In November, Fieldston—a prestigious Manhattan private school associated with the Ethical Culture movement—experienced an anti-Semitism scandal that came to a head after a guest speaker made disparaging comments about the Holocaust and a teacher rushed to defend them. After displaying indifference to the concerns of Jewish parents, the school’s administration did recently fire the teacher in question. Ammiel Hirsch and Joshua Davidson, the rabbis of two prominent Reform synagogues in New York City, warn that the “primal loathing” of Israel found on college campuses threatens to spill over into primary and secondary schools:

Of the millions of so-called Palestinian refugees the world over, most are in fact not refugees by any standard definition, but are properly speaking the descendants of refugees, often kept in a permanent state of segregation and dependency by Arab regimes. But as a consequence of the Syrian civil war, numerous Palestinians living in Syria have become actual refugees, fleeing to countries like Lebanon. Khaled Abu Toameh explains their current discontent with the Palestinian Authority (PA) and its leader, Mahmoud Abbas: