My son, Leo Fuchs, is principal of LWL (Learning without Limits) an elementary charter school that he founded in inner city Oakland, CA with the goal of going boys and girls from underprivileged backgrounds a better shot at meaningful and productive lives. I am very proud of him.
His letter below was published in the San Frnacisco Examiner in response to disparaging remarks about Israel that appeared in a recent Examiner Op-ed essay.
I am writing in response to Rachel Ebora’s July 28 Op-Ed. As the parent of Jewish children who attend the SFUSD and the grandchild of three Holocaust survivors some, of whose family members escaped from Germany to Israel, I felt relieved to read Superintendent Carranza’s remark quoted in the Examiner on July 14 that “We are not interested in … providing an environment where any group of people will feel disparaged or unwelcomed.”
I applaud the district’s effort to include instruction in languages spoken by significant proportions
of our city’s population, including Vietnamese and Arabic. I also applaud the intention to carefully avoid putting curriculum and personnel in front of children that would disparage any ethnic group’s culture or homeland.
If what has been reported in the press is true, that AROC leaders have made comments disparaging Israel, and AROC’s Executive Director is unapologetic and lacking understanding of the pain of these words, then surely this is not a group that should be working with the SFUSD’s children.
As this conversation moves forward, I hope that we in the Bay Area can model for our children difficult conversations the way we hope our children will hold them as they grow up and take on the world’s great challenges.
I hope we can model empathetic listening and the seeking of win-win solutions in problems small and large.
Leo Fuchs
Finding Ourselves In The Bible 