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Trouble in Riverdale: Feldstone School implodes as parents fight woke teachers

Ethical Culture Fieldston in Riverdale, founded in 1878 by the son of a rabbi as a model for social justice, racial equality and intellectual freedom, now is convulsed by allegations of anti-Semitism, racial discrimination lawsuits, quarrels over identity politics, a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Department run amok and a union­ized faculty impervious to criticism.

Disgruntled parents are considering ways of extracting their children, angry donors are closing their wallets and distraught teachers are resigning or taking leaves of absence.

For some parents, concerns were crystallized when Fieldston students became aware that a YouTube video, “Secrets of the Living Dolls,” featured a new member of the faculty, a self-described “large black man” with a fetish for dressing up as a “sexy white woman” in a lifelike latex mask and breasts.

“I’ve fought for LGBT issues,” says one Fieldston parent, “but this is indicative of the weird things happening around the school which are rooted around intersectionality and an obsession about identity politics and race.”

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One of the most contentious issues at Fieldston has been the introduction of affinity groups, separating children by race. The groups “are rooted in a ­sociological model of whiteness that completely disregards the lived Jewish experience and, for a community with an above-average population of second- and third- and even first-generation Jews, that was deeply problematic,” said one insider.

“There are relationships with the school that will never be repaired. It really represented a turning point in the trajectory of the school and uncovered a degree of anti-Semitism that Fieldston [previously] has been immune from.”

A mother says the groups were a “pretext … They take kids of color and make them angry … It is the start of the blame culture. White people are to blame. The poison is far-reaching.” Fieldston is paralyzed by “wokeness,” the mother says.

Another member of the community blames “an extreme far-left group of teachers … and the most important identity at the school is being a person of color or gender-nonconforming … Boys and white people are demonized. If you’re a straight white Jewish boy, you’re the worst.”

The political angst at the school spilled over when Donald Trump was elected president. “The school was closed for days,” says one parent. “The first day, teachers didn’t come to class, they protested the second day and the third day there was counseling … What kind of fragile snowflakes are we cultivating that they can’t deal with a presidential election that doesn’t go their way?”

The irony is that the indoctrination appears to be backfiring, with some students quietly adopting conservative views. “Moms were coming to the school crying that their kids were growing up so conservative because that was their rebellion against what was going on with the school,” says one insider.

Okay, all that’s fun reading, but it can’t happen here, right? Well, and take this with a grain of salt because I’m hearing it second, maybe third hand, but a friend tells me that “a Greenwich Country Day parent told me yesterday that the school is about to become aggressively gender-neutral. They plan to enforce gender-neutral clothing, specifically prohibiting belts, for some reason, and the schools will not allow the use of traditional gender pronouns”.

True? I don’t know. Possible? Absolutely; private schools draw from the same pool of college graduates that public schools do, and there’s no reason that the two differ in ideology.