Community members at Monday’s Evanston Township High School District 202 Board of Education meeting decried school administrators’ reprimand of an ETHS teacher for displaying a “Jewish acts of dissent” poster in his classroom.

Andrew Ginsberg, a social studies teacher who has taught at ETHS for nine years, said after a complaint alleged the poster was offensive, school administrators asked him to take it down. In response, Ginsberg replaced the poster with a letter to his students claiming it had been “censored at the insistence of the administration.”

“This treatment came at the urging of a small group of parents who are trying to censor speech, both in the broader Evanton community and within the Jewish community, my community,” Ginsberg said during public comment at the meeting. “By siding with a small group of litigious and aggressive parents, the school has taken a position which endorses and imposes on everyone else the Zionist view that political support of Israel is central to being Jewish.”

The poster depicts a menorah displaying the word “dissent.” Additional messages on the poster describe an “absence of assets that make creative dissent possible” and claim that Judaism “came into being as an act of dissent.”

Ginsberg said school administrators discovered the letter replacing the poster in early March, pulled him out of class, gave him a written warning and asked him to review policies on teaching controversial topics and maintaining appropriate contact with students.

Ginsberg’s prepared remarks were finished by another speaker during public comment. They concluded with a list of demands that included the district remove the written warning from Ginsberg’s personal file, issue a public apology and cease “its suppression of free speech about Palestine.”

District 202 did not immediately respond to questions about whether the district will respond to these demands or comment on the reprimand. 

In total, 18 community members, including parents, students and Ginsberg himself, signed up to speak at Monday night’s meeting. Some speakers wore keffiyehs, and many invoked their own Jewish identities to criticize the administrators’ decision.

“In this case, a teacher is being disciplined, not for causing harm, but for refusing to stay silent. To fight antisemitism, we might resist the systems that silence moral dissent,” Evanston resident Nadia Greenspan said. “Encouraging dissent is not a threat to Jewish safety — it is the heart of the Jewish ethical tradition.”

Ginsberg said while he considers the board “more or less a rubber stamp for the administration,” he has filed a “formal grievance” disputing his reprimand and wanted to address board members directly.

During public comment, Ginsberg also said the school’s support for the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 was “diametrically opposed” to administrators’ recent treatment of student activists supporting Palestine. He criticized “Zionists in (the) community” for using ETHS to suppress “pro-human rights sentiments” and discussions of Palestinian deaths in the Israel-Hamas war, which he called a genocide.

“Too often, leadership at this school has capitulated to the small group of people, marginalizing and punishing teachers at their request,” Ginsberg said.

According to Ginsberg, the poster in question was created by Jewish artist Liora Ostroff and originally published in the magazine Jewish Currents, which describes its mission as centering the Jewish left’s “rich tradition of thought, activism, and culture.”

ETHS parent Robin Brown expressed support for the school’s rebuke of recent executive orders targeting the use of federal funds to support diversity, equity and inclusion programs but criticized the school administration’s reprimand of Ginsberg.

“In the face of threats from our federal government and other outside forces, ETHS has been bold and brave,” Brown said. “This recent move to censor a poster from the Jewish Currents magazine is neither bold nor brave. There was nothing wrong with that poster, except that it made some people uncomfortable.”

Similarly, Ginsberg argued the district has been “very Trumpian” when responding to pro-Palestinian activism.

ETHS parent Annie Zirin urged the board to “hold the line” in support of free speech, even amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on antisemitic rhetoric in schools.

“I know these are big questions, but now is not the time to bend the knee to this arrogant, disgusting administration in Washington that wants to dismantle our schools and take away all kids’ rights,” Zirin said. 

Ginsberg said he put up the letter because school administrators were “already violating (his) rights” and his students deserve to know why the poster was removed. He added that he plans to return to ETHS next school year.

One student, ETHS senior Isaac Lieb, compared the administration’s treatment of pro-Palestinian student activists to the censorship of high school students during the Vietnam War.

“When have the students ever been on the wrong side of this issue?” Lieb said. “They weren’t wrong in Vietnam. They weren’t wrong during the Civil Rights Movement. They weren’t wrong during apartheid (in) South Africa. They weren’t wrong in Iraq, and they are sure as hell are not wrong now.”

Later in the meeting, Pete Bavis, the school’s assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction, swore in first-term board member John Martin and incumbents Pat Savage-Williams, Pat Maunsell and Mirah Anti.

Martin replaced outgoing board member Gretchen Livingston, who served for 16 years. In her farewell speech, Livingston alluded to the concerns expressed during public comment while imploring the board to reduce opportunity gaps between students of color and their white counterparts, increase collaboration with Evanston/Skokie School District 65 and improve Latinx representation on the board.

“The reason that ETHS has the reputation it does — one that is not perfect, as our public comment demonstrated tonight, but always striving for the best for its students — is that we have the trust and support of our community,” Livingston said. “That trust is built and maintained by all who work in this building every day.”

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