On Monday night (May 15), Gladwyne’s own, Elana Fishbein, took time out from being famous to attend a Lower Merion School Board Meeting. She was there to express her discontent with the school where she hadn’t sent her kids for the last three years. It’s unlikely that her appearance will have much impact on future policy decisions of the school board and the district. However, if Fishbein’s goal was to create a spectacle, that objective was clearly met.
The source of Fishbein’s current outrage was the Palestinian display at a recent Cultural Heritage Night at Gladwyne Elementary School.
In contrast to Fishbein, Jared Gordon, without hysterics, calmly noted that “the presentation of Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine, rather than the internationally recognized country, Israel, denies Israel’s existence, denying the Jewish people a claim to our ancestral homeland, denying or delegitimizes Israel’s view in the world. And celebrating a poet’s poetry of Mohammad Asaff, is an act of Anti-Semitism. He writes of annihilating Israel when he writes, ‘my land is from river to sea.’ Asaff calls for Jews to be wiped out of Palestine and replaced with Arabs – only Palestinian Arabs.”
Others who spoke out against the Palestinian display at Gladwyne School included Mort Klein, long-time President of the Zionist Organization of America, and Neil Klein, Rabbi Emeritus of Temple Beth Hillel in Wynnewood.