http://www.latimes.com/news/specials...home-headlines
Barry Siegel wrote what I thought was a gripping and fascinating account of a clash of values at the modern Orthodox Jewish school Shalhevet. Here are excerpts from the article:
An enthusiastic young teacher finds an Orthodox Jewish school full of moral purpose and wide-open debate. But then he starts talking about the Middle East.
"Come in, it's warm inside," beckoned an ad for the Orthodox Jewish school Shalhevet, and that's just what Alexander Maksik did. It was a shock at first. There he was, a young sometime actor, a secular Jew uninterested in religion, newly installed as a middle school English teacher. In the hallways, girls and women walked by in long skirts, boys and men with yarmulkes on their heads. At 7:30 each morning, the students gathered to daven. In the afternoon came more prayer, everyone standing, bending at the waist. Shalhevet had a kosher kitchen and no Christmas break, not even on Christmas Day. Maksik had never seen such loyalty to Jewish culture.
He loved this school's pride. Even more, he loved its wide-open spirit.
Dennis Prager thought the article was pointless. He griped about how it took most of the front page with a big photo.
Dennis: "The author loved the teacher. The LA Times loved the teacher. The thought that a Jewish school wishes its kids to support Israel apparently disturbs The Los Angeles Times.
"This seventh grade secular teacher [Alexander Maksik] decided that he was going to go in and show the other side. You would think that the purpose of teachers is to teach truth - moral truth, factual truth - not 'other sides.' But to the modern mind of the left, the typical secular person on the left, the other side is what needs to be taught and there is no moral truth. Here's the proof. I devoted an hour to this article:
"He didn't think you could say "this is right, this is wrong," and then claim you were educating kids."
"Isn't that awesome? And that's what the LA Times' loves about him. That a teacher could not say to kids, This is right or this is wrong. This the times finds worthy of front page attention - the beauty of teacher who can not say this is right... This summarizes our present moral crisis.
"The world has many crises. For reasons that are unclear to me, the vast center of the front page of the LA Times on Sunday was about an Orthodox Jewish school, which my son [David] had attended... This is all new to me [in the article]. It's not so much about the school as it was about the secular teacher they brought in and how he got in conflict with them because he wanted to show them a lot of pro-Palestinian things, movies, and books, and so on.
"I have zero problem with that at a later age. People should be exposed to all points of view. But when the point of view is wrong, it is not the duty of a school to subject a kid to it. Among the greatest [places] of moral clarity today is the Palestinian/Arab - Israeli conflict. One side wants primarily to destroy the other, one wants to live in peace. One side celebrates death. One side celebrates life.
"They celebrate the teacher in this article. He opens their eyes. He teaches seventh grade and he assigns Palestinian works in a religious Jewish school.
"The reason I think this teacher is not intellectually honest is that he would never go to a Muslim and assign pro-Israeli Zionist texts. The Muslim school certainly wouldn't keep him if he did, while this guy stayed for a while at this Jewish school until they finally made it bad for him to stay. People were not happy.
"The article is not really about Israel or the school. It's about the celebration of secular moral confusion. This is how your kids are taught by most teachers in secular schools.
"If the seventh grade teacher of my kid couldn't teach this is right and this is wrong, I would want that teacher fired.
"If this teacher in a religious school can't say this is right and this is wrong, why do I need a religious school? To pray and then have moral confusion."
Luke: "This teacher taught secular subjects. It was not his job to indoctrinate the kids."
Dennis: "Everybody in the article seemed absurd. The teacher looked absurd. The school looked absurd. Listen to this line after another homocide bombing in Israel."
A mother says in the article: "This wasn't what she wanted for her son. One reason she sent her child to Shalhevet was for protection ? to buffer him for a while from the intensity of the world. Maksik didn't understand that. It was all just theory for him."
Dennis: "What a devastating line. It's all just theory. Why is it just theory? Because Maksik doesn't have kids and I bet he's not married. He doesn't understand what parents go through with kids.
"He had a big complaint there that the only articles on the school bulletin board were about Palestinian suicide bombers. All the news is about horrors to Israel. There's never any discussion of any other side. I wonder if during WWII, he would've opposed American schools only showing the horrors the Nazis committed but not the horrors the Germans underwent?"
Here are excerpts of this "pointless" article that Prager did not discuss:
When they studied "To Kill a Mockingbird," all the students agreed that the treatment of the black character Tom Robinson was racist and cruel. On the spot, Maksik asked: What would they think if Tom Robinson were a Palestinian?
"I would spit on him," one boy replied.
This shocked Maksik. He began to see in kids this young an expression, a look in the eyes, of absolute certainty. He feared that these kids were learning to hate other people.
To some at Shalhevet, the Palestinians were equivalent to the Nazis. That became clear one day when an otherwise gentle rabbi said, "I hope they kill all the Palestinians."
Some teachers on the Judaic staff averted their eyes when Maksik passed in the hallway. A parent told him she wouldn't mind if all Arabs disappeared.