other Jewish student spaces on campus, like Chabad at Yale and the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life. When asked about the relationship between Shabtai and these spaces, Hecht emphasized that Shabtai is distinct in its “relative privacy,” because it “allows people to speak most openly without fear of judgment.” 

Hecht, in fact, founded Chabad at Yale in 2002. He said that his then-goal with Chabad at Yale was to foster a similar community to the one he had created at Shabtai, yet in a more open manner.

“Shabtai was not going to have the room to entertain the number of students needed,” Hecht said. “Chabad was going to be a more open space, so we started it and then we gave it its autonomy to run the way other Chabad houses run on campuses.”

Rabbi Meir C. Posner, the current director of Chabad at Yale, clarified this relationship, stating that Hecht was “instrumental in establishing Chabad at Yale, but does not have any present involvement in the organization.” 

“Chabad at Yale and Shabtai have no affiliation with each other,” Posner wrote to the News. “Chabad centers, including Chabad at Yale, are recognized and sanctioned by Merkos L’Inyonei Chinuch and operate under the auspices of Chabad regional headquarters; to my knowledge, Shabtai is not recognized as, and does not hold itself out as, a Chabad center.”

In regards to the society’s relationship with Slifka, Hecht re-emphasized the value of Shabtai’s relative privacy in comparison to the larger “cafeteria” of Slifka, he said.

“We want to be to Slifka what the Lizzie is to the English department,” Hecht said, referring to the Elizabethan Club, a private literary club at Yale that functions on an invitation-only basis.

For Hecht, the line between Slifka and Shabtai can be drawn along a public versus private paradigm. But campus Jewish life leaders like David Sorkin, professor of Jewish intellectual history in Yale’s history department, emphasize that such a distinction is built on a faulty premise. 

“I think the thing to keep in mind is, Slifka is the official center for Jewish life at Yale, and it’s pluralist. It includes groups from the right to the left in terms of politics, in terms of religious observance, in terms of attitudes towards Jewish life in Israel, Jewish politics, et cetera,” Sorkin said. “It’s not as if there isn’t room for diversity among Jewish students on campus or non-Jewish students who happen to take an interest in some issue related to Jewish life without Shabtai.”

Sorkin, an affiliate of Slifka, has, in fact, declined multiple invitations to speak at Shabtai. He characterized Shabtai as a “one-man institution” and described Hecht’s involvement in Shabtai as “dictatorial.” He cited a particular instance in which a female colleague of his, an expert on American Jewish history, felt “mistreated and disrespected” at a speaker event at Shabtai.

“Shmully disagreed with her,” Sorkin said. “She’s an expert on American Jewish history and has strong views on Israel, and he shouted at her.”

Hecht wrote to the News that he had “no idea” of the incident Sorkin described.

Sorkin also emphasized the fact that Yale and Shabtai bear no official affiliation to one another as motivation for his distance from the organization.

“There’s no supervision by the University,” Sorkin said. “You see this with the Ben-Gvir invitation, that he [Hecht] is trading on the fact of being at Yale without really being a part of Yale.”

A struggle between institutions

Sorkin’s reflections echo a larger reality. Hecht’s mission to create a Yale-affiliated society is so complete that Shabtai’s organizational acts are seen as associated with Yale as an institution. Simultaneously, Shabtai’s continued outreach thrives off of marketing itself as a Yale-based society.

In operating a structure that feeds off of continued participation from Yale students, alumni and faculty, Shabtai’s identity has fused itself with Yale.

Recent events, like the invitation of far-right Israeli minister Itamar Ben-Gvir to speak at Shabtai in New Haven — as well as at Shabtai chapters in New York and Washington — have therefore drawn backlash against the University itself. 

On Wednesday, protests outside of Shabtai’s Anderson Mansion included signs calling out Yale for inviting the Israeli minister to speak. A spokesperson for Shabtai, though, clarified at the protests that the event had no affiliation with Yale.

However, the event was primarily attended by Yale-affiliated Shabtai members, including approximately 100 Yale students and 30 faculty members.

The Yale administration did not reply to requests for comment on this story. 

Simultaneously, on a larger scale, events like Ben-Gvir’s talk speak to wider concerns regarding the gradual politicization of Shabtai. Since the event was announced, former members of Shabtai have spoken out against the society’s decision to invite Ben-Gvir to speak.

Two Shabtai members, including David Vincent Kimel, the coach of the Yale Debate Team, sent an email to a Shabtai listserv protesting the invitation. “Shabtai was founded as a space for fearless, pluralistic Jewish discourse,” the letter stated. “But this event jeopardizes Shabtai’s reputation and very future.”

“I’m deeply concerned that we’re increasingly treating extreme rhetoric as just another viewpoint, rather than recognizing it as a distortion of constructive discourse,” Kimel said in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Co-founder of Shabtai Noah Feldman echoed these sentiments.

“Shabtai has undergone many transformations over the last 30 years, and especially, I would say over the last ten and even in the last two, it’s become more sophisticated in its politics and more overtly politicized,” Feldman said.

Shabtai members like Matt Beck LAW ‘25, though, contend that this “politicization” is, in fact, simply inviting “diversity of thought.”

“When politicians come to speak, they represent … a wide range of perspectives,” Beck said. “Students who attend … come from every corner of the campus and represent the full spectrum of political identities, all united by a shared commitment to free speech and rigorous, respectful dialogue.”

As Shabtai continues to cultivate its own independent identity and host speaker events for the Yale community, its relationship to Yale as an institution merits clarification. 

January 2026 will mark the 29th anniversary of Shabtai’s founding.