On the False Accusation of Antisemitism, the Evidence That Refutes It, and the Institutional Silence That Followed

The Statement That Should Not Have Been Necessary

On the Unsupported Accusation of Antisemitism, the Evidence That Refutes It, and the Institutional Silence That Followed

By John F. Sendelbach · Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts · May 2026

There is a polished stone bench on the hill above Buckland, in the cemetery that looks out over the Deerfield River valley. I made it. A local Jewish woman named Susan Garfield Wright had commissioned stone sculptures from me when I first arrived in this area, pieces for her husband Michael that stayed in the home they shared throughout her life. After Susan died, her husband and daughters came to me with an intimate request: would I move large stones from their property to the cemetery on the hill, and polish one into a bench in her memory? They wanted it designed to receive a bronze plaque that would tell her story. A permanent marker, in the place where she rested. I did it. The bench is there. Anyone can go see it.

When I was finishing the installation, Amazing Grace played on the chimes in the bell tower of the church nearby. I had never heard it before, not live, not in that context. The sound came across the hilltop while I was working the stone, and I stopped. It was one of the most moving experiences I have had in thirty-five years of this work. A Jewish family, a polished stone, a cemetery on a hill, and Amazing Grace coming through the air over all of it. I did not plan for that. It happened.

I mention this not as sentiment but as evidence. Because in the summer of 2020, in a public Facebook comment thread that reached twenty-two thousand people, a woman named Janice Sorenson published the following statement as settled fact:

"I 'unfriended' him years ago when Jewish people were his target of choice. And yet something does not feel completely right about planning his full demise."

~ Janice Sorenson

This vile accusation arrived at the two-thirds mark of a comment thread, one of many threads, that had already spent hundreds of comments dehumanizing me, ripping my career and reputation from its foundations, calling me a KKK member, a child predator, a woman harasser, a racist bigot, and someone channeling the Grand Wizard. Rhonda Anderson, Western Mass Commissioner for Native American Affairs — a state-appointed position paid by Massachusetts taxpayers — called me an 'unhinged conspiracy theorist', ignoring the pure irony that she was participating in a conspiracy to defame, joined by dozens of people. Michael Hoberman, who would later endorse the antisemitism charge on a public street, draws a state salary as a professor at Fitchburg State University. Both of the individuals who lent institutional authority to this smear campaign are paid by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. All for questioning an unannounced street closure that blocked my business access.

No evidence was offered. No incident was documented. No direct quote was cited. No witness was named. The statement arrived as a verified conclusion to twenty-two thousand people, as though it were common knowledge, resulting in immediate economic and reputational damage. The bench on the Buckland hilltop is the most compact refutation of that statement that exists in physical form. It is not the only one.

What the Record Shows

An accusation of antisemitism carries severe social and economic consequences in the progressive community of western Massachusetts. It functions as an immediate barrier in the arts community, the academic world, the nonprofit networks, and the civic spaces where commissions originate. It travels faster than any correction can. Therefore, the material counter-record must be stated plainly against unverified online claims:

In 2002, I aligned the Sojourner Truth memorial plaques in Florence, Massachusetts, drilling the anchor holes by hand in slanted granite, public art installed quietly eighteen years before the current local focus on the language of identity.

In 2011, I designed the Pothole Fountain at the Bridge of Flowers with mason Paul Forth. Forth had two biracial daughters. His partner's design vision included polished stones shaped to the African continent, permanently embedded in the entrance fountain's stone inlay as a tribute to those daughters. I approved and he executed that design. Those stones were in the ground nine years before a petition alleged racial bias. When the Bridge of Flowers Committee installed an anti-racism plaque in June 2020, they placed it three feet from this installation without acknowledging its history.

A local Jewish man commissioned a sephirot from me, the Kabbalistic Tree of Life in polished stone, to display his raw emerald collection. I built a functional bench on Bridge Street in direct collaboration with Muhammad Yaseen, a Palestinian man whose family has members currently sheltering in Gaza.

                      

Key figures embedded in the institutions that local social media riled up, some who are themselves Jewish: Joan Livingston, the former editor-in-chief of the Greenfield Recorder who presided over the articles regarding the campaign against me; Joanne Soroka, the longest-serving member of the Bridge of Flowers Committee; Annette Szpila, Bridge Committee Chair, Kay Berenson, detractor, holder of secret BOFC Zoom meetings, former publisher and website founder for the Recorder, and Zachary Livingston, the neutral eyewitness whose sworn statement remains central to the criminal prosecution of my attackers. One of my oldest and closest friends, a Jewish man, taught me my first guitar chords thirty-five years ago.

Who Made the Accusation, and Who Endorsed It

Janice Sorenson lives in Buckland with her partner, Michael Hoberman, Ph.D. Michael Hoberman is a Professor of English at Fitchburg State University, where he has taught since 2001, specializing in Jewish American history, literature, and regional folklore. He is a Fulbright Scholar, co-chairs the Buckland Planning Board, writes for Tablet Magazine, and has books published by Rutgers University Press and Oxford University Press.

He is, by any measure, a highly credentialed regional authority on Jewish American experience and history. His professional focus is the documentation of Jewish identity, the history of bias, and what constitutes historical evidence. Yet, he endorsed the baseline accusation against me on a public street without having ever spoken a single word to me in his life.

The June 2023 Confrontation

Three years after Sorenson's comment, I saw her cycling past barrel obstructions on Conway Street. I asked her to come back and talk. She agreed, riding back approximately a hundred feet to my car. This was the first time I had seen her since June 2020. When I asked her why she published that statement, she claimed she could not remember it. I filled her in on the exact quote. As words ensued, I got out of my car to talk on level ground, my neck was turned sideways leaning out the window to speak. She interpreted my movement as an escalation. She dropped her bike, rushed toward me from ten feet away, and closed to within twelve inches of my face with her fists clenched.

Michael Hoberman intervened physically to force her back by her elbows. As he turned his head toward me, he stated: "You are an antisemite." I replied: "You just assaulted me." She shouted: "I didn't touch you." Then they left.

That same day, I filed a formal police report with Sergeant Budrewicz and sent a letter of intent to sue for defamation and civil assault under M.G.L. c. 265 §1A. I stated a settlement demand of one hundred thousand dollars, explicitly noting a willingness to waive financial damages if formal apology letters were published in the Greenfield Recorder and the Daily Hampshire Gazette. Neither the criminal police report nor the civil demand letter produced any response. No investigation, no cross-examination, no reply.

The Contradiction in the Professional Record

The contradiction practiced by Michael Hoberman is documented in his own public and institutional record. In a February 27, 2026, interview with the University of Pennsylvania's Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, Hoberman detailed his scholarly focus: "how people shape their cultural lives and sense of collective meaning through their relationships to the physical geography that surrounds them." He claims an expertise in reading how identity is carved into terrain. Yet when confronted with a 35-year material record of public art carved into the physical geography of Franklin County by his own neighbor, he bypasses the material landscape in his immediate vicinity to validate an unverified digital comment.

The gap between his academic framework and civic behavior is distinct. In that same 2026 interview, Hoberman warned against reducing complex human encounters to a single flat accusation of bigotry, stating that doing so is "just not particularly interesting. It would be one more story we’ve all heard before too many times." Within his academic fellowship, Hoberman demands textual nuance and warns against reducing history to quick labels. But on June 14, 2023, on a public sidewalk on Conway Street, he abandoned that standard, bypassing evidence entirely to resort to a direct, unverified label. This pattern exists alongside his public roles. On September 26, 2024, at the Sunderland Public Library, Hoberman delivered a public lecture entitled "Only In America: Anti-Semitism," standing before a local audience to define the historical patterns of bias, what evidence looks like, and how communities polarize around accusations.

His official curriculum at Fitchburg State University reveals the exact scale of this contradiction. He receives a state salary to teach Folklore in America (ENGL 3880), Storytelling and the Oral Tradition (ENGL 2890), and Culture & Literature of Place: Regionalism in America. Hoberman evaluates students on their ability to analyze how local rumors, oral traditions, and regional narratives shape or distort the truth of human lives. He is an expert on how storytelling weaponizes myths within small New England towns. Yet, when his partner deployed an unverified, unsubstantiated piece of digital folklore into a Facebook thread of twenty-two thousand people, he did not apply those analytical standards. He became an active vector for the exact type of unverified local narrative he critiques in his syllabi.

