More than 100 parents at the elite Riverdale Country School in the Bronx criticized administrators for allowing what they described as intense anti-Israeli sentiment to fester on campus during a packed, emotional meeting the evening of June 11.

The assembly was held at the start of the school’s summer break, days after the administration announced an investigation into history teacher Shawn Redden. He has been accused of what one parent said was “bullying in the classroom” during a heated discussion with students following the killing of 60 Palestinians in Gaza by Israeli soldiers on May 14.

“He was yelling, he was screaming and saying things like ‘Israelis are all terrorists,’ etc., and not letting [my daughter] comment further,” said one mother about her child’s recollection of the discussion, adding that the young woman was again driven to tears when another student defended Redden’s right to criticize the Israeli response during an assembly after the incident.

“None of the faculty or administration present said anything to simply protect her as the most vulnerable in their group,” she added.

The situation in Gaza has become a hot-button issue on school campuses, leading to a death threat aimed at the administrator of an highly regarded Manhattan public school that held a moment of silence for Palestinian victims.

Riverdale parents packed into the theater on the school’s campus, secluded along a leafy, winding road in a tony neighborhood. They clapped after each speaker brought up a number of concerns, including students’ fears their grades would suffer if they expressed opinion outside of their teachers’ liberal orthodoxy.

“The anti-Israel, anti-capitalist, anti-American, anti-success narratives of resentment echo off the walls of this school,” said one parent, who has two daughters at Riverdale, adding there was an “environment where students are afraid and unwilling to challenge their teachers to provide a contrasting point of view.”

Redden, whose wife is Jewish, countered that the parent’s account of her daughter’s experience “has no basis in fact” and that he never made “outrageous and ignorant” statement equating all Israelis to terrorists.

Read More: The Forward