In late 2023, Joaquin Clavijo sat alongside his classmates in the hallway of Evanston Township High School to protest the school administration’s response to the deaths of Palestinian civilians in the Israel-Hamas war. Soon, school administrators said the protest’s “allotted time” had expired and gave an ultimatum: disperse or face disciplinary action. 

Clavijo stayed put.

“It’s not really a protest if the administration you’re protesting against is telling you when to stop protesting,” he said.

As former principal Taya Kinzie and her aide explained the consequences of continuing the protest, another student began recording, Clavijo said. At first, the administrators “were not being particularly aggressive,” but when the aide noticed the phone, her tone shifted. She became “very serious” and told the student to stop filming immediately, Clavijo recalled.

Skeptical of the aide’s insistence that Kinzie’s conversation with students remain “private,” Clavijo said he discreetly started recording on his own phone. Moments later, the aide demanded he stop. When Clavijo refused, she grabbed his wrist and pulled him toward the deans’ office, he said.

It wasn’t Clavijo’s first time in the office. He’d already been called down multiple times in the weeks leading up to the protest.

When he arrived, Clavijo said he instinctively sat toward the back of the room but was immediately told to move to the center — a request that initially puzzled him.

Then, two School Resource Officers, employed by the Evanston Police Department, entered the room. Clavijo — “surrounded” by officers and administrators — was informed he had committed a felony by recording others without their consent, he said.

Under Illinois law, recording someone without their expressed consent in certain private settings can be a felony. ETHS District 202’s policy manual also prohibits students from using a “video recording device,” including cell phones, “in any manner that disrupts the educational environment or violates the rights of others.”

“You always practice (what to do) when you’re intimidated or detained by the police or administrators, but then when you’re in the moment and not with anybody else, you get rattled,” Clavijo said. “I couldn’t really leave, so I deleted all of the videos. And throughout the process of deleting them, the system was very demeaning — (they were) talking to me like a child.”

Clavijo’s mother, Siobhan Moffitt, said school officials never notified her of the incident.

Moffitt said she typically trusts Clavijo to handle conflicts on his own and rarely reaches out to school officials or attends parent-teacher conferences. 

But this time felt different, she said.

“I’m not the kind of parent who’s reaching out and complaining or trying to advocate for my son — he’s very good at advocating for himself,” she said. “But when I finally did reach out, I made it very clear that it was because I was seeing a pattern of trying to silence him and others.”

A battle over ‘Jewish acts of dissent’

Moffitt shared her son’s story at an ETHS D202 Board of Education meeting last month, joining several supporters of Evanston Ceasefire, a local pro-Palestinian advocacy group, in their criticism of the administration’s decision to reprimand a social studies teacher for displaying a “Jewish acts of dissent” poster in his classroom.

Andrew Ginsberg, the longtime ETHS teacher who is Jewish, said administrators asked him to take the poster down in March after a complaint called it offensive. In response, he replaced the poster with a letter to his students stating it had been “censored at the insistence of the administration.”

The poster was designed by Jewish artist Liora Ostroff and originally appeared in Jewish Currents, a magazine that highlights the Jewish left’s “rich tradition of thought, activism, and culture,” according to the publication’s website.

It featured a menorah bearing the word “dissent” and excerpts from an essay of the same name by Abraham Joshua Heschel, a rabbi and civil rights leader who opposed the Vietnam War.

Ostroff called “Dissent” one of the “most prophetic” essays Heschel wrote and said its message about dissent as a foundational Jewish principle transcends anti-war movements. While the poster itself does not mention Israel or Palestine, Ostroff said it was designed to “give strength” to dissenters facing retribution.

“I feel like working with Heschel’s essays is so powerful because, in the Jewish world, he is an unassailable figure,” Ostroff said. “So for a Jewish student and their family to say, ‘The words of Abraham Joshua Heschel make me feel uncomfortable or unsafe in my classroom,’ is just f—ing crazy.”

