#a note on my palestinian classmate
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i hope we continue to see more protests within the US military. i see a lot of leftists and folks who are anti-military who have such an open disdain for the people who are in the military, yet neglect to considering the conditions this country makes to produce ideology, poverty, and the illusion of choice to make all kinds of people choose to enlist in the military. You ever see those videos of ROTC kids recording each other asking why they joined the military and everyone's like, "healthcare", "it helped me go to college", "I was bored" or "free ptsd lol". I hate to remind everyone but folks who are in the military are people, too, and they are the same victims and perpetrators of violence as the rest of you, we have all been shallowly conditioned to view each other as enemies just because one person is wearing army greens and the other is not.
some of the biggest anti-war advocates are those who engaged in war. Veterans who genuinely believed they were protecting the US against "terrorism" come back with blood on their hands, and they choose to realize that it was US imperialism that forced them to carry out violence, instead of doubling down and shielding themselves from the fact that they too are capable of atrocities... This is a class of people who are intentionally conditioned to be as poor and as ideologically aligned to US imperialism so that the military has a never-ending pool to send their youth to destroy other country's youth. The only people I have ever heard say "do not join the military" are those who ARE military.
This is in no way to ever excuse or explain away any of the atrocious war crimes and violence this industry and its people have committed against others. What I am saying is that we absolutely cannot cast aside the individuals who have been victimized within US imperialism, even if they are wearing army greens. I was speaking with my Palestinian classmate last week and another classmate--a member of the US air force-- walked up to me and struck up a conversation. My military classmate showed me her new bird, bid both of us goodbye, and left. My Palestinian classmate asked me if I was close with her, and I said we talked quite often, and she said, "I never met a person who's in the military. I still hate the military, but I never knew that they did, too. I didn't realize that they were also victims."
If my Palestinian classmate--one who is actively watching her own community die--can understand that it is not individuals who are the problem but it is in fact systems, US imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism...why can't we all? And she has EVERY reason to hate any individual military member. A lot of online activism just creates more barriers. if your optics look bad, complicated, or contradictory, you are cast aside. Everyone has got the be the perfect activist, you can never make a mistake or share a half-baked thought, you should always believe every word from a marginalized persons mouth (because being marginalized doesn't mean you're not entrenched in white supremacy too!) and you should never question what you see...Do you know what you sound like? The very imperialists who are convincing poor whites to vote against themselves. Perfectionism is white supremacy. Black & white thinking is white supremacy.
I'd rather have a military member who genuinely believed in the US imperialism machine but was disillusioned after being deployed as my comrade than some leftist who cherishes the performance of "being a good person". I don't want "good people" in our movements. I want humans who care. I want humans who make mistakes and who learn from them. I want humans who accept the messiness of a person. I want humans who hold others accountable and allow themselves to take responsibility for their actions. I want people who change for themselves and others.
fight systems, not individual people. we can change each other, but if we're too preoccupied looking like the World's Perfect Activists, we will only consume each other alive. Connect to your fellow humans, forever and always.
#muertotalks#a mind dump after seeing so much come out after the self immolation of the us air force member#i know hes not the first one to self immolate for palestine#and he might not be the last#i hate the military#i really fucking do#but i choose to see the people within them as victims within the overall system just like the rest of us#i will never go through what they did to make them choose to enlist#i never struggled with poverty homelessness healthcare or social acceptance#i wont shame them#shame is not productive#i want them to know there are civilians who support their protests#i want them to know that we their allies too#a note on my palestinian classmate#if youre arab or also a colonized person impacted by the us military feel free to hate every member of the military#i dont intend to police yall in how you choose to feel your anger#im angry with you#the point i mean to make is about understanding and compassion#someone who has every right to hate these people still chose to see them as the people they are#yes i even want the best for the “bad” people in the military too#i dont want these people to continue the ideology but we cant stop that without dismantling these systems#and we cant do that without creating spaces for healing and reform and growth#so many thoughts so many thoughts#none of this is easy#i fight daily against impulsively hating the world#everyday is a fight to choose compassion and understanding#but being a leftist and doing leftism is not fucking easy#if you genuinely think it is it isnt#and you may be missing the point of what leftism is#anyway
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I see so many reflections today from different people: someone woke up from the explosions, some from a phone call, some woke up and saw hundreds of notifications from different telegram channels. It is still so unimaginably bizarre. I have no ability to put into words the feeling of your world falling apart and we didn’t even understand half of the danger that was surrounding us. We were so damn close to disaster with half of Europe believing that nothing good will come out of it.
Ukrainians didn’t care what Europeans thought though, I personally saw news pieces about "Russia will take control of Kyiv" a lot later, somewhere in May, when Ukrainian military took control over the north of the country. And I’m so eternally grateful to every Ukrainian who made sure that all this "experts" sat in those flashy studios red from guilt. I’m grateful for my life, I’m grateful for our Ukraine. She persist. She is still the love of our lives. She’s hurt and devastated but she lives despite all the attempts to destroy her. Same as us. Somehow still here.
Yet I feel more detached from the western world than ever and I’m so fucking jealous of you all. It’s not even about the rockets or shakheds - somewhere along the lines you accept the fact that you may die in any moment - it’s about normal things like your Twitter feed that doesn’t look like a necrology, military terms that don’t make any sense to you, your city that doesn’t stop everyday to mourn the dead, you don’t feel guilty for trying to live a normal life while your classmate, who wanted to be a director, posts stories from the trenches. All of that and more. I’m not even entitled to my emotions because there always will be someone who says that my country is not suffering enough. I no longer react to comments like this as emotionally as I’ve done before but it is still so bizarre to see stuff like that from people whose countries have always been the one to inflict suffering on others.
I may sound mean or sarcastic or whatever but there is so much negativity inside of us that was put there by people like I’ve mentioned above that it is going to be released from time to time. "Your country shouldn’t exist", "Only 9 thousand killed", "You all are nazis/racist/zionists/any of the -ist terms" - yet you should always react in a constructive way because the moment you let your emotions go, you are the worst person on the planet. But who am I kidding, some people here do believe that we are. There is a thousand bad people with sketchy patches in a 40-million country and suddenly "That’s why I no longer support Ukraine". Well, honey, that means you never did. Because Syrian flags were quickly replaced with Ukrainian ones and just as quickly with Palestinian. It’s not about the "Support the oppressed", it’s "Anything to not feel guilty" because then you’ll find the reason to hate Palestinians, just as you did with us. If only you cared about the problematic shit happening in you country as much as you care about our political and social life.
But there are people who still are there for us. Countries that are still here. We may not say it as often but we are thankful. So very thankful for everything you’ve done and are doing for us. Thank you for hearing us and uplifting our voices.
Recently one of the most beautiful people here have lost her life defending me and you. She was always in my notes, always making sure that we didn’t feel uncomfortable even if she of all the people had all the right to be upfront about her thoughts and feelings. I don’t think I will ever get rid of the feeling of guilt. She was there while I wasn’t. She said to mourn her through anger. Anger towards the oppressor. Anger that should be directed into something useful: donations, sharing info, contacting your MPs and so on.
The soldier‘s death is not something out of ordinary during the war, it’s not considered a war crime but what if half of the army are civilians? Volunteers who left their homes to protect them. What if the soldier was a teacher, a poet, an actor, an IT-specialist, a scientist, what then? Isn’t it a tragedy? My country is loosing yet another generation of beautiful talented people and it makes my view of the future even darker.
But what can I say? I’m still here. My country still stands. Ukrainian air defence is doing everything possible and impossible to protect the lives of the civilians. Ukrainian military is still the only thing keeping us all alive. Heroes, titans, gods. Glory to them. Eternal glory to those who lost their lives defending Ukraine.
To Ukrainians: якось буде, прорвемся.
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Some People are Still Good
I recently caught up with a friend of mine and offhandedly, sort of casually mentioned that I’d been off instagram since October 7th. He didn’t know what I meant. He'd heard something about a terrorist attack and Israel's military retaliating, but nothing else.
In another universe without tiktok history lessons, I might have been upset. In this one, I was immensely relieved. I didn’t have to argue with him, or hear him rattling off whatever talking points are de rigueur for the Online Left, or get into a heated discussion about the meaning of the word “Zionist,” or get accused of being an apologist for crimes against humanity. I could just…tell him what happened, and how I felt about it.
I told him about the massacre and hostage-taking. I told him how many of the people murdered and kidnapped were peace activists - easier targets, he noted, than anyone in the actual government that Hamas is supposedly resisting. How this was, in proportion to Israel’s population, a bigger terrorist attack than 9/11. That it wasn’t just Israeli Jews who were killed or kidnapped, but Bedouins, laborers from abroad, Americans, and (this is something conveniently left out of a lot of the Discourse), Palestinians.
I told him about the Israeli government doing exactly what Hamas had counted on them doing in Gaza. I said that people aren’t their governments. I tried to make it clear that I hope Netanyau, may his name be blotted out, lives out the rest of his days in shame and political obscurity (or, to save us all some time, quickly succumbs to some hideously painful disease). That I know there are miles of difference between going to war with Hamas and going to war with the Palestinian people. That if you express any hope that the rest of the hostages will be rescued, you run the risk of getting lumped in with people who think airstrikes on refugee camps are somehow justified, and that unfortunately those people do very much exist.
I told him how Jews are still reeling from what happened, and that it doesn’t help that so many on the left seem to think it’s irrelevant. I told him how my boyfriend (who I’ve seen cry maybe twice over the last decade), spent the entire afternoon of October 7th sobbing at his desk as he watched everything unfold in real time. I told him how that same boyfriend posted about how frustrating it is for Jews to have their suffering repeatedly dismissed, and how one of his leftist friends responded by accusing him of being a genocide apologist. You know, how you talk to a person in mourning.
I told him how when the first news of the massacre hit, there were leftists who praised it as the start of some glorious revolution. How I don't know how many of them were my acquaintances, because I got off social media before I could find out. How a lot of them were probably ill-informed about what was happening and how and why, but others just think killing Jews is good, actually, and I don't have the mental or emotional fortitude to find out which fall into which category.
I told him how frustrating it is to be a leftist of Jewish background, sickened by the right and heartbroken by the left. I told him how many petitions I’ve been asked to sign that didn’t so much as mention Hamas or the attack. I said I was worried to bring it up, because if you say “but what about the Jews (and, you know, others) who were tortured and murdered and kidnapped,” you get accused of all sorts of heinous, improbable crimes, and I simply do not have the kind of time or energy for that discussion.
