I was working at my desk this morning when I got a text from my daughter, who’s sixteen years old and a student at Brooklyn Tech. She wanted to know if I would go with her to a walkout for Palestine that had been organized by and for New York City high school students. Having dragged her to so many demonstrations when she was much younger, I was thrilled to be asked to join her at this one.

We met up, and at 3:00 p.m. the students converged at 52 Chambers Street, where the New York City Department of Education is located. I was impressed by a few of the increasingly familiar elements that distinguish this generation of protesters from previous ones — the extraordinary diversity of the students, the variety of boroughs they were coming from, the initiative of the students (from every corner of the protest, a different student would start a chant whenever the crowd fell silent), and the leadership role of female students.

But what most struck me about the protest was how frequently I heard the phrase “the truth.” In my more than thirty years on the Left, I’ve never heard so much talk of “the truth.” The speakers and the chanters invoked the phrase repeatedly.