Last year, I sat in the Holocaust Remembrance Day assembly feeling confused. No one had mentioned Gaza or how the memory of the Holocaust colors our capacity to talk about the war. But I say that even as I have felt afraid to address the aftermath of Oct. 7, 2023. As a Jewish person, I feel implicated in the topic, yet, the conflict is divisive enough that I am concerned about articulating a stance. By suggesting we should have discussed the war during that assembly, I may have alienated half my readership already.
Last week, my suspicion that there were few spaces to talk about the Israel-Hamas war was confirmed when on Oct. 4 New York magazine published the article Does It Matter What Your Therapist Thinks About Israel? The story focused on the strain that differing viewpoints on the conflict placed on the patient-therapist relationship. The obvious resulting question: If we can’t talk about this issue in therapy, can we talk about it anywhere?
Just as a therapist’s office may seem like the right place to express your controversial opinions, a high school may seem like the wrong one. Students are less informed and less confident in their political positions. But they are also teachable.
The Laboratory Schools, a place where unorthodox teaching was historically pioneered, is perhaps one of the few spaces where we should be able to learn how to talk about this war respectfully.
An alternate term for those schools which follow John Dewey’s model of experiential learning is an “experimental school.” By its design, U-High is meant to allow for new forms of learning and discussion. Further, we are a community of teenagers who are, hopefully, less obstinately fixed in our opinions than many of the adults around us.
Often, I feel torn. So I do not suggest that these discussions will be easy for us. I am Jewish. I had a bat mitzvah. I have visited Israel. I also believe what is happening in Gaza is genocide.
Yet, without discussion and education, people will become more intractable in their hard-line positions and even less capable of dialogue. No doubt this issue is harder because it does not follow the familiar lines of political parties. But the tools we’ve learned since childhood — empathy, respect, sensitivity — are the right ones. They only work when we make use of them.