I told him how I still like my classmates, but I don’t trust most of them. I can’t let my guard down around them. I can’t talk about how I feel about the conflict except in vague terms, which is ironic, because the people who are brave enough to say “peace would be nice” are accused of not taking a stand. How terrified I am that I'll use the wrong word and out myself as whatever they think that makes me. How I’d hoped they’d be my friends, before all of this. How they’re all being really nice to me, and I can’t shake the thought that they’d hate me if they knew I thought the state of Israel should exist and that Israelis have the right to not be murdered. How I wish I felt like I could be in activist spaces without having to loudly and eagerly participate in my own dehumanization and that of so many people I love.
And he listened.
I don’t think anyone Jewish is wrong to be cautious. But for all the leftist goyim willing to argue that murdering babies is actually a good thing if the babies belong to colonizers, there are others - many others, I hope - who genuinely want to understand what’s actually going on. Who see a difference between resisting your oppressors and murdering them at a music festival or burning them alive in their homes. Who find “it’s wrong to kill civilians” to be an uncontroversial statement. I hate how many people I can no longer trust, but I’m so grateful to have at least some non-Jewish friends who actually understand nuance and care enough to try.
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If you talk to an ordinary American, or, in my experience, if you talk to an average Israeli, for that matter, they don’t know anything about who the Palestinians are. They don’t know where they come from, they don’t know how they live, what they believe, and they don’t want to. Right? Because that just complicates things… – historian Sam Biagetti.
Last month, The New York Times conducted a series of interviews with a number of American Jewish families and the way they have been dealing with what the paper calls a “generational divide over Israel.”
The Times notes a trend that has been developing for a long time—younger American Jews becoming markedly more critical of, sometimes downright hostile to, Israel than their elders. The piece looks at “more than a dozen young people…[who] described feeling estranged from the version of Jewish identity they were raised with, which was often anchored in pro-Israel education.”
One such person is Louisa Kornblatt. She is the daughter of liberal Jewish parents, who grew up experiencing the cruelties of anti-Semitism in suburban New Jersey. Her grandmother “had fled Austria in 1938, just as the Nazis were taking over.” Partly as a result of this legacy, Louisa Kornblatt “shared her parents’ belief that the safety of Jewish people depended on a Jewish state” as a child.
However, her views began to shift once “she started attending a graduate program in social work at U.C. Berkeley in 2017.” As she recalls it, “classmates and friends challenged her thinking,” with some telling her that she was “on the wrong side of history.”
While in graduate school, “she read Audre Lorde, Mariame Kaba, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and other Black feminist thinkers,” who further made her re-think ingrained assumptions. Eventually, “Kornblatt came to feel that her emotional ties to Jewish statehood undermined her vision for ‘collective liberation.’”
“Over the last year, she became increasingly involved in pro-Palestine activism, including through Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist activist group, and the If Not Now movement.” She now goes so far as to assert, “I don’t think the state of Israel should ever have been established,” because “It’s based on this idea of Jewish supremacy. And I’m not on board with that.”
Also interviewed are the parents of Jackson Schwartz, a senior at Columbia University whose education there has significantly altered his outlook on Israel:
“The parents of Mr. Schwartz…said they listen to him with open minds when he tells them about documentaries he has seen or things he has learned from professors like Rashid Khalidi, a prominent Palestinian intellectual who is a professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia. Dan Schwartz said his son helped him understand the Palestinian perspective on Israel’s founding, which was accompanied by a huge displacement of population that Palestinians call the Nakba, using the Arabic word for catastrophe.”
“It wasn’t until Jackson went to Columbia and took classes that I ever heard the word Nakba,” Dan Schwartz said.
These interviews are hugely instructive for two reasons. For one thing, they demonstrate very clearly why power centers are so critical of higher education, especially in the humanities: They are afraid young people might actually—horror of horrors—learn something, particularly something that challenges the status quo.
American culture overflows with accusations from parents that their kids went off to college only to be “indoctrinated.” But at least in these instances, the opposite is what happened—far from being brainwashed, the kids read books and learned history, and were forced to think hard about the implications. In other words, higher education did exactly what it is supposed to do—forced students to encounter and engage with perspectives and thinkers they otherwise never would have.
In reality, most parents (and certainly media outlets) who complain of indoctrination are actually worried about education—that is, that their children will develop more nuanced, critical and informed views of the world after engaging with unfamiliar viewpoints. Such aggrieved elders don’t see it this way, of course, largely because they themselves never shook off the propaganda of their youth. Indeed, they likely are not even capable of perceiving it as such. But that is what it is.
The interviews from the Times piece also demonstrate what Sam Biagetti refers to in the quote that sits atop this article: the phenomenon of older Americans who profess attachment to (and presumably knowledge of) Israel, displaying aggressive—no, fanatic—ignorance about basic Israeli/Middle East history.
That Mr. Schwartz had never heard of the Nakba until his son learned about it from Rashid Khalidi speaks volumes about the way young people in this country are “taught” about Israel, as well as how much their parents actually “know” about it. It is the equivalent of a German father professing fierce attachment to the German nation-state, but never hearing the word “Holocaust” until his child tells him about it after learning the history from a Jewish professor.
The new documentary Israelism explores this issue of younger Jewish people raised to reflexively identify with Israel and to view it as a “Jewish Disneyland,” but who changed their minds (and behavior) upon encountering the brutal realities of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
It is a powerful film, one that takes a look at the too-often ignored indoctrination regarding Israel taking place in many Jewish day schools, the way younger people are starting to de-program themselves from it, and where they go from there.
Directed by first-time filmmakers Erin Axelman and Sam Eilertsen, Israelism largely follows two protagonists whose experiences mirror those of the filmmakers.
The first protagonist, Eitan (whose last name is never revealed), grew up in a conservative Jewish home in Atlanta. Typical of such an upbringing, he was steeped in pro-Israel PR.
He recounts that “Israel was a central part of everything we did in school.” His high school routinely sent delegations to AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, also known as the “Israel lobby”) conferences.
Outside of school, the PR continued. He describes going to Jewish summer camp, where each year the staff included a group of Israeli counselors, brought in “to connect American Jews to Israeli culture.”
This included having the children playing games designed to simulate being in the Israeli military, including the use of actual Israeli military commands.
The film intersperses interviews of its protagonists with interviews of prominent individuals who promote this Israeli PR.
For instance, Rabbi Bennett Miller, the then-National Chair of the Association of Reform Zionists of America, asks with a laugh, “does [my] average congregant understand that I’m teaching them to become Zionists? Probably not, but it is part of my madness, so to speak.”
Enamored with what he saw as the glory of military service, Eitan told his parents that he was going to join the Israeli military rather than go to college. He had always thought of Israel as “my country,” and learned from numerous childhood visits there that he “fit in” better in Israel than in the United States.
During basic training with the IDF, he was trained as a “heavy machine gunnist” [sic] with an emphasis on urban warfare. After seven months of this, he was deployed to the West Bank. His life in the IDF involved operating the various checkpoints which comprise the apartheid system, as well as patrolling Palestinian villages on foot in full gear with a bulletproof vests. He recounts that on such patrols, the mission of his unit was to make their presence felt, in order “to let them know that we were watching.”
His encounter with the occupation changed him forever. “Even though Israel was a central part of everything we did in school,” he recalls, “we never really discussed the Palestinians. It was presented to us that Israel was basically an empty wasteland when the Jews arrived. ‘There were some Arabs there,’ they said, but there was no organized people; they had really treated the land poorly. Yeah, there are Palestinians, [but] they just want to kill us all…” Furthermore, “It was always presented to us that the Arabs only know terrorism.”
His role as an occupier made him see things rather differently. He witnessed IDF soldiers needlessly abusing captives, who were blindfolded and handcuffed, thrown to the ground, kicked and beaten. He despairs that he “didn’t even speak up,” something he is visibly still struggling with. And, he says, “that’s just one of many stories that I have from my time in the West Bank. It took many years to really come to terms with my part in it. Only after I got out of the army did I begin to realize that the stuff that I did [from] day to day, just working in checkpoints, patrolling villages—that in itself was immoral.”
After great difficulty, Eitan has begun to publicly speak out about his experiences, though he notes that it took a long time, and that on his first attempt, he was not able to make it through without crying excessively. Since then, he has gotten better, and continues to pursue this necessary work.
Israelism’s second protagonist is Simone Zimmerman. Zimmerman’s grandfather settled in Israel; he and his immediate family were some of her only relatives to escape the Holocaust. Zimmerman herself was raised in a staunchly pro-Israel household, attending Hebrew school from kindergarten through high school. While in high school she lived in Israel for a period as part of an exchange program, which was just one of many visits.
These organized stays in Israel routinely involved her and her friends dressing up in Israeli army uniforms and pretending to be in the IDF. She participated in Jewish youth groups and summer camps which, like Eitan, immersed her in a steady diet of pro-Israel propaganda. Summing up her childhood experience, Zimmerman explains that “Israel was just treated like a core part of being a Jew. So, you did prayers, and you did Israel.”
Like Eitan, she was familiar with AIPAC: “AIPAC is just the thing that you do. Like, going to the AIPAC conference is just sort of seen as a community event.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, almost ten percent of her high school graduating class ended up joining the Israeli army, and many of her summer camp and youth group friends did as well. This is the power of effective propaganda instilled from a young age, Zimmerman observes. “The indoctrination is so severe, it’s almost hard to have a conversation about it. It’s heartbreaking.”
Israelism contains footage of this indoctrination in action inside Hebrew schools.
Scenes of teachers excitedly asking classes of young children, “do you want to go to Israel too?” and the children screaming back, “YEAH!!!” are reminiscent of the similarly nauseating kinds of religious indoctrination made famous in an earlier era by films like Jesus Camp.
Some of these scenes can be glimpsed in the trailer for the film. Older students are seen reading copies of Alan Dershowitz’s book The Case for Israel, which was famously exposed as a fraud by Norman Finkelstein years ago. Zimmerman herself gets to look at some of her old worksheets and art projects from her elementary school days, all of which in some way revolved around the Israeli state.
Other than enlisting in the IDF, Zimmerman had been told that the other major way to be “a good supporter of the Jewish people” was to become an “Israel advocate.” Choosing the latter path, Zimmerman became involved with Hillel, the largest Jewish campus organization in the world, when she began attending the University of California at Berkeley. Hillel, too, worked very hard to instill pro-Israel beliefs in her. She describes being trained in how to rebut “the ‘lies’ that other people [were] saying” about Israel.
