CAIR Honors Ben & Jerry's Co-Founder Ben Cohen at Rosh Hashanah Gala

The Council on American-Islamic Relations named Ben Cohen, the Jewish co-founder of Ben & Jerry's, the recipient of its Champion of Justice Award at its 32nd annual gala in Washington on Saturday night, the second night of Rosh Hashanah.

The gala closed out the first day of CAIRCON 2026, a two-day conference the organization held under the theme "We the People: Saving Our Democracy, Building Our Future." The keynote speakers were Dr. Adam Hamawy of New Jersey and Darializa Ávila Chevalier, a former Columbia University encampment participant. Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud was listed as a speaker at the accompanying policy conference.

Announcing the award earlier this month, CAIR national board chair Manal Fakhoury described Cohen as an entrepreneur and activist who has spent decades working for peace and human dignity, and pointed specifically to what she called his advocacy for Palestinians facing genocide in Gaza. The organization also cited his leadership of Up in Arms, a campaign to cut Pentagon spending, and noted that he was arrested last year while protesting in the Senate.

Cohen, 75, was born in Brooklyn and raised in Merrick, New York, by Jewish parents. He founded Ben & Jerry's with Jerry Greenfield in a converted Vermont gas station in 1978 and sold the company to Unilever in 2000. He served as national co-chair of Bernie Sanders's 2020 presidential campaign, and in 2021 he and Greenfield publicly backed the company's decision to stop selling ice cream in Israeli settlements. He is currently in a public dispute with The Magnum Ice Cream Company, the Unilever spinoff that now owns the brand, over the company's independence and values.

Last year's Champion of Justice Award went to Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia graduate student detained by the Trump administration over his role in campus protests.

The award comes as CAIR faces an escalating campaign by Republican state governments to designate it a terrorist organization. On Friday, one day before the gala, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and the state Cabinet approved a rule establishing the process for such designations, clearing the way for the state to formally apply it to CAIR, the Muslim Brotherhood and Antifa. Texas Governor Greg Abbott designated the Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR as foreign terrorist organizations under state law in November 2025, describing CAIR as a front for the Brotherhood. President Donald Trump signed an executive order the same month beginning the process of designating certain Muslim Brotherhood chapters, and the State and Treasury departments designated the group's Egyptian, Lebanese and Jordanian branches in January.

Critics of CAIR point to the 2008 Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing trial, in which prosecutors named the organization an unindicted co-conspirator and identified it as a Muslim Brotherhood associate. CAIR rejects the characterization and has never been charged. In March, U.S. District Judge Mark Walker issued a preliminary injunction blocking Florida from enforcing an earlier DeSantis executive order against CAIR, finding the group likely to succeed on First Amendment grounds. Florida appealed, and CAIR, represented by the ACLU and other attorneys, filed a further suit in July challenging the state's designation law.