It was during a senior class trip to Israel that Lila Steinbach had the first inkling that she might be different from her peers.

Steinbach, now 23 and living in Chicago, grew up attending Jewish day school and summer camps. Her family keeps kosher, celebrates all the holidays and has visited Israel frequently. Her Jewish faith is a part of her everyday life.

Her father is an Israeli American.

Her high school took the seniors on a four-week educational trip to Israel. The students heard from speakers around the country. One of them was an alum who was living in the West Bank at the time, a peace activist speaking out against Israel's occupation of the territory.

Some of Steinbach's classmates were outraged, calling the speaker a traitor. Others left the room in tears -- shocked that a Jewish person could hold such views.

For Steinbach, it made her think about the history she had been taught -- and what might have been left out. Her class took a trip to the West Bank in a bulletproof bus. She saw a checkpoint where lines of Palestinians would wait for permission to cross for work.

“I felt sick seeing that,” she said. Steinbach also started having doubts about what she had been taught about Palestinians.

“We learned they were one entity -- a homogenous group who wanted to hurt Jewish people,” she said. She recalled the lessons about how Israel was created: that the land of Biblical Israel had been barren and underdeveloped. Some people may have lived there, but they didn’t have a national identity. Israel was created to protect the Jewish people after the Holocaust.

“It was not mentioned that this safety was at the expense of another nation,” she said. She kept her doubts about these narratives to herself.

When she began as a first-year student at Washington University, she joined a chapter of a liberal Zionist lobbying group. She learned history and perspectives she had never known. She met students from Palestinian backgrounds and engaged in conversations with them. When she posted a tepid message against Israel’s expansion into the West Bank in 2021, she felt the backlash from her own community.

“It led me to see how anything that was construed as critical of the Israeli government was seen as a threat to Jewish safety to some people,” she said.

She braced herself for difficult conversations with her parents, whom she loves dearly. She showed them the film "Israelism," made by two young American Jews who joined a movement to redefine Judaism’s relationship with Israel, “revealing a deepening generational divide over modern Jewish identity,” per the film's description.

“To their credit, they didn’t leave” during the movie, Steinbach said. They’ve had some arguments, but they prefer to avoid discussing the emotionally fraught topic.

In the past year, after the attacks by Hamas on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the subsequent Israeli war in Gaza, Steinbach has become more outspoken about justice for the Palestinians and has attended marches in favor of a ceasefire.

She used the word “occupation” for the first time in a conversation with her father.

“There was a visceral reaction to that,” she said. From his perspective, that was a word used by people who hated Israel -- not his own daughter, who loves her faith and her people.

She’s never used the term "apartheid" with them, although that’s how she believes the Israeli government operates.

She discovered unlikely allies through conversations with her aunt, who is also an Israeli American, and her uncle. In a recent conversation, her uncle told her that he agreed that Israel was committing genocide against the Palestinians.

“I was totally shocked,” she said. “Hearing someone in my family, an adult in my family, call Israeli warfare and tactics genocidal, I was taken aback,” she said. Steinbach knows her opinion is in the minority among the community in which she was raised.

A survey conducted in May by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs found that approximately one-third of Jewish American respondents agreed with the accusation that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, while about half disagreed.

A number of organizations -- such as Jewish Voice for Peace, Progressive Jews of St. Louis, IfNotNow, Rabbis for Ceasefire, and Shoresh (anti-Zionist Israelis in the U.S.) -- create community for those who feel marginalized and excluded from mainstream Jewish institutions.

At Washington University, Steinbach helped found Jewish Students for Palestine. She said she wanted to create a space where she felt safe practicing her faith while remaining true to her beliefs. But in response, several of her Jewish friends unfollowed her on social media. One close Jewish friend stopped talking to her.

Steinbach will begin law school at WashU next year. She plans to study human rights law -- putting into practice values learned from her faith.

"Being anti-Zionist doesn't mean being against Jewish safety in any way," she said. "It's a belief in the end to the cycle of violence."

Darryl Diggs Jr. stood outside the Parkway Early Childhood Center in suburban St. Louis at 4:30 a.m., wondering if he had failed his children.

He was third in line the day preschool registration began. His wife had researched the district’s preschool options, and they were focused on getting their son into one specific location.

It was dark and cold that morning. He stood outside the door for four hours, a long line growing behind him, until the doors opened at 8:30 am. He wanted the other parents to see that he was waiting in line just like them -- that his position as an assistant principal in the district didn’t give him an advantage in the process.

But what if he was unable to secure one of the limited spots for his child?

He thought about how his Black ancestors and his parents had stood in lines and sacrificed for their children’s futures. He thought about how far his parents had come from their childhoods in the inner city of Memphis and the high expectations they placed on him and his siblings.

He wondered if his children would one day have to stand in line to secure a great education for their own kids.

Diggs, now the executive director for diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility at the Special School District of St. Louis County, wants a world where parents don’t have to queue up and hope to get one of the limited spots for the education their child needs.

“Who’s willing to work and fight for that?” he asked me, as he recounted that experience from eight years ago.