This approach is reflected in his stated research philosophy: "the ultimate measure of whether or not a historical topic is worth reading and writing about is its worthiness for fiction." This framework prioritizes a cohesive narrative over inconvenient or contradictory facts. It approaches the civic life of the valley through a literary lens looking for narratives that fit a pre-packaged conclusion. A real material record, hand-drilled granite anchor holes, public safety video footage, police logs, and court dockets, presents a level of verifiable friction that an unverified narrative cannot accommodate.

The Mechanics of the Accusation

Sorenson's statement in the Facebook thread is structured with precise internal mechanics. The first sentence ("I 'unfriended' him years ago when Jewish people were his target of choice") launches a severe accusation stated as established fact, requiring no evidence to cause immediate reputational damage. The second sentence ("And yet something does not feel completely right about planning his full demise") acts as a defensive cover. By performing a mild reluctance about "his full demise," she positions herself as an objective bystander rather than an active participant in the social exclusion she has just initiated. Both sentences work in tandem: deliver the charge, then claim moral distance from the consequence.

The structural asymmetry of this social mechanism is total. In a court of law, a charge must be supported by evidence. In the digital space Sorenson utilized, the accused is required to disprove a charge for which no evidence was required to make. The accusation travels instantly to twenty-two thousand people; the material refutation arrives years later, on an archive website. A scholar who demands rigorous proof in his academic work abandoned those standards on a public street, lending his professional authority to an unexamined, undocumented claim while ignoring the extensive, verifiable counter-evidence resting on a stone bench less than a mile from where he stood.

The Cost of Silence and the Institutional Stakes

This unverified accusation compounded every other element of the 2020 campaign against me. Unlike overt online harassment, the label of antisemitism appeared to neutral observers as a credible warning from authoritative sources. The institutional responses that followed operated entirely on the signal the thread created. The Recorder published articles without interviewing me; the Bridge of Flowers committee met without calling me; the police processed multiple false reports from my harassers without conducting a counter-interview.

My demand for a correction was met with institutional silence. Because Fitchburg State University is owned and operated by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, it is a state actor. Its employees and administrators operate under color of law, meaning that official administrative actions that penalize citizens based on unverified street claims raise direct procedural due process concerns under the Fourteenth Amendment. Should a state institution officially adopt, republish, or administratively enforce an unverified personal smear against a private citizen, it moves beyond private opinion into clear legal exposure regarding civil rights violations.

The exposure of this dynamic has already been integrated into regional design pedagogy. Hoberman's participation in maintaining this local myth directly inspired the objective, fact-anchored QR code framework driving the Pocumtuck State Park (PSP) regional design framework. While Hoberman claims an institutional ability to "read" the physical landscape, his failure to account for the physical evidence in his own town necessitated the development of a specific diagnostic tool, Cold Cruel Sidestep-Walkaway-DARVO, to accurately decode how local institutional networks use denial, attack, and reversal to obscure physical reality. This professional oversight has now become a permanent case study within the counter-pedagogy.

An accusation of antisemitism is not proven by the credentials of the person delivering it or the academic titles of the person endorsing it. It is either supported by evidence or it is not. This one is not. The legal record is still developing, but the documented word is here, in full, so that anyone seeking the facts can read them without relying on a narrative assembled without my participation.

The things forged in steel and set in stone remain the definitive record of what occurred.

Questions for a Self-Vetting Community

• Why is textual nuance and historical caution strictly demanded in the protected confines of a university seminar room, but entirely abandoned on a public sidewalk?
• How does a professor who collects a state salary to teach Folklore in America and Storytelling and the Oral Tradition, grading students on their ability to catch how small-town rumors distort human lives, instantly validate an unverified piece of digital gossip?
• By what logic does an authority stand before a public library audience to dictate what evidence looks like, and then march onto a street corner to endorse a severe reputational charge without a single quote, a single witness, or a single receipt?
• When an institutional gatekeeper uses his professional weight to endorse an undocumented smear, does he realize he is actively cheapening the very history he is paid to protect?
• When everyday people watch a highly credentialed scholar deliver a severe accusation with zero proof, does it teach them to guard against actual bias, or does it breed a deep, justified cynicism toward the entire academic class?
• Should we all be wondering whether this exact behavior, where a leading institutional authority deploys a severe accusation of historical trauma in a personal street confrontation, is itself a self-perpetuating root cause that drives, creates, and feeds the profound public resentment and cynicism toward the very institutions and standards he claims to represent?