This article was produced as part of the New York Jewish Week’s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with Jewish teens around New York City to report on issues that affect their lives.

Every morning on my walk to the F train, I pass bright yellow signs hanging in the windows of houses along the quiet streets of Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn. Each one reads: “Free Palestine.”

Windsor Terrace is a small, mostly residential neighborhood, where the same dogs are walked daily and American flags hang off of the brick row houses. It hasn’t changed much in the 13 years I’ve lived here. So six months ago when the signs popped up with their bright yellow backgrounds and watermelon designs, they stood out.

At first, there were only one or two. Then more appeared, stretching along the streets I walk every day. Nearby neighborhoods like Borough Park and Crown Heights are home to over 96,000 Jews, but Windsor Terrace has a much smaller Jewish population. My family is one of the few Jewish families on our block, but I have a strong Jewish identity from my Brooklyn day school, my camp and my extended Israeli and Israeli-American family. Until recently, my Jewishness had never made me feel out of place.

The signs changed that.

Part of what unsettled me is that I don’t hear “Free Palestine” as a neutral call for peace. I associate it with a broader political movement that sometimes includes not just strong criticism of Israel, but the rejection of Israel’s legitimacy, like the phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Even if that is not what every person displaying the sign intends, that association is hard for me to separate from the words themselves. 

But maybe I was assuming too much. What did my neighbors mean when they put these signs in their windows? Were they........

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