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At Brooklyn Friends School, progressive Quaker values are part of the curriculum. A required seminar for ninth-grade students encourages them to explore matters of identity and social justice, and there are land acknowledgments on the walls. But a debate over Israel between parents and the school has tested its values. Brooklyn Friends says it is trying not to pick a side, but parents who are critical of Israel say the school has silenced them.

BFS is one of many liberal entities to face a split within its ranks after October 7, including the rift inside the Democratic Party. PEN America, a free-expression group, canceled its prestigious awards and World Voices Festival after writers withdrew, calling on the organization to more strongly condemn Israeli attacks on Palestinian writers and culture. College campuses across the country are convulsed not only by student protesters but by administrators who respond with violent crackdowns.

Nobody has called the police on critical parents at BFS, but there is tension all the same. It stretches as far back as December, when BFS asked Esther Farmer, an activist with Jewish Voice for Peace, to speak at an event honoring Human Rights Day. Farmer says she readily agreed, figuring she had been invited to provide JVP’s anti-Zionist perspective. In her view, that wouldn’t be out of keeping with the school’s pacifist Quaker tradition. “The American Friends Service Committee has been pro-Palestinian and pro-peace for many, many years. And I had a lot of respect for them,” she says.

A few weeks later, BFS withdrew Farmer’s invitation and later canceled the event altogether. “So that was a little surprising because this was the Friends school, and I couldn’t understand what happened there,” Farmer says. Kevin Murungi, the school’s director of global civic engagement and social impact, says they “vetted all the speakers, including Esther, carefully, and told them the spirit of the event that they were attending.”

Farmer wasn’t the only person surprised by her cancellation. Some parents were taken aback when they learned of the decision through a December 8 email from Crissy Cáceres, the head of the school. She wrote that other parents had raised concerns about JVP. “We would never knowingly pursue a course of action that would put any of our students in harm’s way,” Cáceres said.

But what harm could Farmer — who is Jewish — pose to students? “I have to say my experience of that is that’s really what’s antisemitic,” Farmer says. “So we’re only allowed to hear some Jewish voices but not other Jewish voices?”

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Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Ajay Suresh

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