During public comment at last month’s school board meeting, Ginsberg concluded his prepared remarks with a list of demands: that the district remove the warning from his personal file, issue a public apology and end what he called “its suppression of free speech about Palestine.” He accused the board of siding with “a small group of litigious and aggressive parents” and endorsing “the Zionist view that political support of Israel is central to being Jewish.”

Ostroff, who first learned of the controversy after being tagged in an Instagram post about the meeting, said she agreed with Ginsberg.

“The school board is being extremely, decidedly antisemitic,” Ostroff said. “They’re capitulating to people who are saying, ‘These are the boundaries of what can be expressed by Jews (and which) Jewish ideas we want perpetuated and expressed in schools.’”

Ostroff claimed the complaint against her artwork was “drafted with the help of” Chicago Jewish Alliance, a group that, according to its website, advocates “for the safety and security of Israel, promoting understanding and support for Zionism.”

She pointed to alleged ties between the group’s original co-founders and organizations like the North American Values Institute, which she claimed promotes “far-right ideologies.” On its website, NAVI describes its mission as fighting “radical DEI and extreme social justice ideologies” in schools. 

“The main story isn’t that people are censoring this piece of artwork,” Ostroff said. “The real story is that they’ve found a wedge issue the school board doesn’t understand, and they’re using it to advocate for a broader far right agenda. If they succeed in intimidating the board on this, they’re going to come for (things like) trans (rights) next.”

Josh Weiner, NAVI’s chief marketing and development officer and a co-founder of CJA, announced Monday morning that he was resigning from CJA’s executive team, citing differences in the group’s “vision for how to take (the) organization to the next level of growth.”

Representing NAVI, Weiner addressed the board during public comment at last week’s meeting, invoking the district’s policy on teaching controversial subjects, which requires all teachers to remain “respectful of the rights and opinions of everyone” and present a “balanced academic recognized research view.”

“Last month, we sent a letter to this body urging it to enforce its policies and clarify that teachers’ speech rights do not supersede their professional duties. Today, I give credit to the board for doing just that,” Weiner said. “Displaying a partisan message on a complex, divisive international conflict violates that policy and compromises the classroom’s neutrality and inclusivity.”

Weiner then posted his remarks on Instagram, drawing criticism from Ostroff in the comment section.

In response, he wrote that NAVI is composed of “mostly liberals who are concerned and opposed to the far left extremism of the Democratic party,” arguing the controversy is “not really about (Ostroff’s) art,” but rather Ginsberg’s failure to provide an alternative perspective on the Israel-Hamas war. 

Ginsberg said although his case has drawn significant attention, he doesn’t want to become “the face of” pro-Palestinian activism at ETHS. Rather, he said, he believes he was punished for supporting student activists.

“The kids have been surveilled, intimidated (and) condescended to in a way that’s completely unprecedented in my nine years at this school. That’s why I got involved — to have their back, to counsel them and to assert their right to do what they’re doing,” Ginsberg said. “The point of all of this is that I help the students carve out a space to talk about the genocide, and I’m being punished for that.”

Board members respond

Since last month’s meeting, supporters of Evanston Ceasefire have promoted an online letter-writing campaign defending Ginsberg. The campaign’s description alleges his reprimand “follows a long series of attacks by the D202 administration against staff and students alike.” 

At the time of publication, it has generated more than 5,000 emails to school administrators and board members.

Nine days after last month’s meeting, board members defended their actions in a guest essay published by the Evanston RoundTable.

“We have endured division within our school and broader community, conflict and strained relationships between colleagues, a sense of alienation for some students and staff and fierce controversy on how to address competing concerns,” they wrote. “Expressions of solidarity with one group can sometimes be experienced as exclusion or harm by another.”

The board also wrote that “when navigating the line between expression and exclusion,” its members are “not always judging the content itself” but also consider speech’s impact on students. 

Ostroff rejected that logic, arguing the board should focus on the artwork’s content alone because “anybody can claim that anything has an impact on them.”

