Philadelphia Public Schools Face Censorship on Palestine. Teachers Fight Back.
Lauren Abunassar
This year, Philadelphia public school teachers and students have been facing an uphill battle when it comes to teaching and learning about Palestine. From schools in southwest to northeast, censorship has been on the rise. And some Philly teachers are fighting back.
At Northeast High School, history teacher Keziah Ridgeway is frustrated that Palestine is emerging as an exception to the importance of free speech in schools.
“If we can say ‘Black lives matter’ in schools, if we can support Ukraine and no one cares if that makes Russian students uncomfortable, then we should also be able to support Palestinian students,” Ridgeway said in a charged speech at a February 29th Philadelphia School Board Meeting.
She was compelled to attend and speak out, she said, on behalf of two Northeast High School students who found themselves at the center of a school censorship debate related to a video podcast they made exploring Palestinian resistance through art.
Keziah Ridgeway has been teaching since 2011 and attended both primary school, high school, and college in Philadelphia. Photo by Drew Dennis.
“It was an amazing project,” Ridgeway told Al-Bustan. One of the best she’s seen in her long career as an educator. It was a creative response to an assignment in which she asked her tenth-grade students to consider a modern day indigenous and/or repressed group who turned to art as a tool of resistance. One of Ridgeway’s students chose Palestine. A friend outside of class soon joined the project, excited to see what they could create together. Eventually the students were connecting Palestinian resistance to African American slaves’ utilization of art as both an expression of cultural identity and a means of resisting oppression. The students, who identify themselves as Nebil and Kevin in the podcast, called the project The Oppression Art Podcast.
Eyeing the podcast as a meaningful contribution to the school’s Black History Month assembly on February 21st, Ridgeway forwarded the finished video podcast to school principal, Omar Crowder, to be sure there were no issues with screening it. All went ahead as planned. That is, until Ridgeway got word that another teacher at the assembly found the content concerning and forwarded a clip of it to the newly formed School District of Philadelphia Jewish Family Association. The organization then forwarded a clip of the video to the school district, who soon banned the school from screening the video at any of the remaining assemblies. Ridgeway was the one to break the news to one of the students involved in the project.
“It was gut-wrenching for me,” she said of the conversation. “You never want to tell a child who has put in that much time and effort [into their work], that you have to go back on your word and can’t show it to the school because some adults were uncomfortable. Not even unhappy but uncomfortable, because that’s the word they used. I definitely cried a couple of times that day.” After all, the student’s first question to Ridgeway was: “What did I do wrong?”
“I’m a Black woman and I was born feeling uncomfortable, but I show up to work anyway. My students are uncomfortable… My Palestinian students have been told they don’t have a country.”
Though this question was emotionally striking and difficult to swallow, it also brought up a number of other questions. Namely, what was so wrong with the video that it deserved to be banned?
In an email from one unnamed concerned Philadelphia school district parent, sourced by The Inquirer, the parent explains, “Jewish individuals, including [district] students, are currently fighting unprecedented anti-Semitism, and this will undoubtedly create more.” Another email from the Jewish Family Association similarly called the video podcast anti-Semitic and dangerous, even if the word “Jewish,” was not used in the video.
However, Ridgeway, students, and other teachers are still struggling to comprehend exactly where the concern lies.
“I would be proud if my child had completed this project and furious that the school and school board have chosen to disrespect their achievement,” writes Andrew Saltz, a Jewish teacher at Paul Robeson High, in a letter to the school board. Citing the teacher who initially brought the project to the school board’s attention, Saltz goes on to write, “These teachers taught a terrible lesson: With privilege you never have to be uncomfortable.”
It’s a sentiment that Ridgeway echoed in her remarks at the Philadelphia School Board Meeting.
“I’m a Black woman and I was born feeling uncomfortable, but I show up to work anyway,” she said. “My students are uncomfortable… My Palestinian students have been told they don’t have a country, they can’t wear their flag, they can’t wear a keffiyeh… They have been told they can’t be Palestinian.”
Northeast High is one of Philadelphia’s largest high schools, boasting over 3,000 students with an 85.5% minority enrollment. Given the significant number of Palestinian students in the school, Ridgeway is adamant that no one is fully considering the emotional toll the conflict in Gaza is taking on the kids right here in Philadelphia. She sees them regularly navigating survivor’s guilt, the loss of family and friends abroad, the careful balance that comes with trying to send money back to family while simultaneously negotiating what they will be able to live without in order to send the money.
Northeast High School is one of Philadelphia’s largest high schools, with just over 3,000 enrolled students. Photo by Mike DeNardo/KYW Newsradio
“It’s people who aren’t emotionally intelligent not being good humans and not understanding the toll it’s taking on students that’s the problem,” Ridgeway said.
