To celebrate 50 years of educating girls at Albuquerque Academy, Alumni Council member Ted Alcorn ’01 is telling the stories of women alumni.
By Ted Alcorn ’01
As a five-year-old, in the company of her maternal grandmother, Elianna Boswell ’12 went to China.
It was one of many countries she had already visited. That “China” was a restaurant by the interstate didn’t matter to her. Whenever the pair went out to eat, they would “travel” to the country of the chosen cuisine, and her grandmother, an elementary school teacher, would tell her all about the place. And that was magical to the little girl, sparking a lifelong love of learning and travel.
At the Academy, which Elianna entered as a sixth grader, she was not shy about sharing her views or standing up for them, and she was eventually recommended for the debate team. In preparing arguments about complex questions like the ethics of the death penalty, she read philosophical texts she said were far beyond her comprehension. But it was empowering to discover she could still access them to some degree and make them meaningful to her life.
What she valued most, she said, was how the school conferred on her the belief she could do anything she wanted — without a burdensome expectation she had to succeed at all costs or a narrow conception of what it should look like. “It didn’t need to be a particular version of success,” she said. “Whatever I chose was worthwhile.”
Her senior year, during a unit on Israel-Palestine in Charlie Bergman’s comparative government class, Elianna found herself turning her formidable analytical skills on unquestioned dimensions of her own identity. Her Jewish ancestry was deep-rooted; her grandparents, the children of Jewish immigrants, still spoke Yiddish at home together, and Albuquerque’s diverse and inclusive Jewish community had made a place for her family, which had always espoused unwavering support for Israel and the rightness of its policies.
Now, she encountered ideas about land and occupation that were incongruent with the beliefs she’d grown up with. What was most jarring, she said, was what this said about her own blind spots. “The Academy deeply instilled in me the value of critical thinking. And at that point, I was convinced that I was, in fact, a critical thinker.” Now a new, more complicated landscape of the Middle East had come into view. “It was earth-shattering,” she said.
To answer some of the questions this raised, she did what her grandmother had taught her: she traveled. First on a gap year in a Bedouin community in southern Jordan and, after university, to Jerusalem. There, working as the education director for the small non-profit Achvat Amin, which believes in Jewish solidarity with Palestinians as the path towards collective liberation, she developed an experiential curriculum to help her peers explore Israeli and Palestinian societies, as she had.
The program drew students from around the world, many of whom were reconciling their own Jewish identities with Israeli policies to which they objected. For three years, Elianna led cohorts across Israel and Palestine to engage with people living there, be they Palestinian shepherds or Israeli kibbutz residents, and to learn from them.
“I really, really believe in people being allowed to have journeys towards different political points of view, understandings of history, understandings of self,” she said. “There are so few spaces in the world where we’re able to take complex identities and unpack them in really non-judgmental spaces.”
Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, and the bombardment of Gaza that followed, did not stop the educational program. But they were a stark reminder to Elianna of how challenging the situation is, how tectonic the forces at play. “It’s hard — largely because the scale of change that I work at is not the scale of change that we need. And that feels really, really difficult to cope with.”
She also tasted the heartbreak so many people have experienced when her dear friend Khalil was killed in Gaza last fall. “Each life is a world,” she said, referring to a saying that exists in both Jewish and Muslim cultures, and it’s impossible for her to wrap her mind around the fact he is just one of tens of thousands who died. “The human brain is not meant to understand the kinds of numbers that we’re dealing with,” she said.
