SILENCE IN THE FACE OF ANTI-SEMITISM --THE Fieldston School

Like many of you I read Tablet Magazine's expose of anti-semitism and anti-Zionism at the Fieldston School in Riverdale with a sense of such tremendous pain and sorrow. If you haven't read the article (or wish to read it again) here is the Link: https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/295595/pride-and-prejudice-at-fieldston?utm_source=tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=2ffd1fc6ee-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_12_18_09_53&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c308bf8edb-2ffd1fc6ee-207183989

To this writer, the anti-semitism often masked as anti-Zionism as practiced at Riverdale's Fieldston School is no different, and, in fact worse than the latest out-break of anti-semitic defacing of Jewish cemeteries or scrawling Nazi graffiti on the walls of our institutions. For those at Fieldston weren't skinheads; they weren't white supremacists; they were, the perpetrators here are what are termed "progressives," they are "intellectuals," they are academics, they are the ones teaching our children. 

When I Chaired the Chicago Jewish Community Relations Council 30 years ago, we experienced a single ugly defacing of a Synagogue in two years -- I will never forget that our JCRC pro only had to make a single phone call and the leaders of every faith gathered to condemn that heinous act. I was so proud of my community -- and it happened that way in every federated community way back then. Today? Today?

It's as if the hate spewed out as if it were rational thought today had laid dormant to the extent that we, as a community, grew complacent thinking that that hate was a vestige of the past and buried with it. We were so wrong. 

Read Sean Cooper's Tablet article, Pride and Prejudice at Fieldston, read it and weep.I applaud the Jewish parents at Fieldston are fighting for their children, for fighting against hate. But, where are the communal leaders? Do they somehow think that this isn't their fight, that this isn't the fight that all of us must wage, that these courageous parents must fight this alone? 

I have read the articles that have followed on the Tablet piece -- maybe I've missed something, but I neither read nor heard communal leadersdhip support for these children, for the parents who have been demanding action from the school itself. I hope I am wrong; that communal leadership has spoken out and demanded answers, called out for change.

The silence is deafening, my friends, and the shame of our organizational silence, our shame, is screaming at us.

Rwexler