Students at Quaker school in Manhattan, New York, rally behind teacher fired over “Heil Hitler!” remark

Students and alumni at Friends Seminary, a Quaker-run private school in Manhattan, are rallying behind a mathematics teacher who was dismissed after making a joking Nazi salute in his classroom.

Ben Frisch, who has taught at Friends for 34 years, was fired for saying “Heil Hitler!” while raising his arm to illustrate what basic geometry calls an obtuse angle. The school’s principal, Robert Lauder, explained the decision in a letter to the community. “Our students know that words and signs of hate and fear have no place at Friends,” he wrote. Lauder cited the Feb. 14 incident and “other equally inappropriate and troubling actions by Ben.”

Support for Frisch has been organized in several forms. A student petition circulated among the school’s 279 students drew 190 signatures voicing support for him. Alumni launched a separate petition that has drawn 469 signers. Students and some faculty also joined a walkout to protest his firing.

The alumni petition defends Frisch’s character and motives. “I think we all can agree that whatever happened, Ben’s intentions were not malicious or bigoted. He has always been devoted to Quaker principles of nonviolence and fighting injustice and has not a hateful bone in his body,” it states. “It sounds like he found himself in an awkward situation and made an awkward joke.”

The New York Times, which first reported the firing, noted that Frisch is a practicing Quaker and the son of an Austrian Jewish man whose grandparents were killed in the Holocaust. The New York Jewish Week reported in 2012 that about one-third of the school’s enrollment is Jewish.

Not everyone quoted in the coverage backed the teacher. One speaker said, “I would have been gravely disappointed if the school had kept him, and would have been extremely unhappy and uncomfortable to have my child in that classroom next year.”

Times columnist Gina Bellafante took a different view. “At the same time an adherence to the values of forgiveness and restorative justice that institutions like Friends promote would seem to demand a path — reprimand, rehabilitation — other than firing someone who made people uncomfortable.”

Source: Read the original report