Gaza ‘genocide’ curriculum rhubarb in Hudson Rivertown

Hastings-on-Hudson, a bucolic village of about 8,500 people, is one of 10 communities along the eastern bank of the Hudson River north of New York City that are collectively known as the Rivertowns.

Main Street slopes down to the river’s edge, where there is a park, a playground and a couple of restaurants. The train station takes commuters straight into Midtown Manhattan. Hastings is known as “the Brooklyn of the Rivertowns” for its many artists, writers and academics.

Lately, though, things have been anything but idyllic for students and parents at Farragut Middle School, the village’s public middle school. Last month, as the school year was getting underway, they learned that an eighth-grade social studies class would include a lesson on genocide that would use Gaza as the sole example.

A day before back-to-school night, parents received a syllabus for the class that mentioned neither the Holocaust nor any other atrocity — only the one purported to be occurring in Gaza.

Upset parents complained to William McKersie, superintendent of the Hastings-on-Hudson Union Free School District, which operates an elementary school, a middle school and a high school. The district removed the lesson from the syllabus, but not before the proverbial match had been struck.

After the district appeared to modify the Gaza lesson, Westchester for Palestine — a group with a small social media following whose members include the local Jewish Voice for Peace chapter — decried “censorship” that bowed to “global Zionist power.”

Many speakers at school board meetings, identifying themselves as parents of Hastings middle schoolers, said they were upset.

“When I first saw the syllabus, I instantly thought that this is activism masquerading as education,” a mother said at a Sept. 9 board meeting, just two days after the syllabus was distributed.

“The inclusion of Gaza is at best biased,” a father said at the meeting. “There is no way to bring something like this up without considering how it affects the community.”

Another mother said that “educated and informed Jewish adults struggle to talk about Gaza respectfully. How can you possibly think that this teacher is capable of doing it with this age group?”

“How can a Jewish child, particularly one who identifies as a Zionist, possibly feel safe hearing their peers talk about Israelis?” she added. “I sincerely hope the district reconsiders covering this topic with this age group.”

Westchester for Palestine urged supporters to show up at the Oct. 6 school board meeting. “Don’t allow US education to ignore the racial supremacy philosophy of Zionism,” it told its 2,750 Instagram followers. “Let’s do better for our children and stand up to a colonial curriculum. Teach about Palestine and all colonized people.”

Paul Feiner, a Democrat who has served for 35 years as supervisor of Greenburgh — the town that includes the village of Hastings — and is running unopposed in next month’s election, told JNS that he received about 500 letters from concerned citizens.

Nearly all objected to the omission of the Holocaust from the class plan, to the inclusion of Gaza without context or to its inclusion at all. Most writers told him that whether civilian deaths in Gaza after Oct. 7 constitute “genocide” is a matter of contentious debate and shouldn’t be presented as fact.

Teaching Gaza as a “genocide” to eighth graders “could create more antisemitism, because you have middle schoolers and the teacher focusing on the Israel-Gaza dispute,” Feiner said.

“A lot of Jewish students will be the center of attention in their classes,” he said. “It’s unfair to bring Jewish students into something they have no control over. They will be blamed for actions they’re not responsible for. I’m very upset.”

The Oct. 6 meeting, which ran about three and a half hours, was packed with people who came to speak during the public comment period. Many said they had traveled from surrounding towns — some from as far as Rockland County, across the Hudson — to attend.

Some said they were parents of Hastings students. Some identified themselves as Jewish, others as Muslim.

Several who advocated including Gaza in the eighth-grade curriculum wore hijabs or had keffiyehs draped over their shoulders. Some spoke of the pain of Palestinian and Lebanese relatives living in war zones and urged that the Palestinian experience “not be erased” by the Hastings school system.

Jewish speakers described in strong terms how the episode has affected them and the village.

Omitting the Holocaust from the first version of the syllabus reflects “a toxic mix of ignorance and ideological distortion,” said one father, who told the board that he has a son in eighth grade at Farragut and another child who graduated from Hastings High School.

“Already the course has torn at the seams of our community. It has torn us apart, not brought us together,” he said. “It’s just such a fraught issue.”

Another speaker, a Hastings resident with children in the middle and high schools, said that including Gaza in a “genocide” unit is “about lies.”

“This is about ignorance and about something much more sinister,” he said. “Would you have a flat earther teach geography? A Klansman teach African-American history?”

“I ask you not to endanger our children,” he said. “I ask you to not destroy our community.”

A Jewish mother of a Hastings student, who asked not to be named due to safety concerns, told JNS that people came to the meeting “from all over Westchester and Rockland County” and that the incident “really shook people up.”

