Young children don’t get enough credit for their sense of fairness. While poorly written sitcom versions of children do little more than whine about getting their way, the real-life children who have come through my preschool classroom over the years are intuitively fair and kind people. They really want the whole world to be just, and for all people to treat one another well.

This can lead to difficult conversations when the world isn’t fair, and when people aren’t very kind. I often describe injustice to the kids as when one group of people decide that they will take more than their fair share without worrying that other people won’t have enough.

It’s when they make up stories or lies to pretend that they deserve more than their fair share. Sometimes those lies are about race, or about wealth, or about land, or religion, or gender, but when we really get to know one another it is much easier to share what we have because we can see one another’s humanity every day. That gets harder to do when we’re far apart.

I didn’t always understand this. It took a lot of unlearning of my own biases to get here, and that anti-bias work doesn’t end. I often reflect on how lucky my students are that they won’t have to unlearn the same biases I grew up with because the world is so different almost 50 years down the line.

This difference comes up a lot when we’re choosing picture books for our shelves. Some of my favorite books as a child feature text and illustrations that have not aged well. Sometimes we read those books anyway, but we stop to talk about where bias shows up. Sometimes an older book has so much to talk about that it would be difficult to read to the class and cover all of the ways bias shows up without boring the kids to tears, so we skip them.

My favorite picture books are the ones that create windows for the kids to see one another’s humanity, no matter how far apart. I was alarmed to see one such book mentioned on the front page of The Gazette last Friday, along with the local author’s name, as part of one person’s testimony to Massachusetts’ Special Commission on Combating Antisemitism.

Hannah Moushabek’s book “Homeland: My Father Dreams of Palestine” has been on my classroom shelves on and off since it was published in 2023 because it offers such a bittersweet and beautiful window into her family’s experiences. My students know the book well, and it is a gift to be able to share this book with them.

I was not so fortunate. My childhood understanding of Palestinian, Arab, and Arab-American experiences was shaped by terrible stereotypes in the media of the 1980s and 1990s like Indiana Jones, Disney’s Aladdin, and old Bugs Bunny cartoons. These “windows” only showed me “billionaires, bombers, and bellydancers,” to borrow from media scholar Jack Shaheen.

The window Ms. Moushabek’s book creates for my students shows us humans, neighbors who joyfully greet one another in many different languages, share delicious food and beautiful music. It shows us how we can share our own stories in order to keep memories of places and experiences alive. The book makes no mention of conflict, certainly no mention of Israel nor of Judaism, so I struggle to understand how this book and its author merited inclusion in these recent conversations about antisemitism.

Certainly the mere existence of Palestinian people and their stories is not inherently antisemitic.

This book will stay on our classroom shelves. We should all welcome more opportunities for our children to learn about the humanity of our neighbors, both local and global, from writers like Ms. Moushabek. The more of these windows we look through, the more we understand our shared humanity, the more fair and just our world can be. Our children will lead the way, if we let them.

Suzanne Stillinger is an early childhood teacher and accessibility coordinator at New Village in Northampton. She is a 2024-2025 Teach Plus Senior Writing Fellow, a 2024-25 Teach Plus Massachusetts Senior Policy Fellow, and a co-facilitator of the Massachusetts Working Group with Defending the Early Years.