Isaac Lieb, who graduated from ETHS last month and defended Ginsberg at recent board meetings, said the board’s essay reflected a “progressive except Palestine” approach.

“It was an attempt at lip service, and I think it really fell short — both to me and others who thought the board would actually take our comments to heart instead of PR steamrolling the situation into a ‘both sides need to calm down’ kind of thing,” Lieb said. 

Lieb said he believes pro-Palestinian student activism is “something that ETHS should be proud of, not something it should repress,” adding that the school’s curriculum emphasizes the critical thinking skills necessary to organize protests.

Lieb also described the school’s Palestinian solidarity club as “very organic,” pushing back on claims of “indoctrination” and saying the group would continue its work even if Ginsberg and other adults were “completely out of the equation.”

But, he said, organizers have encountered challenges in the past, including when school administrators allegedly delayed a showing of a documentary that criticizes the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians.

“It’s truly a level of censorship that makes students feel like they cannot properly express their religion, their politics and everything else in between,” Lieb said. “It removes any chance for critical dialogue on the topic by making everyone terrified.”

The future of student activism

Last week, during public comment, several speakers criticized the board’s response to Ginsberg’s poster, contrasting his reprimand with the school’s vocal support for previous social movements.

But Clavijo questioned the extent of that support. He argued that while it’s easy to claim the school would have championed historical Black and queer “liberation struggles,” generating real change is difficult.

“All of these movements they support in retrospect were not peaceful kumbaya marches,” Clavijo said. “They were very real, necessarily violent revolutionary events, and we are seeing one of those events happen right now in Palestine.”

Board member Mirah Anti suggested that the school has historically supported social movements only when “the community has decided to allow it,” arguing that the public ultimately “defines what we can and cannot say in our classrooms.” 

She pointed to the meeting’s contentious public comment as proof that residents were “actually disagreeing” and perhaps “waking up to whom (they) live next to,” suggesting Evanston residents might not be as supportive of Ginsberg as pro-Palestinian activists think.

Ginsberg said while he appreciated Anti’s candor, he disagreed with her claim that the community is squarely in favor of movements like Black Lives Matter. Nevertheless, he said, since ETHS presents itself as a “social justice-oriented school” and invests in professional development focused on combating injustice, administrators shouldn’t “pick and choose” which causes to support “based on (their) impression of what the community thinks.”

After Board President Pat Savage-Williams added that, by law, the district cannot comment on personnel matters, Board Vice President Monique Parsons said members were “elected to do more than just react” to public sentiments and acknowledged that some of their decisions will be unpopular. 

“My take on their statements was that they tried to paint us as a group of recalcitrant schoolchildren and felt entitled to make self-righteous, self-satisfied speeches that basically said nothing,” Ginsberg said. “I found it appalling that Monique Parsons, for instance, talked about her duties as a public servant while serving on a board that makes all its decisions behind closed doors, where board meetings are just a formality and public sentiment is ignored in favor of basically doing whatever the administration tells them.”

Ginsberg added that the board reprimanded him a second time for violating policies around student privacy following his comments at last month’s meeting.

Still, he plans to return to ETHS next year and expressed optimism about the future of pro-Palestinian student activism.

“I feel like we’re building power for a more democratic school — a school that sticks to and stands up for its values,” Ginsberg said.

As for Clavijo, who graduated from ETHS last year and remains active in Chicago’s pro-Palestinian groups, the future seems less promising.

“Liberal institutions like ETHS were given a chance,” Clavijo said. “Take a stand, put some skin in the game, risk upsetting the status quo. But they chose the same option they always do — stay quiet, keep in line, don’t ruffle the board members’ feathers. I’m sure in the next few months, as we enter the third year of this genocide, there will be more events like what happened with Mr. Ginsberg, and I don’t think they’re going to change their opinion or their approach.”

Correction: A previous version of this story misstated the year Joaquin Clavijo graduated from ETHS. He graduated last year. The Daily regrets this error.

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