Booting Bronx Teachers For Anti-Zionism in School
Riverdale School acted in the tradition of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. when it fired two teachers, Shawn Redden and Joel Doerfler, for anti-Zionest screeds. (“‘Bx. Teach’ ax over Mideast,” July 8)
As Dr. King said with great wisdom in 1967: “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking anti-Semitism.” Richard Sherman Margate, Fla.
As a former student of both Doerfler and Redden, I am deeply disturbed, though not necessarily surprised, that both teachers have been fired for daring to voice their views.
On the first day of my senior seminar on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Doerfler told our class why he chooses to share his views with his students. Like other human beings, he explained, teachers are necessarily influenced by their own personal beliefs.
Doerfler and Redden chose to treat their students as scholars, worthy of holding and engaging with a diversity of views.
In this case, I have little doubt that the students’ concerns could have been addressed without parental intervention.
At Riverdale, however, overzealous parents are eager to supervise and censor their children’s education. Criticism of Israel is the most striking example of a view that simply cannot be heard. Leila Murphy Manhattan Doerfler went on the record as being not only “profoundly critical” of the rhetoric and actions of the Israeli government but also of the “Zionist project in Palestine as a whole.”
Doerfler makes a fair argument that teachers should not try to maintain a false aura of neutrality, but my own experience as a high-school counselor makes me question whether a teacher needs to be as assertive with his opinion as Doerfler seems to admit to being.
The relationship between a teacher and a student, particularly in adolescence, is far less balanced than the same relationship in college or graduate school, and the likelihood is that highschool students will not feel as free to challenge the teacher’s perspective.
Leaving space for that challenge is not easy, particularly if a teacher is strongly invested in a particular view. Arthur Toporovsky Flushing