He planned to share this story, and pose this question, as one of the speakers at an Oct. 5 storytelling event celebrating the value of diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility -- commonly abbreviated as DEI.

Heather Fleming, founder and executive director of Missouri Equity Education Partnership, organized the event in an attempt to counter disinformation about DEI initiatives. While some have turned the effort to encourage diversity into a political issue -- at least 10 states have passed laws limiting these programs, especially in education -- others may be unaware of how such initiatives benefit people, institutions and society.

Learning about others’ experiences offers students a global worldview, allowing them to connect with people from all walks of life, Diggs said. Having a diversity of perspectives fosters innovation and creativity, and it enhances decision-making and problem-solving. For businesses, research consistently shows that fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace improves employee engagement and retention, and increases customer satisfaction and market reach.

In contrast, laws that lead to book bans and censored history lessons hurt society by increasing division and reinforcing biases, Fleming said. In Missouri, schools banned 333 books during the 2022-2023 school year -- the third-highest number of book bans in the U.S.

That’s what Fleming hoped to counter with the event, in which people from various backgrounds shared their stories about how DEI work has affected their lives and those around them.

Diggs said his family lived in Panama and Guatemala for a while when he was young, and that the exposure to other cultures "changed my life for the better." When he came back to St. Louis, he noticed how segmented and divided it was -- and he questioned why, because he had seen something different elsewhere.

He wants his biracial sons to be exposed to diverse cultures, perspectives and backgrounds so they can connect with their peers in the richest way possible, he said.

He thinks back to that day of preschool registration and the hours of freezing while waiting outside.

All that shivering paid off when he got inside and managed to secure a spot for his son.

My longstanding feud with the wildlife in my backyard took an odd turn this summer.

Typically, the feud involves me trying to discourage the deer from eating my hostas and flowers. But this season, my husband sprayed deer repellent earlier than usual, and it actually worked. Feeling a little overconfident in my amateur gardening skills, I decided to plant a variety of seeds and flowers.

It didn’t take very long for the rodents to discover this buffet.

I’m sure the squirrels had something to do with the dirt flung out of the pots. But the holes burrowed in the ground, the uprooted bulbs and the chewed-up plants looked to be work of chipmunks.

A family of them have lived under our patio for as long as I can remember; I’ve spotted them furtively darting about the flower beds, plotting a crime spree. In the past, I’ve accepted this as part of the deal of having a backyard. This time, I was incensed by their brazen destruction. I began thinking about the ethics of getting rid of the chipmunks -- for good.

Would it be morally permissible to kill a sentient, living being simply for the sake of a flower garden? I was deeply conflicted about the idea. On one hand, the chipmunks have a well-established pattern of ruinous behavior on our property. On the other hand, I’m not growing crops to feed my family.

I talked to several close friends, and got just as many opinions. I thought about writing to The New York Times' Ethicist or asking our imam.

Weeks passed as I mulled this moral dilemma.

One recent morning, when I took Frankie outside to take care of his business, we both noticed a small brown animal moving in the grass. My dog's dreams of catching prey seemed about to come true. But I could not bear to witness a chipmunk murder before my eyes.

As Frankie raced toward the animal, I hollered "Leave it!" at the top of my lungs. Surprisingly, he listened -- not a skill he is usually known for. He sniffed near the chipmunk and raced back toward me.

The intensity of my emotions around the prospect of this rodent’s demise startled me. Seeing something die in front of you is a different experience than calling an exterminator -- even though the result is the same.

It made me think about how many gruesome acts we might support from a distance, but recoil from if witnessed up close. How many of us would eat meat if we had to slaughter the animals ourselves? How many of us would kill other human beings in a war?

Philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists have debated the role emotions play in forming our values. Moral emotions -- the feelings and intuitions that play a major role in most of our ethical decision-making -- may come from cultural conditioning or even an innate, evolutionary instinct. Empathy and compassion are important moral emotions that we teach our children in the hopes that they become caring members of society.

Of course, we all value different things.

This comes into sharp focus every four years and plays out in 30-second morality plays on our screens. This time around, one of the signature election-year proposals is mass deportations. Former President Donald Trump is promising to round up and deport immigrants who are here illegally, which would mean expelling around 11 million people from America.

Among his supporters, I bet there are those who gleefully cheer for this kind of mass expulsion. Others might not support it, but are unbothered by the rhetoric because they believe it’s an impossible plan -- one that would collapse too many vital industries and would never happen for logistical or legal reasons.

There’s probably also a fair number who support the idea theoretically, but if they had to personally wrench an immigrant mother away from her American-born children, they might balk at it.

If you had to look a person in the eye -- someone who may have been your neighbor for years, might clean your home or do your church’s lawn work or have repaired your roof -- could you kick them out of their home and banish them from their family? Could you do it to millions of people who have done nothing but work, pay taxes and try to live decent lives here?

In short, could you knowingly bring on the suffering of someone in your own backyard?

I decided to pay attention to my instinctive reaction to protect the chipmunk in my yard.

It’s not as complicated as I once thought.