The film explores the nature of Hillel’s work fostering pro-Israel activism at college campuses across the country. Tom Barkan, a former IDF soldier and “Israel fellow” at the University of Connecticut’s Hillel chapter, says, “name a university in America, we probably have a person there.” Barkan’s mission is to turn Jewish college students into either Israel advocates or military recruits. While he warns eager students that joining the IDF will not be easy, he wistfully tells them that it will be “the most meaningful experience that you ever go through.”
Former Jewish day school teacher Jacqui Schulefand works with Barkan in her role as Director of Engagement and Programs at UConn’s Hillel branch. Her love for the State of Israel is inseparable from her identity as a Jewish person, which she proudly explains. “Can you separate Israel and Judaism? I don’t know—I can’t. You know, some people I think can. To me, it’s the same. Yeah, you can’t separate it. Israel is Judaism and Judaism is Israel. And that is who I am, and that is my identity. And I think every single thing that I experienced along my life has melded into that, like there was never, you know, a divide for me.”
Schulefand describes joining the Israeli armed forces as “the greatest gift you can give,” and notes that “we actually have had quite a few of our former students join the IDF—amazing!” But her demeanor sours when she is asked about criticisms of the country. In a tone combining incomprehension with a hint of disgust, she laments that “somehow, ‘pro-Palestinian’ has become ‘pro-social justice.’”
It was this sort of pro-Israel advocacy network that organized Simone Zimmerman and other students to oppose what they perceived to be “anti-Semitic” activities such as student government legislation favoring the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israeli occupation, and other measures critical of Israel.
To prepare for such confrontations, she was handed talking points that told her what to say—accuse critics of being anti-Semitic, of having a double standard, of making Jewish students feel unsafe, etc. Describing her feelings about BDS and the Palestinian cause at the time, Zimmerman says that “I just knew that it was this bad thing that I had to fight.” She remembers literally reading off the cards when it came time for her to make the case for Israel.
However, such work inevitably brought her into contact with people who challenged her views. She encountered terms like apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and illegal occupation. “I thought I knew so much about Israel, but I didn’t really know what anybody was talking about when they were talking about all these things,” she said.
Growing up, she was barely taught anything about Palestinians, much like Eitan: “The idea that there were native inhabitants who lived there [when settlers began to arrive] was not even part of my frame of reference.”[1] To the extent that her upbringing provided her with any conception of what a Palestinian was, it was that a Palestinian was someone “who kills Jews, or wants to kill Jews.” But now she was dealing with actual Palestinian students and their non-Palestinian allies, who told her things she found alarming.
Zimmerman went back to Hillel, embarrassed that she and the other pro-Israel advocates were not doing a good job refuting the information they had been confronted with. When Zimmerman asked what the proper responses were to specific criticisms directed at Israel—other than shouting “double standard” or “anti-Semitic”—no one provided her with any. “That was really disturbing for me,” she says. She was flabbergasted that “there are these people called Palestinians who think that Israel wields all this power over their lives and don’t have rights, don’t have water. What is this? How do I respond to it?” “How is it that I am the best the Jewish community has to offer—I’ve been to all the trainings, all the summer camps—and I don’t know what the settlements are, or what the occupation is?”
This anguish led Zimmerman to see the occupation for herself, the summer after her freshman year. This was her first time “crossing the line” into the West Bank. The film movingly details her experiences there. She listened to Palestinian families describe routine instances of being beaten by the IDF, and the harsh realities of life under military rule.
She befriends Sami Awad, Executive Director of the Holy Land Trust, who works to give Americans tours of the territory. An American citizen born in the U.S., Awad describes encounters with American kids who have joined the IDF, people “who just moved here to be part of an army to play cowboys and Indians.” He remarks on the absurdity that “Somebody…comes here from New York or from Chicago, and [claims] that this land is theirs.”
Awad’s family was originally from Jerusalem. His grandfather was shot by an Israeli sniper in 1948, and the rest of his family were evicted by Israeli forces soon after during the Nakba. They have never been allowed to return, and have lived under occupation ever since. Nevertheless, Awad is an extraordinarily empathetic person, having made a career out of trying to teach Westerners what life is like in the West Bank, in the hopes that they will use what they learn to effect positive change. He recounts visiting Auschwitz, and says that the experience gave him an insight into “inherited trauma” and how it shapes the conflict today. In the film he comes across as optimistic:
“I really believe that there is an emerging awakening within the American Jewish community…From American Jews, coming here, and listening to us, and hearing us, and seeing our humanity, and understanding that we are not just out sitting in bunkers, planning the next attack against Israelis, that we do have a desire to live in peace, and to have our freedom, and to walk in our streets, and to eat in our restaurants, and like we – I mean it’s crazy that I have to say this, that we are real human beings that just want to survive and live, like all other people in this world.”
Zimmerman also meets Baha Hilo, an English speaker who works as a tour guide with To Be There, another group that helps people understand the reality that Israel imposes on the West Bank. His family was expelled from Jaffa in 1948 during the Nakba. They were forced to settle in Bethlehem, sadly believing that they would eventually be able to return to their homes.
Hilo discusses his frustration that Israelis get to live under civil law, whereas Palestinians like him must live under the humiliating military law of the occupation: “When an American goes to the West Bank, he has more rights there than I have had my entire life!” The film takes care to note that Americans play a major role in such realities: “Of the roughly 450,000 [illegal] Israeli settlers living in the occupied West Bank, 60,000 are American Jews.” Some readers may recall the famous viral video of an Israeli named Yakub unashamedly stealing Palestinian homes while conveying a breathtaking sense of entitlement.
Hilo laments that, “From the day you are born, you live day in and day out without experiencing a day of freedom.” His astonishment at the audacity of Israelis, particularly those who are also Americans, mirrors Awad’s: “What makes an 18-year-old American kid who was given [a] ten days’ trip for free in Palestine, what makes him want to come in and sacrifice his life? Why would a foreigner think it’s ok to have superior rights to the rights of the indigenous population? Because somebody told them it’s [their] home.”
While happy to make such friends, Zimmerman nonetheless says of her time there, “I don’t think I realized the extent to which what I would come to see on the ground would really shock me and horrify me.” This experience often changes people. The filmmaker Rebecca Pierce is interviewed on her own visits to the West Bank, and her reaction is in line with Zimmerman’s. Pierce had always been opposed to using the word “apartheid,” but once she saw the reality of the situation, she changed her mind immediately.
The protagonist of With God on Our Side (a 2010 documentary critical of Christian Zionism), a young man named Christopher, had a similar reaction, specifically at the behavior he witnessed from the Israeli settlers. Each year a group of them converges on the Arab section of Old Jerusalem to celebrate Israel’s capture of East Jerusalem in 1967. Christopher witnessed the festivities, which featured a massive crowd of settlers wrapped in Israeli flags, shouting “death to Arabs” repeatedly as they danced through the streets.
A large group identified an Arab journalist, surrounded him, began chanting at him and flipping him off, to the point where the police had to be called. Christopher was visibly shocked at all this, glumly remarking that he “felt ashamed to be there.” This same celebration is also seen in Israelism, and the Israeli chants are as deranged as ever: “An Arab is a son of a bitch! A Jew is a precious soul!” “Death to the leftists!”
Zimmerman’s experiences led her to become a co-founder of the If Not Now movement, a grassroots Jewish organization which works to end U.S. support for Israel. They have engaged in activism targeting the ADL (more on them in a moment), AIPAC, the headquarters of Birthright Israel, and other organizations which directly contribute to the perpetuation of Israel’s occupation. “We decided to bring the crisis of American Jewish support for Israel to the doorsteps of Jewish institutions to force that conversation in public,” Zimmerman says.
Israelism contains powerful scenes of younger Jewish people engaging in this work. Many come from similar backgrounds as Eitan and Simone. Consider Avner Gvaryahu. Born and raised in Israel, Gvaryahu also joined the IDF. His combat experience ultimately turned him against the occupation. His whole life in Israel, he had never been inside a Palestinian home, but was now being tasked with “barg[ing] into one in the middle of the night.”
By the end of his service, he had routinely taken over Palestinian homes and used them as military facilities. No warrants were needed, and no notice was ever given to the families who were living there. He reflects back “with shame” on how violently he often acted toward the residents in such situations. Gvaryahu is now the Executive Director of Breaking the Silence, an organization of IDF veterans committed to peace.
“There are a lot of Jewish young people who see a Jewish establishment that is racist, that is nationalistic,” Zimmerman explains. Jeremy Ben-Ami, the President of J Street, agrees. “They’re really, really angry about the way they were educated, and the way they were indoctrinated about these issues, and justifiably so.”
While such courageous individuals often receive quite a bit of hatred from their own community (Zimmerman says, “The word I used to hear a lot was ‘self-hating Jew.’ Like, the only way a Jewish person could possibly care about the humanity of Palestinians is if you hate yourself”), their numbers are growing, and one hopes that this will continue. Israelism was released a few months before the terrorist attacks of October 7th and Israel’s genocidal response, events which make the film timely and important.
Since October 7th, we have seen many of the tactics and talking points used to justify Israel’s crimes that the film depicts return with a vengeance. Chief among them is the by-now ubiquitous claim that calling out Israeli atrocities is somehow anti-Semitic.
Zimmerman is anguished that “so many of the purported leaders of our community have been trying to equate the idea of Palestinian rights itself with anti-Semitism.”
This applies to no one more than Abraham “Abe” Foxman, who until his recent retirement was the long-time head of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an organization masquerading as a civil rights group but which is really a pro-Israeli government outfit which has long sought to redefine anti-Semitism to include “criticisms of Israel.”
These efforts have borne fruit—“The Trump administration issued an executive order adopting” this definition of anti-Semitism “for the purposes of enforcing federal civil rights law,” Michelle Goldberg notes in The New York Times. Foxman says in the film that “it hurts me for a Jewish kid to stand up there and say ‘justice for the Palestinians,’ and not [say] ‘justice for Israelis’; it troubles me, hurts me, bothers me. It means we failed. We failed in educating, in explaining, et cetera.” Many Israel supporters seem to share Foxman’s horror that Jewish people sometimes care about the well-being of people other than themselves.
Israelism explores this deliberate conflation of anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism. Sarah Anne Minkin, of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, is deeply bothered that “The way we talk about anti-Semitism isn’t about protecting Jews, it’s about protecting Israel. How dangerous is that, at this moment with the rise of anti-Semitism?”
Indeed, the film contains footage of the infamous Unite the Right rally featuring hordes of white supremacists marching through Charlottesville, Virginia, with torches, screaming “Jews. Will not. Replace us!” over and over, as well as news footage of the aftermath of the Tree of Life Synagogue mass shooting.
