Fair Lawn accused of antisemitism again
Mother goes to the press after her complaints about school bias are ignored
Last week, Adi Vaxman of Fair Lawn decided that she’d had enough with the Fair Lawn High School.
The Israeli-American, who holds a Ph.D. in business and owns a management consulting firm, Sheba Consulting, is also the mother of three children. She and her husband, Ronen Magid, are the proud parents of Tavorr, who graduated from public school in Fair Lawn and now is a senior at Brandeis; Maya, a senior at Fair Lawn, and Ethan, a seventh-grader at the town’s Thomas Jefferson Middle School. So she has a lot of skin in this particular game.
When Maya texted from her school last week to complain about how differently her club, the Jewish Students Union, was treated, compared to the group one table over, the Muslim Students Association, at the school’s Club Fair, her mother was unwilling to let it go.
Dr. Vaxman has been actively supporting Israel since October 7. The nonprofit she started, Operation Israel — operationsisrael.org — provides humanitarian aid to Israel’s emergency responders, civil defense groups, and other, similar defenders of the state and its people.
She’s also been active in her response to the antisemitism she’s seen in the town and in the school. “The first big incident was in 2021,” she said. “But in the last year it has gotten much worse.
“I’ve talked to several superintendents,” she added. A few have rotated through the position. “I was hopeful when this new one” — Dr. Rui Dionisio — “started. I met with him in March, but nothing came out of it. They’ve all tried to brush us away and keep us silent.”
But now Dr. Vaxman is taking it to a new level.
“On Wednesday morning” — that was October 2, erev Rosh Hashanah — “I started getting texts from kids at school,” she said. “They said that they made us take down the Israeli flag.”
She explained what happened.
First, she described the set-up at the school club fair. The Muslim Students Association had a table; the Jewish Students Union shared a table with the Christian student group.
The Jewish students “set up their table as they always do,” Dr. Vaxman said. “They had an Israeli flag, as they always do.” They also had a magnet showing a yellow ribbon, the symbol that reminds wearers and viewers of the hostages, still in captivity in Gaza, dead or alive, by now more than 365 days later. “The Muslim association, at the next table, got upset and complained.” Then an administrator “yelled at the girls” at the JSU table, “telling them to take down the flag and the magnet.
“She said that the magnet is political.

“Anything other than childhood cancer is political, and therefore not allowed,” Dr. Vaxman added sarcastically. “So they took them down.”
Dr. Vaxman said that she does not understand why the Muslim Students Association would put up a Palestinian flag — although of course she means that she does understand it — it’s all politics — but she thinks it’s wrong. “There are 57 Muslim countries, and in 27 of them Islam is the official religion,” she said. “There is just one Jewish state.”
When the administrator had finished yelling at the girls to take down their political symbols — “and two parents and two other girls, not my daughter, also said she was yelling at them — she went over to the Muslim Student Association, and she was laughing and friendly with them. She said that because the other students had complained, they’d have to take down the flag.
“But they left the keffiyeh up.
“I asked some students to take videos and pictures, and they told me that the administrator threatened them with three hours of detention if they did that. So they did take the videos, but they took them at a weird angle, so no one could see that they were filming.”
The results of those videos show a table first with an Israeli flag, then the same table denuded and flagless; it shows the next table over decorated with a keffiyeh.
After she saw the images, Dr. Vaxman called the school and asked to speak to the principal, Paul Gorski. “They said that he was in a meeting, and I said, ‘Pull him out.’ They said, ‘No, but he’ll call you back.’ And I said, ‘if he doesn’t call me back immediately, I will go to the media.’”
He didn’t — he waited for a few hours — so she did.
On Sunday, a story appeared in the New York Post.
When Mr. Gorski did call Dr. Vaxman back, “I asked him how the hostage ribbon is political? And a keffiyeh is not? The yellow ribbon is about babies kidnapped from their homes on a holiday morning. The black-and-white Arafat keffiyeh is a symbol of armed resistance against Israelis. Why can that remain, when there are Israelis at the next table over?
“So after I talked to him, and I told him that there is a raging antisemite on his team, and that I am done with this, he sent someone to take the keffiyeh down.
“But it was the end of the day, and it was a one-day fair.”
On October 7, an unsigned email from the school system went out to the community.
While it was full of words, they were not used with much specificity.
“We write to provide important clarification in light of recent media coverage regarding the October 2nd Club Fair at Fair Lawn High School,” it began, referring to the first story, the one in the Post. “Unfortunately, the article in question is inaccurate — it does not include all of the facts or share the actual context of the situation. To ensure transparency and provide a complete picture, the district is sharing this update with our community.”
But the email provided neither all the facts — to be fair, always a massive undertaking — or the “actual context.” Instead, after explaining that a club fair is an opportunity for students to learn about the afterschool activities available to them, it said:
“During this year’s Club Fair, both the Muslim Student Association (MSA) and the Jewish Student Union (JSU) were asked to make adjustments to items that had not been part of their original displays. The decision to ask both groups to modify their displays was made in response to the disruptive impact that certain items were having on the learning environment. The school did not take any position with regard to certain symbols or items that were added to those clubs’ displays but simply asked both clubs to restore their displays to their original content….”
It went on: “We are very proud to note that both the MSA and JSU are actively involved in the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) ‘No Place for Hate’ initiative.” (As Dr. Vaxman put it, the writer “checked some boxes.”)
The last few paragraphs were devoted to the school’s concern with creating an inclusive environment, detailing its collaborators, and talking about how it promotes “peace, open dialogue, and mutual respect.”
On the morning of October 7, Mr. Gorski made an announcement to the school and called for a moment of silence, but according to Dr. Vaxman, who bases her comments on what she was told by a teacher, he did not say what that moment of silence was for. And then he made some entirely correct if vague statements about the need for peace, she said.
“But there has been incident after incident,” Dr. Vaxman said.
The first about which she took action was in 2021, “when an AP history teacher told an entire class that 9/11 was Israel’s fault, and that the attack was justified,” Dr. Vaxman said. The discussion was based on the 2003 film “Thomas L. Friedman: Searching for the Roots of 9/11,” in which the New York Times writer investigated why some Muslims justified the attack. The teacher seems to have jumped from understanding that lie to believing it, and from there to endorsing it, Dr. Vaxman said.
In February or March, at a school board meeting, “many Jewish students came up to the podium, saying they don’t feel comfortable in school,” she continued. What changed as a result of such upsetting testimony? “Nothing.
“In March, there was an art exhibit in the public library, with art from public school students. An Israeli girl was not allowed to exhibit her piece about the Nova music festival and the sex crimes that happened there on October 7, but a Palestinian girl’s artwork, which was extremely antisemitic, calling for violence against Israel using every possible symbol, stayed up.
“Last week, a teacher intervened in a conversation between two Jewish students. They were talking to each other about Israel, but the teacher intervened and said, ‘You mean Palestine.’ The students said, ‘No. We mean Israel.’”
They went back and forth five or six times, no, Israel, no, Palestine, in what had been a private discussion, Dr. Vaxman said.
Her son’s middle school, Thomas Jefferson, is doing better than the high school, she continued. “It has calmed down significantly, even immediately after October 7. The principal, Mike Weaver, is making an effort.”
At the high school, on the other hand, she has filed HIBs — complaints of harassment, intimidation, or bullying that are part of New Jersey’s anti-bullying law. “By law, if you file a HIB complaint saying that harassment, intimidation, or bullying are based on any protected status” — race, color, ancestry, religion, disability, sex, gender, or any similar condition — “the school has to file it with the state, and the board of education must conduct an investigation.”
She’s filed such complaints, “but the board determined that every HIB I filed was deemed not to be substantiated. Every single one. Although they clearly were. That just tells you.”
Dr. Vaxman estimates that about 30 to 40 percent of the students in the Fair Lawn public school system are Jewish. There is a large Orthodox community in the town; most of their children go to day schools. Fair Lawn also is home to many Israeli and Russian Jews. There are far fewer Muslims than Jews in Fair Lawn, but that community is growing, she said.
Dr. Vaxman feels compelled to do this work, “even though I have a life,” she said. I have a company. I have a family. But instead of doing that, I have a nonprofit that I am running, and this is what I am doing, day in and day out.”
She’s compelled to do this work at least in part because both one of her grandfathers and one of her husband’s grandmothers were Holocaust survivors. To be specific, her grandfather, Lipek Goldberg, survived Auschwitz, and Chaya Magid, Ronen’s grandmother, was a partisan, who fought the Nazis. “She only died last year, so my kids got to spend many years with her,” Dr. Vaxman said.
As for the work she’s doing now — “We have to fight what’s going on in any way we can,” she said. “It” — antisemitism — “has been normalized and standardized. We cannot allow that to happen.
“We all have to stick together, and we have to do what we have to do to make it stop.”
We do not know how the Fair Lawn school district would respond to this story, because, despite requests to the superintendent and the principal for comment, neither got back to us.
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