TEACHER’S RIOT NIGHTMARE
Recalls fearing pupils, but she returned
The Queens teacher whose attendance at a pro-Israel rally sparked a nearly two-hour riot at her high school involving hundreds of students has spoken out for the first time about the “frightening and horrible” ordeal — and how she was determined to return to the classroom and show the teens that she “wasn’t going to run away.”
Karen Marder identified herself in a USA Today op-ed published Tuesday as the teacher who was forced to hide in a locked office as the angry mob tried to push its way into her classroom at Hillside HS in Jamaica in November, after many students became enraged to learn she was photographed at a Queens rally two days after Hamas’ Oct. 7 terror attack on Israel.
‘I stand with Israel’
“I posted a photo on Facebook of myself holding a sign reading, ‘I stand with Israel.’ That act, in the hours after the Hamas assaults, would lead to a devastating response from students I care about deeply,” Marder said in the piece, which was co-authored by Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers.
Despite the terrifying ordeal, the educator made the decision to return to her classroom to teach students about “basic humanity.”
“I had a choice to transfer to a different school. I stayed to use the experience to connect, to listen, learn, debunk misinformation and combat intolerance. The day I returned to school, a Palestinian friend (a fellow teacher) and I met with students,” Marder wrote.
“I answered their questions and shared my feelings. I repeated the hurtful, threatening and untrue things that students had said during the riot and on social media — helping them connect with my humanity and their own. Many of my students hugged me and apologized for what had occurred.”
The teacher shared how it was “difficult” to go back to work and said healing from the trauma of being threatened for mourning the “torture, rape and slaughter” of Israelis would be a “long process.”
“What happened to me was frightening and horrible and something that no teacher, staff member or student should have to experience, particularly in a school building,” she said.
Damage at high school
During the Nov. 20 riot, some 400 students flooded into hallways and ran amok, chanting, jumping, shouting and waving Palestinian flags or banners after seeing Marder posing with her pro-Israel sign on Facebook.
Students demanded that the health teacher be fired and ripped a water fountain out in the hallway and shattered tiles in the second-floor boys bathroom before dozens of NYPD officers arrived at the school to quell the mob.
Three student organizers of the riot were suspended — the most severe punishment doled out in connection with the terrifying incident, a source had told The Post.
The teacher said she had to earn back the trust of her students by demonstrating “forgiveness, active listening, acknowledging wrongs and sitting with uncomfortable feelings.”
“I had to listen. I had to understand what messages they were absorbing and where they were coming from. I had to answer their questions, address their fears and confusions and simply be there,” Marder wrote.
“Further, I had to show them that I wasn’t going to run away, even though some of them behaved inappropriately. They had to see, through my actions, that I would not give up on them, that I’d keep coming in, again and again.”