One of the chief tasks of Israeli propagandists has been to conflate such acts with anti-Zionist sentiment. Genuine anti-Semitism of the Charlottesville variety is (obviously) a product of the far right—recall that President Donald Trump famously referred to “very fine people on both sides” of that incident, an unmistakable wink and nod to such fascist groups.
People who comprise such groups, the type who paint swastikas on Jewish homes, are not the same as peace activists marching to end the Israeli occupation. This should not be difficult to understand. But the Israel PR machine has done a marvelous job confusing otherwise intelligent people on this issue.
Also quoted in the film is Ted Cruz, who like Trump is a regular speaker at AIPAC events, and who like many Republicans pitches his political rhetoric to appeal to the very reactionaries who espouse genuinely anti-Semitic sentiments. This does not stop him from having the audacity to refer to criticisms of Israel as anti-Semitic, shamelessly insisting that “the left has a long history of anti-Semitism.”
The American right wing has been hard at work lately, trying to convince gullible people that the rise of actual anti-Semitic incidents is the result of critics of Israel. The New York Times’s Michelle Goldberg reports that “Chris Rufo, the right-wing activist who whipped up nationwide campaigns against critical race theory and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, told me he’s part of a group at the conservative Manhattan Institute workshopping new policy proposals targeting what it sees as campus antisemitism.”
Such efforts apparently convince many liberal-leaning people to agree with UConn Hillel’s Jacqui Schulefand, who as noted above believes that “Israel is Judaism and Judaism is Israel.”
If you believe this, it is understandable how you might come to see criticizing a government’s policies, or the political ideology (Zionism) undergirding them, as anti-Semitic. I do not often profess gratitude for President Biden (indeed, I am really hoping the “Genocide Joe” label sticks), but it was nice to see him publicly state that “You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist. And I’m a Zionist.” This pronouncement clarifies something that the Israel Lobby likes to obscure—that Zionism is a political ideology, like “conservatism,” “socialism” or “libertarianism.”
As such, critiquing it is not racist or anti-Semitic, even if the criticism is inaccurate.
It is always important to consider the ways in which assumptions held uncritically can lead one astray, especially assumptions ingrained from a young age, before people possess the capacity to sufficiently question what they are being told. Israelism is a powerful, thought-provoking film that does this spectacularly. And it does so for a topic that does not get as much attention as it should. Discussions of Christian propaganda are fairly common (again, think of Jesus Camp, or even With God on Our Side), as are denunciations of the kind of Islamic fundamentalist propaganda that comes out of places like Saudi Arabia.
It is almost too easy to go after the Mormons or the Scientologists. But the indoctrination taking place in many Jewish schools gets comparatively little attention. I have written previously of my admiration for people, like Naomi Klein, who frankly discuss the troubling fact that Israeli PR defined much of their early schooling. It is important to have an entire film devoted to the subject. People might not like what they see, but they need to see it.
Israelism is streaming here until January 31st.
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THIS IS A PRO-PALESTINE BLOG.
DO NOT INTERACT IF YOU SUPPORT THE PALESTINIAN GENOCIDE BEING CARRIED OUT BY THE ISRAELI/UNITED STATES GOVERNMENTS AND ARMIES.
Requests for drawings are open! You can ask about a character doing something specific, or just a drawing for a character! Your imagination (and my art skills) are the only limits.
Please ask questions about the fangan! Askbox is DEFINITELY open!!
I LOVE WHEN YOU GUYS DRAW FANART
——————
FAQ
Where can I watch DGNG?
YouTube!
Are we allowed to make NSFW of your characters?
NO.
The main DGNG classmates are all minors, and are seen as minors, even if they are 18. Any NSFW or NSFW-implying works will be asked to be taken down.
Yes, this rule includes Hiriro.
When will the project be finished?
Unsure. At the rate we’re working, the prologue should be out in about two years, give or take. Since the team is one artist and a co-writer, we need time.
Chapters 4+ will take a very long time to create.
When will the first episode release?
In about two years from now.
Is DGNG like a traditional killing game?
Mostly. Some main differences are how motives are laid out and our mascot being a human. Also, sneaky lore things.
Do the characters have canon ages?
Yes! But if you’re unsure of a character’s age, 17 is usually a safe guess. Quana is 9 years old.
Do the characters have birthdays?
Yes! You can find a character’s birthday on their log entry. These are under the #log or #logs tags. Naruko and Nishimura are twins, and have the same birthday - Naruko is 13 minutes older.
Does the cast have unique features and stories?
Absolutely.
Hotel?
Trivago™️
How long has the project been in official production?
About a year to two years, give or take. The DGNG idea was created back in 2019/2020, but the video series production started with Nishimura’s first default sprite. So that’s… *checks notes*
A while.
Will you accept other artists to helping create DGNG?
Most likely not. I don’t trust people with getting the style exact, and I’m also afraid of scaling issues and stuff. Please don’t take it personally!
Will there be voice actors?
Most likely. Harrison (myself) is voicing Nishimura, and MARI is voicing Naruko. Those are the only voices we have so far.
#danganronpa a new generation#fangan#dgng#fanganronpa#danganronpa#fangan character#faq#faq post#frequently asked questions
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So this year has been really, really good in terms of like... reminding/validating that I'm actually like smart and good at what I do?
Like.
First off, I got my new job which whips ass and is super fun and challenging and pays way better and where my ability to do nine million different things is like very valuable. Like oh yeah, I can reformat this word doc/that powerpoint. Do you want me to do a little bit of graphic design to make this actually look nicer? Oh, you need this video for a presentation but it's on a site other than youtube? Yeah sure, I'll rip it for you. And also just the day-to-day of being able to take good notes, and being able to help copyedit training materials, and generally being a pleasant and mostly on top of things person in the office.
THEN, I took one of Killian's creative writing classes along with them. Which, for one thing, was super fun, good teacher, nice to have an organized space/time to hang out and talk about writing. But also it was really validating to have someone outside of the internet/my inner circle of friends read and critique my work who was like... I dunno another adult/serious writer type person? Our teacher is a published poet -- Though more specifically she's prolific as a TRANSLATOR of poetry. A fair number of the translated Palestinian poets you've seen being posted around tumblr recently are most certainly her work. -- and when she realized the level I was writing at she started critiquing my work a lot harder. Still had nice stuff to say! Just also being willing to dig in and point out places where I could improve.
We actually hung out with her last night at a fellow classmate's band's show and she took both me and Killian aside for expanded critique/thoughts on our final pieces, and said some really nice stuff which included that she sees both of us as like professional-grade writers who should continue to hone their craft and who she really wants to see succeed/get shit published/etc. I'm currently letting a short story (that is... probably gonna end up as a novella orz) that I wrote for class sit before I do another draft of it, and then she's offered to do a more critical line edit for me so I can shop it around and get it published somewhere really good.
(Which is also interesting because I see myself as working very much in genre spaces and she's very in the "literary" sort of mode, and she said that she saw a lot of literary prowess and style in how I wrote which she could see getting it published in a more literary type journal. And that's like a weird/wild thought bc of my complicated thoughts on the way the literary/publishing world looks at and treats genre writing blah blah blah....)
At the SAME show, though, our teacher had brought along a friend, who is also a teacher at the community college. Said friend works for the theatre department and recognized me from volunteering to act at a one-day event last semester for Killian's playwriting class. Like this was an event where I was acting for MAYBE a grand total of fifteen minutes. And she basically said "HEY YOU'RE REALLY GOOD, WHY HAVEN'T I SEEN YOU AT ANY OF THE AUDITIONS?" So then I chatted with her some about how I've done a lot of theatre over the years but time/jobs/money meant I haven't had a chance to in a long time...
But now my job is a 9-5! So I gave her my number and I'm now basically the understudy for if/when someone drops out of the productions currently going on. Apparently they have a lot of issues with people dropping suddenly so it's likely that I'll end up doing something next semester! Which is good cuz like. Damn, do I love the theatre, and I've missed it A LOT.
I dunno just having two different people being really impressed about my creative work in a short time was really, really mood/ego boosting? I dunno. When I last did theater in Pittsburgh I ended up feeling really burnt out by the exhausting sense of always having to hunt for work, feeling like I wasn't good enough, etc... And last year I was struggling a lot with feeling like all my writing was futile/unwanted/etc... So having people remember me and be super complimentary was. Nice.
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Diaries of Resistance, part 1
I've kept a note open in my phone since October 2023 for every moment watching human suffering and scrolling past it wasn't enough. It's horrifying that as I scroll down the note now, I know exactly when I wrote it because every day brings a new atrocity.
I am sitting in a car of white people saying that they’re concerned about the polarization of “the conflict,” that people are shouting about Palestine on the path to the dining hall, and that they have the audacity to write “Free Palestine” on the whiteboards of the science building
You too would have stood by silently as the US bombed the hell out of Vietnam and Cambodia, dropped Agent Orange on the children, raped the women and said “the situation in Vietnam is too complex”
You continue to stand by silently as 6 million people are enslaved in Congo mining the cobalt running your tech start up
I feel like I should be doing more somehow. I am guilty that I didn’t say anything earlier when I was exposed to the history while at Columbia. Why didn’t I say something when I heard from a classmate who literally ran away from IDF soldiers shooting at her? Why didn’t I don the keffiyeh when it was offered to me?
Guilt does nothing for the past. I can only move forward now.
My grandma tells me about her brother who was shot and murdered by French soldiers while he was wandering in the fields because they thought he was a revolutionary fighter. They didn’t even bother to tell our family about their little misfire. Someone found his body in the ditches and ran back to tell us.
My grandma is the last one alive out of her siblings. There is no else left to mourn my great-uncle’s premature demise but her. Where is his monument, the tomb of the unknown Vietnamese man? Perhaps I’ll stumble into his ghost wandering the quiet rice fields of Long An.
Did you know that there are Facebook groups for Vietnamese people who used to be in the refugee camps? They share pictures of the food labels of the UN aid they received and pictures of the captains that steered the boats of desperate hungry people safely to shore. I read a poem about the instant noodles they used to eat. My dad remembers his time at the Thai refugee camp as a good time. “The Catholic priests put us all to work,” he says. “I don’t mind working.”
The UN gave out plastic food toys to the children of Gaza. To the starving children of Gaza. How can I describe violence when its verdict is death by apoptosis, one cell at a time?
I’ve cried every day for the past month. It’s because even the thought of it, the thought of the little boy clutching his beloved cat, the mother screaming for her daughter in the halls of that hospital, and the father straining to hear the voices of his children under the rubble, it hits my central wound. Israel is not just tearing limbs and families apart: it disfigures every aspect of Palestinian identity. It is a poison that mutates a child into a headless corpse, a doctor into a childless parent, and an olive tree into dust. It denies the Palestinian spirit the right to exist as it is and how it should. Watching these videos, it’s as if I’m torn apart too as I’m transported through time. I see my grandma, then 8 years old, leave her school as French soldiers surround it, never to return; I see Bella Hadid’s father kicked out of the home that his family had opened to the Jewish refugees who were now appropriating it. So I cry silently in my room, door closed, sounds of airstrikes and begging children threading through my AirPods. I cry until my eyes run dry, then I put my phone away and go back to my homework. I’ll be back tomorrow.
I have to remind myself that to cry is to feel the wound of humanity for myself. To cry is to open myself to the possibility of living other people’s deepest pain. To cry is to resist the mainstream’s tendency to turn people into numbers or human shields. To cry is to be aware and awake. To cry is to accept my place in the universe as just another human connected to other humans by nature of existing.
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a brief scroll through my facebook feed, notes from my palestinian friends:
one had finished his schooling in geneva and had traveled with his family to be with friends and family for the end of ramadan and eid al-fitr. his family is safe (for now), but they are in gaza. they cannot visit those family and friends due to the bombs, and the fact that the bombs have killed their friends, and the family of their friends.
one wrote that the sounds of airplanes and bombs are in the background 24/7 and she is stressed and anxious for her turn to be bombed.
one lives in ireland and spoke briefly at the rally in dublin but couldn't speak for long because he was overcome by emotion. he saw his best friend killed by the IDF in 2014. he was just a child then.
i know each of these people. i call them my "kids" because i taught them at a leadership conference for a week where we are with one another every waking hour. what they have already had to live through (all of them are from gaza) in their lives is heartbreaking, and it hasn't stopped. these are just three brief stories from people that i know. people who taught me about their culture, were patient with me when i had questions, showed me their dances and songs and the joy they have for being palestinian, fed me traditional dishes that they made by hand....
the first and the second, the ones in gaza right now, are in danger. they cannot leave gaza without the permission of israel. that's not a joke. that is fucking reality. if they wanted to flee to someplace that wasn't being bombed, they couldn't. i'm sure they WANT to flee but why even entertain the wish? it's impossible. electricity is limited in gaza in the best of times (maybe 6 hours a day) and under these conditions? yeah, right.
there has been an underlying current of worry in my life since the last friday of ramadan. i worry for my kids, for their friends and families and teachers and classmates. gaza is being bombed indiscriminately, and any one of those could kill them.
#free palestine#save sheikh jarrah#save gaza#for the record: i do not give a SHIT about this celeb or that saying something or not#it truly doesn't matter to me#this is my role: to spread awareness where i can#and to help others see what's happening
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I don't require anyone to absolutely love Israel. I don't unquestioningly love Israel, and I'm a Zionist.
But if someone vehemently hates Israel, and they don't have the personal history that too many Palestinians have of "The Israeli army literally knocked over my house and destroyed everything I own," I'm calling bullshit. I don't have opinions that strong about foreign countries' existing.
so if someone says "I'm anti-zionist" what I hear is "you probably shouldn't trust me"
Like... I am generally not in favor of monarchies or theocracies, so I'm not a big fan of Saudi Arabia. But I don't hate Saudi Arabia or organize a protest when a Saudi actor gets a role in a movie.
The Saudi royal family can absolutely go fuck themselves, but the rest of the population is probably about as cool as most people. I had Saudi classmates in undergrad. They were cool. We compared notes about food and linguistics.
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On Thursday, Nov. 21, a week before Thanksgiving, 500 high school students settled into their seats in the auditorium of the Fieldston School’s main campus, which sprawls over 18 leafy, manicured acres in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, to learn about apartheid. The invited speaker was Kayum Ahmed, an employee of the Open Society Foundations and adjunct faculty member at Columbia University Law School.
Ahmed’s initial presentation at Fieldston went off without a hitch, according to multiple people who attended the talk. But then came the question and answer period. In a video of his response to a student’s query, Ahmed explained his theory of patterns of trauma and oppression, and how they relate to Jews who were massacred during the Holocaust.
“The [Nazi] attacks are a shameful part of history, but in some ways it reflects the fluidity between those who are victims becoming perpetrators,” Ahmed told the Fieldston students and faculty. “I use the same example in talking about the Holocaust. That Jews who suffered in the Holocaust and established the State of Israel today—they perpetuate violence against Palestinians that [is] unthinkable,” he opined.
Ahmed’s comment sent a jolt through the room, students who were present there told Tablet, yet no one present questioned Ahmed’s assertion that survivors of the Holocaust had metabolized the trauma of their own mass murder to inflict “unthinkable” violence on Palestinians. Jewish parents at Fieldston who heard about Ahmed’s remarks were shaken and outraged, texting in chat circles and even threatening, privately, to withdraw their children from the school. A video clip of Ahmed’s presentation began to circulate amongst the school’s community, confirming the veracity of the recollections that upset students had shared with their parents.
As the crowd filtered out of the auditorium, some of the Jewish students present registered the moment with fear and confusion, according to multiple parents and others familiar with the event. In a classroom later that day, one Jewish student shared that Ahmed’s comment was upsetting. According to someone with direct knowledge of the situation, the teacher allegedly responded that there might be less concern about the Holocaust if more people were familiar with the genocides in other nations.
...Parents certainly had reason to be upset; some were the direct descendants of Holocaust survivors, and others had familial or emotional ties to Israel, a small country located in a region of the world where there is no shortage of states and radical fundamentalist groups that routinely echo Nazi calls for the extermination of Jewish populations. Moreover, the Ahmed event was only the latest in a series of what a number of Jewish parents saw as problematic experiences for Jews at the school, which they said had been escalating since 2015...
...In the wake of the event, J.B. Brager, one of the history department’s instructors who teaches a Holocaust elective, posted several public Twitter messages about the event and the resulting upset—none of which acknowledged the feelings of Jewish students or parents, or even the history of the Holocaust and the effects of trauma on its victims. Instead, Brager chose to use the moment to assert her support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. “I refuse to ‘reaffirm the value’ of ethno-nationalist settler colonialism,” Brager wrote. “I support BDS and Palestinian sovereignty and I have for my entire adult life.”
...Tablet also interviewed the parents of more than two dozen Jewish students, past and present—all of whom, regardless of wealth or status, said that they were too frightened to be quoted by name. All said they specifically feared that public disclosure of their discomfort would cause retaliation by administrators and faculty—who they needed to write recommendations for their children’s college applications or transfer applications to other private high schools. The situation at Fieldston could be worse, they told me, though that perhaps depends on your perspective. “So far, no one’s throwing things at me and yelling ‘Dirty Jew,’ so it’s fine,” one parent wryly noted, in resignation. “But everyone else is going to leave.”
...In their purchase of a Fieldston education, parents aren’t buying an assurance that their children will be able to read Latin, apply basic principles of physics, or score a standard deviation or two higher than the norm on calculus tests. In exchange for the financial support and volunteer board hours, what Fieldston and other New York private schools are rewarding their patrons with is safe passage to the American elite.
...For many of Fieldston’s Jewish families, several told me, what distinguishes the problem at their school can be traced to the recently implemented Affinity Group program. Rolled out in 2015 as a new mandatory part of the curriculum, the Affinity groups asked parents of students in the third, fourth, and fifth grades to tell their children that they would need to select a group to join based on how that student defined their own identity. Over the course of the spring semester, parents were told, students would be segregated into groups based on a single selection from a set of options: African American or Black; Asian or Pacific Islander; Latino; Multiracial; White; or “Not Sure,” which consisted of “a cross-racial dialogue group” designed to make “your child feel more comfortable.”
...At the time, several families asked the school to add a Jewish affinity group; they acknowledged that no other religious group was offered, but argued that Jewishness should also be seen as a marker of ethnic and minority identity—not least because it has been for centuries by Jewish oppressors. According to several parents, they were politely but firmly told that no such group would be forthcoming. “Many parents were aghast,” one parent with multiple children at Fieldston told me.
...As certain teachers remodeled their courses, Jewish students found that their concerns about anti-Semitism were met by fellow classmates who plainly suggested that, first, they should be considered white and privileged—and that second, as such, they could not be considered victims of discrimination.
It was a two-step that shocked and frightened certain Jewish parents—first erasing what they understood to be the history of Jewish exclusion, isolation and murder, while simultaneously confining Jews to the category of history’s not-good people.
...For Jewish parents, the result of these changes isn’t simply the sense of injustice at the prospect of their children becoming targets for social exclusion, bullying, and officially-sanctioned condemnation for holding or expressing normative in-group beliefs —like a belief in the uniqueness of the Holocaust, or that the State of Israel isn’t effusively evil. The lit match here was that “Jews” were nowhere to be found on the roster of oppressed groups.
It’s an absence that is quite deliberate, and yet, because many Jews don’t seem to quite get that, it results in furious and often unintentionally hilariously medieval-seeming debates, both within Jewish communities, and between Jews and “woke” believers about whether Jews with white skin or dark skin are in fact “white,” what degree of victim-privilege Jewish “whiteness” or non-“whiteness” should properly confer, how much possible Sephardic or Mizrahi blood can one reasonably lay claim to in order to join the good team, and so on.
During that same academic year, swastikas began appearing in Fieldston halls and classrooms. In what would become a recurring theme for some Jewish families, parents told me that they were taken aback when school leadership responded to the initial appearance of the swastikas with a presentation for students that foregrounded “the ancient history of the symbol,” as one parent who saw the presentation told me. There appeared to be no significant scrutiny of what the symbol meant after it had become the Nazi emblem, and there appeared to be no mention of its relation to the slaughter of millions of Jews, the parent said.
Facing an uproar over the presentation and the lack of any strong, community-wide condemnation of the incidents, the school sent out a second letter, shared with Tablet, that identified the swastika “as a hateful symbol of the Nazi genocide, the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, fascism, and the destruction of European Jewry and other victims of the Nazi regime.”
...Of course the problem then got worse. Toward the end of the 2017 spring semester, George Burns, who for almost two decades had been the principal of the grade school’s younger division and who had been an advocate of the Affinity Group program, abruptly left. His departure was as much of a surprise as the rumored reason behind it.
According to a report in the New York Times, Burns was discussing parent pushback to the Affinity Groups with the recently hired head of the school, Jessica Bagby, who allegedly then told him who she thought the program’s critics were: “It’s the Zionists—the Jews.” Burns later filed a report to the school’s human resources department; shortly after, Burns announced his retirement. “Mr. Burns had worked there for 18 years and had given no indication that he planned to retire,” the Times report said. “Almost no one believed that his departure was entirely voluntary.”
In an interview with the Times, Bagby disputed the account. “I said to him at the time, ʻWe have a problem in that some members of our community who identify themselves as Jewish, and some who even might identify themselves—self-identify—as Zionists, do not feel embraced by this program.’”
For some Jewish parents, it was a distinction without much difference. Bagby’s remarks had a perhaps unintentional but palpable edge. Since no one in the progressive cultural sphere has used the word “Zionist” as anything other than a curseword for at least a decade, her remarks implied to them that parents “who even might identify—self-identify—as Zionists” had themselves to blame for not being embraced by a program that would not and should not, in fact, embrace them.
Whatever the proper interpretation of Bagby’s remarks might be, the willingness of her school to take anti-Semitism seriously was about to be tested by national tragedy. On Oct. 27, 2018, 11 Jews were murdered during a religious service at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. The night of the attack, the school sent out a note expressing sympathy for the victims, and horror at the attack.
But later that week, the school sent out another letter, shared with Tablet, which declared the committee’s dismay at the slayings while highlighting the positive reaction by the Muslim community of Pittsburgh—as though anti-Semitism was somehow a narrow detail in relations between Jews and Muslims. “[We are] heartsick for the state of our national dialogue and concerned for the safety of the vulnerable among us. We are also heartened by the clear voices of empathy across the spectrum of political views and overflowing acts of kindness, such as the pledge by the Muslim community of Pittsburgh to protect synagogues,” they wrote.
The letter then went on to explain that the theme of the year’s multicultural programming would be “Intersectionality,” with the first event a community day where guest speakers will explain “what Intersectionality means to them and what effect it has on their lives as they work toward equity and social justice.” The committee signed off by highlighting the Multicultural Committee’s recent progress, including a mention of the various faculty who over the summer participated in “anti-bias training for white educators.”
According to several Jewish parents who read the letter, they were stunned by the absence of the word “anti-Semitism”—the specific hatred against Jews that was the defining characteristic of the mass shooting.
“There was no mention of the murder of Jews,” one parent told me. “It talked about how the Muslim community really helped the Jewish community in a time of crisis. And you know, that’s great they did. I think that’s beautiful they helped. But what’s the point of including that in a letter that should be about a horrendous act of anti-Semitism?”
The school’s disparate tone was made all the more stark several days later, when after a gunman killed one and left three injured in a shooting at a synagogue in Poway, California, near San Diego, Fieldston distributed a community-wide letter that did not identify the victims as Jewish but instead as “Passover worshippers”—and which then contextualized the shooting among other recent events. “Hatred and religious violence across our globe at houses of worship since the 2015 murder of congregants at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, should be unimaginable. Nevertheless, in just the last three months, since the horrific mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, this once unfathomable crime seems unrelenting in our news cycle.”
Though this letter mentioned the word “anti-Semitism,” according to multiple parents Bagby’s contextualizing of the anti-Semitic shooting with hate crimes against other religious denominations...was one further example of the school’s apparent aversion to explicitly singling out violence or hatred against Jews as worthy of specific concern or condemnation.
...Several Jewish parents said that this emerging herd mentality had other more direct repercussions: While some of the school’s administrators and faculty have expressed solidarity with Jewish families in private, there’s a fear, according to multiple employees, that any public activism on behalf of the Jewish families will lead to that member of the staff becoming ostracized by their colleagues. This is particularly important because, unlike nearly every other elite private school in New York City, the faculty at Fieldston are unionized—which endows them with a power their colleagues at other schools lack in disputes with the board or the administration.
...By Monday, the leadership of the school was anxious to quell the growing unrest, a person familiar with the leadership’s decision making said, but lawyers cautioned school leaders that a revised statement being circulated was too critical of Kayum Ahmed directly and might ostensibly expose the school to libel charges, according to this person. Some involved in the discussion of the response felt the risk was justified by the necessity to reaffirm an unequivocal position against anti-Semitism, particularly in light of other recent incidents at the school—but that position, according to a person familiar with the drafting process, was not universally endorsed by all parties involved in finalizing the statement. There was enough dissent among the board and administration about how to properly respond that some proposed waiting for after the Thanksgiving break to publicly acknowledge the incident...
Following the wide dissemination of the video clip, concerned parents now reached out directly to the school wondering about the circumstances that led to Ahmed’s presentation. On Wednesday morning, Bagby signed off on a final letter that was sent to the Fieldston community at large. “We are taking the opportunity brought by this incident not to discuss this particular speaker or his words, but to reaffirm our institution’s firmly held values,” she declared. “We will not accept Anti-Semitism. We will not accept racism. We will not accept sexism. We will not accept homophobia. We will not accept transphobia. We will not accept xenophobia. We will not accept hatred in all its ugly shapes and forms.”
Bagby’s response landed with a thud among Jewish parents, several of them told me. “That letter was worse than doing nothing,” one father explained, pointing out that school’s inability to single out anti-Semitism, coupled with the lack of any direct condemnation of the content of Ahmed’s remarks, reflected a lack of courage or willingness to stand up against this particular form of hatred. “It was simply a ‘fuck you,’ and entirely infuriating,” he said. Another parent I spoke with wearily acknowledged to herself that the school’s response was “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” and immediately began the process of finding another school for her children.
For these parents who’d themselves encountered incidents of anti-Semitism at Fieldston or watched their children endure such trials, there was a hope that if the school would only ramp up its educational offerings on the Holocaust or on anti-Semitic bias the campus experience of Jewish students would improve, several parents told me. There had been a time, they recalled, when the school held regular assemblies with Holocaust survivors, including a Holocaust Remembrance Day—which the school no longer includes in its annual calendar of events.
Yet, as some of these same parents recognized, Fieldston is a different place for Jews than it was before, perhaps because New York City is a different place. As one parent observed, Jewish education in New York happened every day for children who would encounter Holocaust survivors at the synagogue, at the kosher butcher’s, and at family birthday parties where explanations would accompany the tattoos on guests’ forearms. At this point, the expectation that elite schools like Fieldston will wholeheartedly embrace Jewish students—let alone encourage the kind of Jewish self-awareness that students are not receiving in their home environments—seems, at best, misplaced. All of which is rather unfortunate—and not just for Jewish students and their parents...
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I don’t agree with everything in this piece, especially with respect to the author’s “understanding” of intersectionality and white privilege. That being said, the underlying issue at Fieldston and the denial of antisemitism as an actual, real type of discrimination when Jews are being killed, beaten, and harassed for being Jews (regardless of whether we’re white or not) is something that bears acknowledgment.
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“There were reactions to my article, if you look at the comments on there, basically calling me Islamophobic, calling me racist, a liar, just all these horrible things by my classmates, telling people that are supporting me to shut the f**k up, all these types of things,” she told The Algemeiner in an interview.
Anti-Israel groups on campus then circulated a petition that, Gunz said, did not mention her name, but given that she was the only pro-Israel activist on campus, was unquestionably directed at her personally.
“It came to my attention that there was this petition,” she said. “It was inspired by me, it doesn’t say anything by name, that it’s me, but it says ‘a certain subset of Zionist activists.’ And that’s just me. I’m clearly outnumbered on this campus, right?”
“All the student groups signed it, professors signed it, a bunch of my classmates signed it, so it’s basically saying that if you are anything less than unequivocally supportive of the Palestinian groups, you shouldn’t be at this school,” she noted. “And then I was accused of ‘Zionist violence.’ I don’t know how my words are violent, but there it is.”
Under the heading “Solidarity With Palestine at CUNY Law,” the petition, titled “CUNY Law Student groups, Students, Alumni and Faculty stand with SJP and Palestinian students,” claimed, “A subset of Zionist activists choose to weaponize the genuine threats of antisemitism elsewhere in our society as a tactic to repress activism and harass and threaten Palestinian students and Muslim students more broadly.”
The petition was signed by, among others, SJP, which has been linked to a rise in antisemitism and anti-Jewish violence on US campuses, the leftist Jewish Law Students Association, the Muslim Law Students Association, the Black Law Students Association and the Asian Pacific Law Students Association.
It was also endorsed by numerous faculty members, including Frank E. Deale, Allie Robbins, Sarah Lamdan, Julia Hernandez, Victor Goode, Chaumtoli Huq, Cynthia Soohoo, Princess Masilungan, Saba Ahmed and Lisa Davis.
Asked whether she received any support during this time, Gunz said, “No. The faculty did not care.”
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‘Illegal Occupied Regime of Isra-hell’ is Trying to ‘Break’ this East Jerusalem Village — With Brutal Results
Malek is the latest child in occupied Issawiya to lose an eye from a rubber bullet as ‘Zionist Cunts’ Terrorist Occupied Isra-helli Police’ intensify repression of Palestinian residents.
— By Judith Sudilovsky | February 25, 2020 | Dr. Norman Gary Finkelstein | 972Mag.Com
Malek Issa at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. Malek was shot in the eye by a sponge-tipped bullet fired by an Israeli police officer in Issawiya on February 15, 2020
For more than a week since their nine-year-old son Malek was shot in the eye by a sponge-tipped bullet, Wael and Sawsan Issa kept vigil over him together with friends and relatives at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, first at the intensive care unit and then at the pediatric ward.
Despite several surgeries, doctors were unable to save Malek’s left eye and thus had to remove it. After being sent home on Monday, the family returned to Hadassah a few hours later due to the pain the boy was suffering.
Concerns that Malek might have suffered brain damage have been allayed and he has been communicating, says his father Wael Issa. “He is sleeping. He does not want to speak with anyone. It hurts and he wants quiet. It will take some time.”
The bullet that hit Malek’s head was shot by an Israeli police officer on Feb. 15, during an arrest raid by Israeli forces in the Palestinian village of Issawiya in East Jerusalem. According to press reports, the officer claimed he had shot the bullet at a wall to calibrate his sights.
The police also claimed they were responding to protests they had encountered during the arrest; however, video footage of the incident showed only normal street traffic in the area.
“We know the boy was injured in the upper part of the body when the police were on patrol in the area,” Police Spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told +972. “As far as we know, the incident is being investigated by the Ministry of Justice,” as per protocol when civilians are injured by a police officer, he says.
Issa charges that the bullet was aimed directly at the middle of his son’s forehead.
An Israeli Border Policewoman stands guard during a demonstration in Issawiya, East Jerusalem, against the new cement blockades at the entrances to Issawiya, on November 12, 2014.
Eyewitnesses, including Malek’s 10-year-old cousin who had been with him and his two sisters when they stopped at a kiosk to buy a sandwich, also say there were no disturbances on the street.
The cousin, whose mother asked that his name not be used, explained that Malek did not hear his sisters telling him to wait because there were soldiers in the street, and had run ahead of them. “Then he fell to the floor,” the cousin said.
For the cousin’s mother, this incident is a familiar story in Issawiya. “The police come to make arrests when the children are coming out of school,” she says. After the shooting, her child “was very nervous at home. It is as if they also injured my son.” A social worker and psychologist were to meet Malek’s classmates to help deal with their traumas from the event, she added.
The shooting is not an isolated incident. Malek is the eleventh child from Issawiya to lose an eye from a rubber-tipped bullet, says his father, who has left his job at a Tel Aviv restaurant to be with his son while he recovers. His wife and daughters have sought counseling, he notes, but he is doing without.
Issawiya has been the site of increased police patrols and arrests since last summer, with over 700 people arrested and one youth killed. Residents have complained of constant harassment by the Israeli authorities, with parents fearing for their children’s safety in public.
“I don’t allow my children to go outside and play anywhere,” says Issa. “I’m afraid all the time. But they had come back from school, and their mother told them that it was a nice day and that they could walk home from where the bus dropped them off. They stopped for a minute to buy some sweets, and despite all my precautions, Malek was shot.”
Israeli Border Police blocking the entrance to the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Issawiya, checking every Palestinian wanting to pass, on Friday, October 16, 2015.
A tour through the village reveals many apartment buildings donning brand new roll-down blinds — not out of aesthetic concern or because people have money to spend, but for protection against stray bullets, says community leader Mohammed Abu-Hummos.
“It is a daily thing,” says fellow village resident Hashem Ashahab, who has five children. “The police come to create tension. There was an agreement (with local leaders) that they would not come when schools let the children out, but they broke the agreement… Why do the police always choose to come to make their arrests and patrols during the time when there is the most traffic? I have five children, three of them go to school, and I am always afraid something will happen to them. [But] I can’t not send my children to school.”
Climbing into a minivan used for local transportation in Issawiya, a woman, 35, who declined to give her name, says incidents between the police and the youth could break out at any moment, and residents always have to be on alert.
Aviv Tatarsky, a research assistant at Ir Amim who has been tracking the situation in Issawiya in cooperation with local Palestinian residents, explains that there has been “quite an intense police disruption of freedom of movement and safety of the residents” in the village since June 2019.
Though the intensity of the summer raids have decreased for now, they are still ongoing, Tatarsky says. Despite dialogue between the police and local leaders under the auspices of the Jerusalem municipality, he adds, police have disregarded the agreements reached, as resident Ashahab similarly charged.
The Jerusalem municipal courts and the Israeli Welfare Ministry have not been vocal enough against the police raids which disrupt the lives of the village residents, continues Tatarsky, though council members Laura Wharton and Yossi Chaviliao, together with a group of 40 school principals, have appealed to Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Lion about the situation. “Maybe a few things are said behind closed doors but certainly not in the open,” he says.
Palestinian women look on during a raid by Israeli police in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Issawiya, July 1, 2019.
A high-ranking official in the municipality’s education department tried to offer himself as an intermediary between the residents and the police, says Tatarsky. “But without the backing of the mayor they do not have the power to stop the police.”
Police Spokesman Rosenfeld told +972 that police patrols are carried out in all East Jerusalem villages to prevent violent activities from taking place and to respond when they do occur.
He says that “severe incidents” had been taking place over the past months in the neighborhood, including petrol bombs and stones thrown at police cars and at cars traveling along the Jerusalem-Ma’aleh Adumim highway (Road 1), located below the village. In October, he added, a local resident’s vehicle was hit by a Molotov cocktail intended for a police car. “Unfortunately in that village, there are many more incidents than in other villages,” says Rosenfeld.
“Our police officers are in contact with leaders of the community in order to try to prevent incidents from taking place,” he continues. “Our message for the community is to prevent incidents before they take place. Police will continue patrolling the area day and night in order to prevent violent incidents both in and around the village.”
Tatarsky holds that the image of Issawiya as a hot-bed of violence is more of a creation of Israeli imagination than anything else. “If you look for attacks or groups who are active in Issawiya you will find none. It is very telling that the police have not been able to show any single event or series of events that prompted its attacks.”
Current Jerusalem police chief Doron Yadid, attending an Economy Committee meeting at the Knesset in Jerusalem on March 20, 2017.
Tatarsky links the increased police presence to new Jerusalem Police Chief Maj. Gen. Doron Yadid, who replaced Yoram Halevi in February 2019. According to Tatarsky, the intensified raids began just a few months after Yadid took over.
“He made a few changes in policing East Jerusalem, more aggressive,” he explains. For example, Yadid re-introduced the use of border police in Palestinian neighborhoods instead of the regular community police patrols which had been used by his predecessor.
But Yadid’s hardline tactics to disrupt daily life including through collective punishment to “break” Issawiya residents is a “big mistake,” warns Tatarsky. “He achieved the opposite: resistance and opposition. Opposition against military presence in the neighborhood is… worse than it used to be with his predecessor. Border police are not welcome in Issawiya.”
Moreover, according to Tatarsky, out of some 700 arrests made by the police, only 20 indictments have been issued, and even then for acts that were committed only because the police entered the neighborhood.
“You terrorize youth who now have all kinds of psychological damage and anger. This has caused more damage and (the police chief) is not able to show anything he actually achieved,” says Tatarsky.
“What is happening in Issawiya is unprecedented,” he adds. “We never had such an intensive violent disruptive campaign with really no reason and for so long.”
— Judith Sudilovsky is a freelance journalist who has covered Israel and the Palestinian Territories for over 25 years.
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Forgiving Sirhan Sirhan
Sometimes life imitates art (and sometimes just the reverse), but what is true about art is true about religion as well: there are times when specific issues are on our minds owing to the nearness of a holiday or some imminent life cycle moment…and then, just as we are focused on that specific issue, it appears on the front page of the paper in some wholly other context and invites us to consider its intricacies from an entirely different angle.
As we count down the days to Rosh Hashanah, the question of forgiveness is on our minds…and in a dozen different ways. If we have wronged someone in the course of the year now ending, can we ask for forgiveness in a way that provokes a charitable response on the part of the ill-treated party? If we have behaved poorly (even in a way known solely to ourselves), can we repent us of our sin sufficiently meaningfully and wholeheartedly for us not to be judged harshly during the course of these coming Days of Judgment? If we have remained silent and inert while seeing another soul being wronged or demeaned, or treated unjustly—or even while merely knowing that someone was being treated in one of those ways, can we forgive ourselves to the extent necessary to stand up in shul and recite our Rosh Hashanah prayers without feeling like hypocrites? Owning up to our own weaknesses of character and errors of judgment is, after all, not quite as easy as it sounds in that it requires a level of self-awareness and candor that comes naturally to almost none of us. So to do it at all is difficult. But to do it because we truly regret our errors of judgment and moral missteps and not merely because we hope merely to garner for ourselves a good write-up in God’s great Book of Life—that is neither a simple nor a straightforward path for any of us to follow.
So those were the ideas that have been occupying me in these last weeks as we move ever closer to the Days of Awe. And then I opened the paper the other day and who should be looking out at me if not Sirhan Sirhan, the man convicted of murdering Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 and sentenced the following year to be executed for his crime. (In 1972, when the California Supreme Court determined that capital punishment was in violation of the state constitution’s stricture against cruel or unusual punishment, his sentence was retroactively commuted to life in prison.) The years passed. As generally happens with the incarcerated, the public heard almost nothing about him. From time to time, a brief note would appear in the paper reporting that Sirhan had yet again been denied parole. But then, just one week ago, Sirhan appeared for a sixteenth time before the parole board and this time he was recommended for parole.
Their recommendation, it turns out, does not guarantee his release. First, there will be a ninety-day review by the California Board of Parole Hearings. And then Governor Gavin Newsom will have thirty days to accept the parole board’s recommendation or to alter it or to reject it. The governor, who has his own hands full with a serious effort to remove him from office, has not indicated how he will respond. Sirhan Sirhan was twenty-four years old at the time of RFK’s assassination and is now seventy-seven.
I remember Robert Kennedy’s assassination vividly. I was just wrapping up tenth grade when he was killed on June 5, 1968. And I was a huge fan, one of my only classmates to prefer his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president to Eugene McCarthy’s. He had his flaws, to be sure. But he had been a presence in American life since the John Kennedy presidency, during the course of which he served not only as his brother’s Attorney General, but also as his closest advisor. As a result, his willingness to run for president represented—to many of us, at least, including to myself and my parents—the possibility of returning to Camelot, of restoring some version of the John Kennedy presidency to our riven country just five years after Dallas.
And then, in a heartbeat, it was over. The images are, at least for people my age, indelible. RFK lying on the floor of that hotel kitchen. The busboy putting a rosary in Kennedy’s hands while he was still conscious. The funeral service at St. Patrick’s. Andy Williams singing The Battle Hymn of the Republic. The nighttime burial in Arlington. John Glenn presenting the flag to Ted Kennedy, then the latter handing it to his mother.
The assassin, a Palestinian without American citizenship, was motivated to murder Kennedy because of the latter’s support for Israel. So that’s certainly part of the story—in general as well, but for me personally in an intense, meaningful way.
And now the newspaper meets the Machzor and challenges me, not to decide what the man’s fate should be (that will ultimately fall to the governor of California, Newsom or whomever), but answer a series of simple questions prompted by the parole board’s decision. Is forgiveness a gift that must be freely offered or can it be earned? If the former, can it be offered other than by the wronged party? (That is obviously an impossibility if the wronged party is dead.) Society can free RFK’s murderer…but would that be tantamount to forgiving the man? The man has been in jail for fifty-three years. He claims to have been drunk when he murdered RFK, a man he had never met and did not know personally. He admits his guilt, but only because he feels it was proven in court, not because he has any recollections at all of the actual event. He is clearly a danger to no one at all at this point. And so the parole board felt that he had earned the right to live free for whatever time he has left. They clearly have the right to free (or to start that ball rolling). But can they forgive?
The responses to the parole board’s decision have been fast and furious. Six of Robert Kennedy’s children expressed outrage that their father’s murdered could possibly be allowed to get on with his life, while their father remains dead and thus unable to get on with his. (To see Maxwell Taylor Kennedy’s op-ed piece opposing parole from the Los Angeles Times, click here. To read Rory Kennedy’s piece published yesterday in the New York Times, click here.) But two of RFK’s sons, Douglas Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., support the board’s decision, the latter going so far as to say that he was grateful to have lived to see the day on which his father’s murdered could be deemed “worthy of compassion and love.” Clearly, they forgive their father’s murderer. But do they have that right? That’s the question the whole story has challenged me to ponder.
That Sirhan Sirhan is a different man at seventy-seven than he was at twenty-four is hardly an impressive achievement: of what seventy-seven year old could not the same thing be said? But the question here is neither whether he is a new man or whether he regrets his actions. Nor is the question for me personally to consider whether the man will or will not constitute a danger to society if he is freed. (Those are obviously huge questions for the parole board to work through. But I don’t sit on that board—and I’m asking a different question here, one related to the question of forgiveness, not to the actual decision regarding Sirhan Sirhan’s release from prison.) Our tradition is clear that bad deeds fall into three categories: those which can be forgiven by the wronged party (whom the doer of the deed must find the courage to approach and ask for forgiveness), those which cannot be forgiven by the wronged party because the latter is dead (in which case tradition suggests convening a minyan at the grave of that individual, publicly confessing to the wrongdoing, and praying for God’s mercy), and those which cannot be forgiven because the aggressed-against party is not known (in which case all the doer of the deed can do is to fast, confess the wrongdoing, and pray for forgiveness). There are a thousand subcategories to those categories, but all are rooted in the same simple concept that only the wronged individual can forgive the wrongdoer. The rest of us can be understanding, generous, kind, and non-judgmental. But if you wish forgiveness, tradition instructs you to find the courage to address the wronged party and to ask—simply and unequivocally—for that individual’s forgiveness. Nothing more than that. But also nothing less.
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Day One Hundred Five
It was a somber morning at my school, as I’m sure it was at others, too. During our PLC meeting we talked about what we’d say in response to the shooting, and about how all our families- like students’ families- desperately want to hold us close every time this happens. I said (and also wrote on Twitter just a bit ago) that I feel for my mom and dad, who weren't prepared to worry about their teacher daughter as much as their soldier son. It was good to have a bit of time to talk about that.
And then we went and faced our students.
I had one boy in class who was really upset, which I was expecting. He expressed it by slamming everything he could (my door, a laptop, his binder, etc...) and calling it trash. I did my best to be totally calm in response, and that seemed to help deescalate him, but he did end up calling his mom to dismiss him. And, hey, if that’s what he needs, that’s what he needs.
Meantime, class went on, as it must.
I was trying out a new lesson using ProCon. I had students get in groups of their choosing (4 people max). Each group had to go on the site and take notes about a particular issue in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. After they did that, I regrouped them so each student in a group had notes about a different issue. They shared what they’d learned, and then I took the last five minutes of class to sum it up and link it to the next lesson, which will come after a week of vacation (stay tuned, kids...)
I think it went well in both my classes, but it went REALLY well in my Block 3 class. They actually had bigger discussions than I’d expected them to have when they were sharing what they’d learned; they started talking about possible solutions to the issues, and voicing their own opinions about the conflict, and I just listened in gleefully. My Block 4 class wasn’t there yet, but that’s okay... Emphasis on the yet.
The best part of my day was Block 5. That’s my prep time, but today I spent it in Mr. I’s Holocaust & Genocide Studies class because he had a guest lecturer: Tom White from Keene State’s Cohen Center. And, longer ago than I care to admit, Mr. White was my AP Euro teacher. More than that, he was the best teacher I ever had.
He’s the reason I became a social studies teacher.
And, man, sitting in class while he taught was incredible. It took me back to all the mornings I spent in AP Euro- first block every other day of my senior year- and it reminded me how GOOD he is. It’s not easy to hold a class’ attention for 80 minutes, but Mr. I’s students were as spellbound and inspired by him as my classmates and I always were.
One of them, who was in World with me two years ago, told me she could tell I’d learned how to teach from him, which is the best compliment I’ve ever gotten. I’m not as good as he is, but I aspire to be that good. And so much of what I do as a teacher is me mimicking him... even more than I’m generally aware, I think.
It was awesome to see him, and to walk him to the doors of MY school- where I am because of him- after the bell. And awesome, too, to end a somber day with joy.
#teaching#teachblr#educhums#edublr#education#social studies#high school#teacher#guest speaker#tom white#mr. white is the best teacher I ever had#Mr. I#stop gun violence#procon#conversations about current events#plc#Day One Hundred Five
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So my younger brother’s 10th Grade history teacher was teaching the class about the Middle East, and had a little segment on Israel. My brother asked why Palestine wasn’t included in his list of countries or on the map, and the teacher responded by saying “because Palestine doesn’t exist”.
Needless to say, this upset my brother, who has lived and grown up in Palestine and been harassed, abused, and held at gunpoint by the IDF, so my brother responded by asking him “so then what am I and where am I from, if Palestine isn’t real?” The teacher responded by laughing at him and brushing it aside and said something along the lines of “I don’t know, but Palestine isn’t real” and proceeded to tease him about it.
That same day, other students in the class teased by brother with the usual juvenile taunts of “ha ha, you don’t have a country!”, which ofc sounds incredibly stupid, but they go at it anyways.
My brother tried talking to the teacher one on one, and got nowhere. This same teacher has on occasion made various racist jokes, to which he’s added “Trump is president now, so I’m allowed to say this”.
My brother went to the principal just to make his complaint noted, and after struggling to meet with her, managed to sit down and have a conversation with her where he presented everything about his teacher to her, from his remarks on Palestine to the various other racist comments the teacher has made.
The principals response?��“It’s just his opinion, people are allowed to have opinions.” Dumbfounded, my brother asked “So if I say it’s my opinion that the US doesn’t exist, or that you’re both bad teachers, you wouldn’t be upset or offended?” The principal just kept up her oblivious charade and reiterated how it’s the teachers opinion to deny the existence of our country, people, and culture. My brother explained to her the impact that such a thing has and how it contributes to the relentless racism against Palestinians, and she didn’t bat an eyelash.
This may seem like something small to non-Palestinians, but it’s not.
To make matters worse, this school has a long history of racism, beginning with my time there as the first full graduating class.
I had teachers who said the same thing to me, who would also go on to call me a terrorist and make horrid racist ~jokes~ in class, in front of my peers, right to my face. ~Jokes~ that were repeated by classmates outside of class, that led to physical altercations, and contributed to my miserable High School experience. And this wasn’t just a teacher or two, but several.
These same teachers who continue to teach to this day, despite numerous complaints against them.
One teacher in particular, Mr. Ronnie Oates of Frontier High School, is exceptionally bad. I’ll be writing a more complete post on him, but suffice to say that he is your typical right-wing paranoid racist lunatic ex-marine who teachers American Government.
I have been informed by trustworthy sources that there was also a student who had her hijab ripped off by two white students who were shouting pro-Trump slogans following the election. The punishment? A slap on the hand for the students and the entire incident brushed under the rug.
I also have it on good authority that a young girl was made so uncomfortable by a particular teacher, that she ended up doing homestudy for that particular class so as to not have to deal with him. Despite this, that same teacher continues to teach.
This very same school recently had a student post an image of himself with a gun in the bathroom DURING CLASS HOURS, and while the school took care of the matter relatively quickly, no statements or warnings were issued to any students or family on campus, with students finding out through word of mouth alone that there was a gun on campus. No reassurances from campus or campus administrators.
Again, I’ll be going much more in depth with this in the future, but this just goes to show how pervasive and horrid our school system has become. Schools our out to protect their own backs instead of the backs of their students. Racism and sexual harassment are swept under the rug to prevent any sort of negative press or issues, while students and families are bullied into silence.
This very same thing extends into upper education at universities as well, and it’s sickening and disheartening and something that I don’t see nearly enough about.
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Day One Hundred Fifteen
It’s wintery and cold, I’m nowhere near New Orleans, and my French (to my Quebecois grandmother’s utter dismay) is totally rubbish. That didn’t stop me from wearing gold, green, and purple and shouting about Mardi Gras this morning. I’m Catholic, so it is a thing I observe, and my glee about it amused my students.
APUSGOV started with a bit more Court Madness. One of the matches was between two really nervous students, and they both had to take a moment to calm themselves down before starting- and again during their arguments- but they didn’t give up. I was so proud of them for how well they did, and how encouraging their classmates were of them. It was an uplifting way to start the day. We finished class with a bit of The West Wing- ”Six Meetings Before Lunch,” and a discussion of one of the episode’s themes: race relations in America. It’s a preview for some of the lessons in the upcoming unit.
If you’re thinking I’m going a bit slowly through the Court Madness stuff, and dragging out the transition into next unit, you’re right; it’s because it’s the winter sports post-season, so I routinely have 6-10 students absent (skiers), and I’d rather not have that many kids playing catch-up when I can just relax the pace a bit instead. It’s March, and it’s been a rough year, so I figure everyone could use the break. I’ve explained my logic to my students, so they’re aware of my thought processes and have been assured that I still know when the AP exam is and can prepare them in plenty of time.
And they’re not the only ones doing debates; the ninth graders are getting into some now, too! Mrs. T and I re-opened the wall between our classrooms for The Big Middle East Debate. We let students choose their own groups this year, which we hadn’t done in the past, but I think it’s going to work out well. I still assigned the topics and the affirmatives/negatives at random after explaining that it’s a skill to be able to argue a point based off of research, not necessarily one’s personal feelings on an issue.
The debates all relate to the things I spent the last few weeks teaching about in World, so students are coming in with some background knowledge and will now be diving deeper:
Should the US keep troops in Syria?
Should the US continue to assist the Saudi coalition in the war in Yemen?
Should the Palestinians have their own country?
Should the US increase the number of refugees it grants asylum to each year?
Mrs. T and I were both pleased with the research we saw the various groups compiling during the double block. It’s definitely solid work. I think she was especially glad to see it because she just wrapped up argument writing, and a lot of students did not conduct research as well as they could have- mostly, they used their time inefficiently- so maybe they learned from the mistakes they made with that.
My department had a meeting this afternoon, and much of it was spent discussing what an awful year of Very Bad Things it’s been. But I think we’re all hanging in there, and moving forward... And spring is coming... And maybe we’re going to end on a positive note.
#teaching#edublr#educhums#teachblr#teacher#education#high school#social studies#interdisciplinary fabulousness#the big middle east debate#Mrs. T#department meeting#court madness#mardi gras#day one hundred fifteen#conversations about current events#West Wing influences my teaching
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