Beyond this, she is urging the Philadelphia school district to examine why teachers who were at the assembly were allowed to leak students’ information to an outside organization in the first place. Though the district stated they were not prepared to respond at the time of the meeting, and did not respond to Al Bustan’s requests for comment, they promised to look into the matter further.
Meanwhile, with permission from the students, as well as from their parents, Ridgeway has posted the video in its entirety to her social media, a way of meeting the students’ desire to simply have their work seen.
“They want to talk about what they’re witnessing,” she explained. “These are kids who have lived through the Black Lives Matter movement. Breonna Taylor. They’ve seen the marches. They’ve grown up in this era where not only have they seen injustices happen, but they see people resisting that injustice.”
Driven to support students like these, and inspired by the Palestinian community that she says welcomed her when she began teaching in 2011 at Al Aqsa Islamic Academy, Ridgeway has continued to encourage dialogue outside the classroom. In January, she helped organize an Educators for Palestine Teach-In and Training as part of the Philadelphia-based advocacy group Racial Justice Organizing.
“Any mention of even the word ‘Palestine’ is often suppressed or met with accusations of anti-Semitism.”
Wanting to collaborate with other educators navigating the question of how one teaches about conflict in real time, how to teach about the nuanced history of the region, how to respond to unfolding emotional crises students are facing – even in the face of pushback, Ridgeway and co-organizers hosted over two dozen attendees. Although the Teach-In was a success and something Ridgeway would like to repeat, it was not without its obstacles. For one, organizers could not publish the address of the event until the night before in fear of pushback. Also, security had to attend when word got out that people were trying to enter the event with, what Ridgeway calls “nefarious intentions.” One organizer was even doxxed in the days following the event.
The doxxed organizer, H., who is of Palestinian descent, and asks not to be named due to fear for her students’ and school’s safety, saw a truck show up outside of her school on February 29th, toting a banner calling her the biggest anti-Semite in Philadelphia. Her biggest concern, she said, was that the truck drivers were also taking photos of students at dismissal. Beyond this, people have called her principal to launch numerous complaints without any specific examples of the anti-Semitism in question. “Seeing the way that, since October 7, any mention of even the word ‘Palestine’ is often suppressed or met with accusations of anti-Semitism, along with the escalation of violence in Gaza, was where we felt a lot of the urgency in hosting the Teach-In lie,” she told Al-Bustan.
H., who spent three years teaching in rural Rwanda – witnessing the impact of genocide even two decades later, is cognizant of the emotional impact on students who can livestream atrocities or find themselves and their families directly impacted by it. Her school, she said, has welcomed Palestine-related educational resources. It’s people outside of the school community that she worries about.
“It’s teachers or community members who are galvanizing the resources of outside organizations to amplify their displeasure and make their influence over how the school operates bigger than their numerical presence within the school,” she said. Doxxing, censoring, and undermining educational efforts, she believes, aim to distract organizers’ attention from forward-thinking problem solving to defensive tactics.
“The biggest challenge is feeling safe to teach Palestine.”
Shaw MacQueen, a teacher at Mitchell Elementary in Southwest Philadelphia and another organizer of the Palestine Teach-In, fears these tactics will contribute to even more of a deficit when it comes to training teachers to navigate Palestine in classrooms. He describes hearing students enter his classroom debating the issue of whether or not Gaza can be rebuilt, for example. And though he feels comfortable and supported by his school when encouraging these conversations in the classroom, he also remembers one teacher who attended the Palestine Teach-In and spoke with him and Ridgeway about disciplinary measures she was facing for allowing space in her classroom for discussion.
The Palestine Teach-In was largely inspired by the fact that a teacher training on Palestine, which MacQueen wanted to help develop, was cancelled by the Philadelphia school district following October 7th. “The biggest challenge is feeling safe to teach [Palestine],” MacQueen said.
MacQueen has also been targeted by Philadelphians who’ve called his principal to lodge complaints. MacQueen wonders if any programs offer teachers educational resources on Palestine. And at the end of the day, it’s students like those at Northeast High School, who are negatively impacted.
While the censoring of the Northeast High School student podcast only underscores more questions about Palestinian exceptionalism, students’ right to free speech, and the decision making and policy power that should be afforded to advocacy groups outside of the school system, teachers like Ridgeway insist the onus is on the school board to publicly address the situation.
“I am hoping for a resolution,” she said. “And I’m hoping for healing.”
***
Lauren Abunassar is a Palestinian-American writer and journalist. A Media Fellow at Al-Bustan, she holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an MA in journalism from NYU. Her first book was published by University of Arkansas Press as winner of the 2023 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize.