Community members brought their concerns to the Maine Township High School Dist. 207 Board of Education over a department chair’s classroom assignments touching on dehumanization and genocide.

Some of the more controversial assignments that students were given was reading Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir “Night” and juxtaposing it to the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict, and in a separate assignment, making their own TikTok videos.

Public comments were both supportive and critical of Maine West English Department Chair Sawsan Jaber. Board members and district officials at the meeting did not respond to the comments.

“We’ve had concerned teachers, past teachers, and students who feel uncomfortable in this classroom. We do not want to silence anybody, that’s not what our goal is. I have a fiduciary duty to the Jewish students, teachers, and community,” said Chicago Jewish Alliance co-founder Daniel Schwartz. “We see this all the time (erasure of Judaism). We see artists being canceled. We see even in curriculum like that, and you put it to the Holocaust, it’s terrible.

“I’m here imagining myself as someone whose grandparents were in the Holocaust, whose family was all murdered, and having to do that assignment.”

Simona Bogode, a volunteer with the Chicago Jewish Alliance, said that the TikTok video assignments are required of students and therefore filming them without their consent, which raises privacy issues. She also stated that students only read an excerpt of “Night” and not the full memoir, which leads to a misrepresentation and dilution of what could be a lesson on the Holocaust.

At the same time, praise and support for Jaber was expressed by others.

“It’s deeply troubling that Dr. Jaber’s competence and character have been called into question by organizations such as the Chicago Jewish Alliance and the Anti-Defamation League. Please be aware that these organizations speak only for themselves and not for all Jewish Americans like me,” said Leslie Williams. “The Chicago Jewish Alliance was organized to intimidate the Chicago City Council from passing the Gaza ceasefire resolution. Now that their efforts have failed, they are joining the ADL to silence educators like Dr. Jaber.”

Jaber previously received the 2024 English Leadership Quarterly Best Article Award for her journal “From Interrogation to Action: Transformative Equity in English Classrooms.”

A former student of Jaber’s, Jihan Chelade, took time to praise her on how she was changing the English curriculum and focusing on lessons that promote global citizenship and social justice, while also giving those students whose ethnic struggles are not represented a space to be.

“If we are going to take the lessons of the Holocaust, it deserves to be more. We need to understand that ‘never again’ means we have to speak out against all genocides that are happening,” said Joseph Miburn from the Council on American Islamic Relations. “Other genocides have happened since the Holocaust and before the Holocaust. What she (Jaber) did is simply allow the Holocaust to be discussed among other genocides.”

Another point of view from researcher Carlos Gallo was that the curriculum being taught has adverse mental health effects on students, giving critical race theory as an example, while students should be learning reading and writing skills in English class.