HAARETZ
by Uriel Heilman
September 2, 2014

After a Jewish couple was attacked by purported pro-Palestinian supporters, a controversy broke up when Manhattan’s premier Orthodox school suggested students wear baseball caps when walking around the neighborhood.

JTA – When Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, the principal of Ramaz, an Orthodox day school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, first heard about last week’s attack in the neighborhood on a Jewish couple by a mob bearing Palestinian flags, he had an instinctual response. Maybe the male students at his school should consider wearing baseball caps over their yarmulkes when wandering around the neighborhood, he thought. So he dashed off an email to his head of school, Paul Shaviv, suggesting parents might want to consider talking to their kids about it.

Then Lookstein thought again and realized he “absolutely did not agree with that policy” he had just suggested. “I think that is giving the lunatics and terrorists a real victory,” Lookstein told JTA on Tuesday.

“We have to stand up here in New York and say we are who we are, and this kind of behavior by people who try to terrorize others should never be allowed,” he said. “I grew up in the 1930s and ’40s, when Yorkville (part of the Upper East Side) was a hotbed of anti-Semitism. And our answer to anti-Semitism has to be that we stand up like exclamation points and not bend over like question marks.”…..

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http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/1.613778