For this year’s 2026 Women’s history month award, Congressman Joseph Morelle, Democrat NY-25, selected former Jewish Federation of Rochester CEO Meredith Dragon with the distinction of lifetime achievement and US Congressional Record for her support of genocide in Palestine and censorship of political dissent.

Congressman Morelle recieves a major portion, over $500 million, of his campaign funds from AIPAC – the pro-Israel lobby. The other primary funder is the defense industry.

“We share a vision and focus for those whose voices really matter,” said Morelle in announcing this recognition with Dragon.

The Congressional award highlighted Dragon’s record of support for genocide:

• Censoring the Palestinian Film Festival by pressuring media outlets -WXXI and the Little Theater to
  cancel the Witness Palestine Film Festival which had been going on for over a decade in Rochester
  until Ms. Dragon disrupted it in 2023.

• Censoring Free Speech on College Campuses by pressuring university police to intervene, going so
  far as to tell SpectrumNews that UR should ban its Students for Justice in Palestine chapter like
  Brandeis, Columbia, and George Washington Universities have done.

• As CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater Rochester to issue a “security alert” warning Jewish
  community members of an anti-Israel rally occurring at the UR. “These rallies call for intifada and
  genocide against Israel and the Jewish people,” the alert said, painting some UR students as rabid
  antisemites.

• As founder of the Levine Institute to End Hate, Dragon used her influence to define any criticism of
  genocide by the State of Israel as a hate crime, inflating the data of hate crimes against Jews, following the playbook of the Anti-defamation League.to foment greater hysteria and victimhood in the Jewish community. Therefore by day, Dragon used the $1 million grant to JFED and the Levine Institution’s non-profit status, which was designated to stop hate and encourage diversity, but by night she facilitated hate, ignorance and intolerance of Muslim and Arab students on campus. Rather than design the goals according to the actual data received in the organization’s “State of Hate” 2025 survey, indicating clearly more discrimination against recent immigrants, refugees, Muslims, Blacks and the LGBTQ+ community, the summarizing public presentation by the Levine Institute centered on hate towards Jews as the more targeted group that would drive the organization’s future priorities; thus using the cover of “diversity” for Dragon’s overall goal of censoring political dissent for the greater Zionist settler-colonial project of genocide of Palestinians.

• Dragon orchestrated a massive takeover of the Brighton Democratic Committee, where the only Black member of Town Council was falsely accused of antisemitism and replaced by Jewish candidates, both of whom were close friends of Dragon and allies to the Jewish Federation of Rochester.

• Dragon’s trail of genocide support includes stints in Jacksonville, Florida, western Massachusetts,
  Rochester, NY and now she is off to New Jersey. There she will continue to diversity wash and pinkwash imperialism and ethnic cleansing for the settler-colonial states of Israel and the United States. Dragon has dedicated her lifework to imperial optics; transforming the perpetrator into the victim, both here in the US and abroad with correlated “diversity” missions in Israel. She can’t stay in any one place too long as the actual diverse communities eventually catch up with her singular intentions of silencing dissent and use of powerful media, non-profit and government institutions to bully the oppressed.