Across the Echo Chamber, a quiet conversation about war and race

The women agreed to meet at a school Ms. Oliver founded three years ago.

When the pandemic hit, Ms. Oliver became frustrated as she watched wealthy, mostly white parents pay teachers for private lessons, exacerbating inequality. In the fall of 2020, she opened a small “holistic, anti-racist and bilingual” school in a neighborhood that once served as the red line for black and white residents.

After a tour of the four-room school, the women sat in an office that Mrs. Oliver rents from a neighboring church. (Ms. Oliver described herself as secular when asked about her religion.) They sat across from each other in faux leather chairs, their knees almost touching. A large piece of paper taped to the wall outlined Mrs. Oliver’s strategies and plans for the school. On the mantel were framed photographs of young black girls engrossed in their studies.

Neither came with an organized set of questions, but each had goals. Ms. Minkin said that, in part, she wanted Ms. Oliver to understand the justification for the existence of the State of Israel and to recognize the role of anti-Semitism. Ms. Oliver focused on American support for the Israeli government’s policies and how its views on racism and oppression in the United States compared to the Palestinians.

“I have a very strong connection with marginalized people — brown, displaced, refugees, black,” Ms. Oliver recalled at the start of the conversation. “We usually hear the perspective of those in power, and our school is about amplifying the voices of the powerless.”

Ms. Oliver then asked Ms. Minkin about “settler colonialism” and the Palestinians who were driven from their homes after the establishment of the State of Israel. She recalled expressing her disbelief that the displacement “felt good for the Jewish people.”

“How can people accept that and how can that be fair?” she wondered.

Ms Minkin thought that question was an oversimplification. Jews also have historical ties to the country, she said, describing the region as “two indigenous peoples,” Arabs and Jews. She spoke about decades of violent attacks on Jews in Israel.

“We must recognize that the policies implemented so far have failed,” she recalled, expressing her hope that both groups would live in peace. “I hope that maybe at the end of this there will be some sort of major policy cracked open by the people who are supposed to be leading us.”

But why, Ms. Oliver wondered, could Israelis simply not allow Palestinians to leave Gaza and the West Bank to live next to them?

Ms. Minkin, thinking back on decades of failed peace talks, thought the idea was unlikely. “Do you really think they want to live peacefully in Israel?” she recalled her answer.

Amid all the suffering in Gaza, Ms. Oliver said, why wouldn’t they?

Things left unsaid

Ms. Minkin tried to steer the conversation away from political history. She is not an apologist for the current right-wing government and has always supported a two-state solution, she said.

But she wanted Ms. Oliver to understand what it felt like to be Jewish right now. After centuries of anti-Semitism, many Jews like her feel existentially anxious, afraid that the world could turn against them in an instant. The way Ms. Oliver described the Hamas attack struck Ms. Minkin as a justification for the murder of Jews.

“It was a massacre, and it’s painful to see someone dismiss it,” Ms. Minkin recalled, noting the deep ties between American Jews and Israel. “We are all related to Israel in some way, first degree, second degree. We are one people and we are in pain.”

Ms. Minkin made no mention of her own experiences in Israel. She lived in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv for years in her twenties, when bus lines were bombed and cafes were attacked. She attended the meeting where Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister who led peace negotiations with the Palestinians and shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize, was assassinated by an Israeli extremist. Israel, Ms. Minkin later reflected, is a central part of her identity, a place that shaped her, a Jewish homeland to which she often returns.

Both women left things unsaid.

Ms. Oliver did not talk about the personal history that influenced her views. Her brother, Morgan, served in the military in Afghanistan for years and struggled with post-traumatic stress before dying by suicide in 2017. She founded the Morgan Oliver School to help honor him. The people who suffer most from wars, Ms. Oliver later said, are the poor and powerless — the soldiers who volunteer and the civilians who are considered collateral damage.

Feeling seen

As she searched for ways to describe her own views, Ms. Minkin tried to emphasize her empathy for the Palestinians. She noted that her sisters were both experts on the Middle East and had close relations with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

Mrs. Oliver nodded, but silently she drew back. The comment reminded her of hearing white people say they had a black friend. “That doesn’t mean you’re oppressed in any way,” she thought.

Both women agreed that the conversation became most charged when it turned to the complexities of race in America.