Jewish residents of Hastings are “very on edge and concerned for their children and families,” she said.

“I have attended Hastings Board of Education meetings off and on for 20 years,” she said. “I have never experienced anything where non-residents of Hastings participated, and certainly not to the degree of last week. That, I am sure, has never happened before. This seemed to be a rallying cry for Westchester for Palestine — especially on the eve of Oct. 7, and that a local board meeting was co-opted in such a way.”

Some who posted to a Facebook group for Hastings residents saw the omission of the Holocaust from the syllabus as Jew-hatred. “No. It’s not a mistake,” one wrote.

The superintendent acknowledged a “mistake” at the October school board meeting and in two letters to parents and residents, which he shared with JNS.

McKersie also said that a new teacher had added Gaza to the syllabus before it was reviewed.

In a Sept. 9 letter to all Hastings households, McKersie wrote that “the exploring equity eighth grade curriculum syllabus sent home to families last week for the genocide and human rights unit by mistake did not include all of the case studies that will be covered in the class.”

“Both the Holocaust and the Cambodian genocide are important parts of the course and should have been listed in the syllabus,” he wrote.

But in an Oct. 5 letter, he said Gaza remains among the topics to be taught in the course at Farragut, a highly ranked school with about 520 students.

“As originally intended, Gaza is addressed in one lesson as a current event that is changing in real time and is debated by scholars and governments,” McKersie wrote. “It is not intended as a comprehensive history of the region.”

In an Instagram post, Westchester for Palestine cited that announcement as evidence that it had succeeded in getting Gaza back on the syllabus.

At the next day’s school board meeting, several people who identified themselves as parents of Hastings students said they were confused about whether Gaza would be taught at the middle school.

McKersie said at the meeting that he was frustrated with the entire imbroglio.

“For the past approximately four weeks, our district focus has been on one topic in one unit, in one course, in one semester, in one grade, and it cannot be the focus of our district,” he said. “Our students deserve better than that, and we need to move forward.”

JNS sought comment from McKersie several times. In response, he emailed links to the two letters.

Alisa Berger is executive director of the Harvard University Graduate School of Education’s Deeper Learning Institute and was founding co-principal of the New York City iSchool, a public high school in Manhattan. She was also director of leadership and organizational learning at the New York City Department of Education and wrote the book “The Essential Guide for the Fearless School Leader.”

Berger told JNS that she was surprised that Gaza and genocide were part of an eighth-grade curriculum.

“Most teachers would not want to touch this with a 10-foot pole, certainly not at the middle school level,” she said.

She said she knows of no public middle school that teaches about Gaza or complex Middle East issues.

Jews in Hastings who spoke with JNS on condition of anonymity said they are anxious about being targeted. Even the rabbi of a local synagogue declined to speak publicly about the conflict, and no one from the grassroots group Hastings Against Antisemitism would talk on the record.

“I know all of us are intimidated, between the shootings, the graffiti, the riots around the country, the interruption of the vigil in New York City,” said the mother who described the community as shaken, referring in part to the disruption of an Oct. 7 vigil in Union Square Park. “Thus, the reason we want to remain anonymous.”

Many Jewish families who felt emboldened to speak up at the September meeting are shutting down after what happened in October, she said. “I guess that was their goal.”

Still fresh in many minds is what happened in April at Slices, a beloved pizzeria on Main Street.

Video footage that circulated on social media appears to show two men claiming to represent the Palestine News Network targeting the shop’s owner, Isaac Garson, who is Jewish, by getting in his face with a video camera outside his restaurant.

The men, who carried anti-Israel signs, are shown demanding that he say “Palestine” after he says he wants peace everywhere.

Many locals later turned out to show support for Garson. When a JNS reporter visited the restaurant a few weeks later, he said he had received an outpouring of support from across the United States, England and Israel.

After the Slices confrontation, the Hastings mayor and police chief asked Steve Goldberg, director of education at the Holocaust and Human Rights Education Center in nearby White Plains, to give a presentation on the language and symbols of hate to police officers and area officials, in cooperation with the Westchester County district attorney.

Goldberg, a longtime Hastings resident, told JNS that the antisemitic graffiti and stickers periodically found in the village are not unusual these days.

“There isn’t a school around that hasn’t had an incident of swastikas. They’ve probably always been around, but we’re more aware of it now,” he said. “There is no greater incidence in Hastings than in any other place.”

He said he is developing an online platform for teaching about the Holocaust at the request of the New York state commissioner of education.

He was also asked to help the superintendent and other officials revise the eighth-grade curriculum after the firestorm over using Gaza as the example of genocide, he said.