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FIRST ON FOX: A Pennsylvania school district is facing backlash from Jewish parents after a Muslim student club promoting Palestinians passed out keffiyahs to students, featured imagery criticizing Israel, and was more focused on activism than culture, parents say.
“My child came home shaken and unsure of whether it’s even safe to speak up as a Jew at school,” Lynn Simon, a Wissahickon School District parent, told Fox News Digital about last Monday’s event at Wissahickon High School, where student clubs were presenting at an annual culture fair stand that had booths representing various cultures, including a booth from Muslim Students of America chapter.
The district’s superintendent, Dr. Mwenyewe Dawan, can be seen in photos on Instagram, along with assistant superintendent Sean Gardiner. The school’s principal, Dr. Lynne Blair, posted photos of the event on her official school social media account, but has since removed some of the photos.
Upset parents say some of the students were displaying slogans like “Jerusalem is ours,” offering cash prize contests, encouraging administrators and young students to don keffiyehs, and essentially engaging in pro-Palestinian activism on school grounds.
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“When the principal is posting pictures of students wearing slogans like ‘Jerusalem is ours,’ and the superintendent is encouraging illegal minor-led games of chance, while visiting & taking photos with politically charged booths dressing students up in keffiyehs, that’s not education—it’s indoctrination. We don’t send our kids to school to be marginalized. We demand accountability, not photo ops.”
Fox News Digital reached out to the Wissahickon School District multiple times and did not receive a response.
Steve Rosenberg, Philadelphia director for the North American Values Institute, told Fox News Digital that “the Wissahickon administration continues to set the gold standard for educational malpractice.”
“The blurring of lines between culture and radical political propaganda — facilitated by staff, celebrated by leadership, and normalized for students — is both an embarrassment and a warning sign. School should be a place for critical thinking, not cultural intimidation and performative activism masquerading as diversity. The district owes its students better.”
A letter sent by dozens of Jewish parents to the school, obtained by Fox News Digital, further outlines the concerns about the event and said their children witnessed several things that “crossed clear educational and ethical boundaries.”
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“Students visiting the Muslim Student Association booth were encouraged to wear keffiyehs, a symbol that in the current global climate is widely associated not only with cultural heritage but with political movements, hostility toward Israel, and in many contexts open expressions of anti-Jewish sentiment,” the letter, sent to Superintendent Dawan, said.
“Multiple students reported that you spent time at the Muslim Student Association table, and did not halt the intimidating and inappropriate behavior. For many Jewish students, this was not experienced as a cultural gesture — it was experienced as political signaling from the highest authority in the district.”
What was “more troubling,” the parents explained, was the cash and candy being given out in exchange for interacting with the booth activities.
The letter reads: “Using financial or material incentives to draw students into a politically charged display is inappropriate and coercive. It exploits students’ curiosity and social pressure, turning an educational setting into an environment where certain political identities are rewarded and implicitly sanctioned by district leadership.”
The photos posted by Blair were described in the letter as “even more alarming,” and the “Jerusalem is ours” slogan was described as a slogan that goes beyond being a “cultural statement” but rather a “political claim that denies Jewish history, identity, and connection to Israel’s capital.”
“This is messaging commonly used in extremist and anti-normalization movements,” the parents argue in the letter. “For a school leader to publicly endorse this imagery, even indirectly, is profoundly inappropriate and sends a chilling message to Jewish students: your history and identity are contested here, and the people in authority are comfortable amplifying those who contest it.”
In a board meeting on Dec. 1, the president of the MSA chapter defended the term and said it is not “inherently antisemitic.”
“Jerusalem is currently a conflict zone in which two parties are actually fighting over it,” the student said. “That statement was written in Arabic so none of the Jewish students could actually understand that and take that as antisemitic, so that is actually just something that an individual is saying to tear us down and paint us as antisemitic. Which is actually going off of my previous point that antisemitism should not be watered down. We should not throw that term lightly here and there.”
The parents in the letter call on the school to take five measures in response to their concerns, including providing a public explanation of the district’s involvement in the keffiyehs being passed out and addressing the principal’s social media post amplifying the controversial message.
Additionally, the letter calls for the release of the “planning framework” for the event, including how booths were approved.
The parents also ask for “clear district guidelines” addressing how they will ensure that cultural programming does not veer into “political advocacy” and how all groups, including Jewish students, will be protected from “intimidation.”
Lastly, the parents are asking for a “listening session” where Jewish families and students can share how they were impacted by the booths.
“Schools must be safe, neutral spaces where students of all identities are respected,” the letter concludes. “What happened this week undermines that principle, and it has caused real fear among Jewish students who now wonder whether their district will protect them — or leave them to navigate this climate alone.”
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