This article was produced as part of the New York Jewish Week’s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with Jewish teens around New York City to report on issues that affect their lives.
My friends and I spent the years from kindergarten through eighth grade at the Hannah Senesh Community Day School, which I’d describe as a small enclave of Jewish pride in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn.
Our grade of 24 students stayed together all day, every day. Together, we acted in school plays, traveled through Israel, and hung out on the weekends. Judaics class was also a big part of Senesh’s yearly curriculum, where we learned about the Torah, the geography and history of Israel and, crucially, given the current war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In addition, seventh and eighth graders also take an Israel class. Our teacher, Phyllis Sussman, told me she designed the course to help students build a sense of pride and connection to the land of Israel and its people, as well as to prepare us for future conversations we may have about the country. Sussman said she made sure her students were familiar with terms such as “settler colonialism” and “apartheid,” and hoped that her students would be able to “recognize when someone is mistelling or erasing the Jewish story and to be able to distinguish between fact and opinion.” Ultimately, Sussman said she wanted us to feel confident defending Israel outside of the protective bubble of Senesh.
Given that my peers and I graduated in the spring of 2023 and started at various high schools just one month before Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, these challenges came soon enough. Even before the Israel-Hamas war began, my former peers and I knew that difficult conversations would undoubtedly arise. As we would come to learn, however, experiencing them in real life is entirely different from talking about them as hypotheticals in a classroom.
At Beacon High School, a diverse, screened-admissions public school in Hell’s Kitchen where I enrolled, I was surprised by the number of fraught conversations about the war that I experienced since the beginning of my freshman year last year.
In the 15 months since the war began, my teachers haven’t addressed the conflict in Israel as much as I’d hoped, and when they have, a lot of the conversations have often felt one-sided in their support of the Palestinian cause.
For example, after a news quiz in global history last fall, we discussed Israel’s bombing of seven volunteers with World Central Kitchen, who were delivering food in Gaza. The teacher implied that it wasn’t a coincidence that the IDF hit so many volunteer-filled vans. I found the teacher’s claim unreasonable; both the tone and the language seemed aggressive. Nonetheless, I felt afraid to argue because I didn’t think many of my classmates would be receptive — after all, I had just started high school a few weeks prior and I was nervous that I could sabotage my hard-earned new friendships. I was not prepared to deal with that situation. Even though my classes at Senesh had taught me about the tension in the region prior to Oct. 7, and had even prepared me for discussing the conflict with others, that nervous feeling of having the spotlight on me was different from any lesson or scenario we had explored in class.
As it turned out, I was hardly alone among my Senesh peers in feeling the way I did. I wondered what my friends endured in their new school environments. Did they feel prepared by Senesh to handle this new world? I felt that if I was experiencing uncomfortable conversations in a classroom about the conflict in Israel, my friends were probably going through something similar. Even if we were equipped with knowledge, it was a wholly different situation to have to speak on the spot in a sometimes hostile environment.
Take my friend Madeleine Plener, who now attends iSchool, a small public school in SoHo. She agreed that though we learned a lot about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict while at Senesh, she wasn’t prepared for what would happen the following fall.
One day, in science class, Plener told me her teacher wrote “All eyes on Rafah” on the class board, referring to the southernmost city in Gaza that was, at the time, under siege. She saw her teacher’s actions as political commentary, showing his support for Hamas and against Israel, which were completely unrelated to the class. Plener said she felt so uncomfortable, she left the class and went to the principal’s office. The principal had the teacher remove what was on the board, but the tense situation didn’t ease up.
When she returned to the classroom shortly after, Plener said the message on the board was gone. “I went to my seat, but he stopped me and said, from across the room, ‘I’m going to put it back up,’” she told me. “I was very confused and then he said, ‘I saw you looking at the board, and I’m going to put it back up.’”
Plener said she felt her teacher had singled her out in front of the whole class. She told me she wished she knew how to advocate for herself in front of an authority figure, especially one who has the power to influence her grade. From then on, she made sure to refrain from sharing anything in her classes about her commitment to Israel and Judaism so she wouldn’t stand out or feel alienated.
Then there’s my friend Leah Konigsberg, who attends Millennium Brooklyn, a diverse public school in Park Slope with an active Jewish Student Union. There, Konigsberg said she and her Jewish friends are often in the minority when Israel-related topics are brought up in class. She said they often feel nervous to speak up during intense conversations in the classroom when the subject of Israel and Palestine is raised. However, when one of her classmates dismissed the hostages, calling their situation a hoax, Konigsberg said she was quick to interject, telling her peer that her information was hurtful and false due to her friend’s main source being classmates’ social media posts.
Konigsberg told me that this interaction was a difficult one, especially because she is related to American hostage Sagui Dekel-Chen. But she also said her education at Senesh helped prepare her for it. “I felt more knowledgeable and up to date about the situation than them,” she said.
Elsewhere in Brooklyn, another former classmate attends a large private school. He said that his class has a large Jewish population and that Senesh gave him the skills he needed to discuss Israel his freshman year. (His parents were uncomfortable with his name or his school name being used in this article.) However, he added that he was unprepared for how the events of Oct. 7 would challenge his fledgling friendships.
This student said that one of his soccer teammates taunted him by repeatedly saying “Free Palestine” to him; he also kept insisting that Israel was committing genocide. My friend said he drew upon his Senesh education to provide a retort to his teammate’s claims, explaining that Israel doesn’t have the intent to harm civilians, rather their objective is to defend themselves from terrorists. “It kind of divided us a little bit,” my classmate said. “Following that, we no longer were as close.”
My friend added that while he was warned at Senesh that such challenging conversations were likely inevitable, it still stung to lose a friend over such a sensitive topic.
This isn’t an issue for my former peer Itay Feinstein-Mentesh. The only type of school he knows is Jewish school. As a sophomore at the Abraham Joshua Heschel School, near Lincoln Center, Feinstein-Mentesh relies on an environment of like-mindedness to grow his support for Israel. He said that most of his peers share his opinion that Israel has a right to defend itself.
Feinstein-Mentesh described the days following Oct. 7 as “a week of grief.” Unlike what my friends and I experienced in public schools, Feinstein-Mentesh said that being in a Jewish environment strengthened the bonds with his peers, rather than fraying them. “It was a grief that created deep bonds between grades, teachers, and the entire Heschel community,” he said. “It’s hard for me to imagine a world where I could even lose friends based on my political beliefs and opinions and support for Israel and support for the Jewish people.”
Like most American Jewish teens, my former Senesh friends were caught off guard by the attacks on Oct. 7, and how the ensuing conflict has played out across the city and in its schools. While our Jewish day school prepared us for life outside our little bubble, it seems that no amount of knowledge could sufficiently prepare us for how divisive our classrooms would become. None of us expected our Judaism to be put to the test so publicly.
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