NEA breaks ties with the Anti-Defamation League. (Repost from Mondoweiss)
I am on holiday until July 20th with family on Block Island, 13 miles off the coast of Rhode Island.
Today I am resting a report from Mondoweiss, a source for news and opinion about Israel, Palestine and the United States.
DELEGATES RAISE SOLIDARITY FISTS AT THE NEA’S 2025 REPRESENTATIVE ASSEMBLY. (PHOTO: NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION)
In a momentous vote, the National Education Association’s 7,000-member policymaking body cut all ties with the Anti-Defamation League. On July 6, the NEA’s national Representative Assembly approved New Business Item 39, committing that the NEA “will not use, endorse, or publicize materials from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), such as its curricular materials or statistics.” The reasoning: “Despite its reputation as a civil rights organization, the ADL is not the social justice educational partner it claims to be.”
The ADL has been a ubiquitous presence in U.S. schools for nearly forty years, pushing curriculum, direct programming, and teacher training into K-12 schools and increasingly into universities – often over the objections of students, parents, and educators. While the ADL has positioned itself as an anti-bias organization (until recently publicly abandoning much of that work), it has increasingly been understood as policing and repressing social justice movements, and deploying “civil rights talk” to derail change.
Now, the NEA, the largest labor union in the U.S. with 3,000,000 members, has finally said no.
Union delegates speaking on the Assembly floor rejected the ADL’s abuse of the term “antisemitism” to punish critics of Israel, and its use of hyperinflated statistics on hate crimes to gin up fears about Jewish safety and paint calls for Palestinian rights as “hate speech.” Delegates also cited the ADL’s history of suppressing antiracist organizing, including attacking the anti-Apartheid and Black Lives Matter movements. If the ADL’s history was not widely known before, its attacks on Jewish, Palestinian, and BIPOC anti-genocide protest over the past twenty months had led people to look more closely. “These are educators who believe in antiracist and social justice unionism. They’re beginning to understand Palestine in that context. They’re intolerant of the justification of violence,” one NEA member said.
Beyond those general objections, the ADL had fully sealed its fate by attacking NEA members themselves. Merrie Najimy, former president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA), recounted that in 2024 the MTA was tasked by its elected board of directors with creating resources for educators themselves to learn the history of Palestine, a counter-narrative to the myth that Palestine was “a land without a people” that European Jews could simply claim. The ADL improperly took those internal materials, cherry-picked elements to claim that presenting Palestinian perspectives on being colonized amounted to “glorifying terrorists”, and “manipulated [them]… to label the state’s largest union of educators as promoters of antisemitism,” as MTA leaders wrote in February. The ADL followed with a barrage of denunciations of teachers and the union in the state legislative hearings and press. These in turn resulted in the doxxing of MTA members, death threats against MTA staff, and anti-labor attacks that are still ongoing. “Why would we partner with an organization that does us harm?” Najimy asked in the lead-up to the NEA vote.
The ADL has similarly attacked the National Association of Independent Schools, which offered keynote talks on human rights, including Palestinian rights, by experts Suzanne Barakat and Ruha Benjamin at its 2024 conference. It has more recently turned its attention to “guiding” scholarly and educational associations – urging them to conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism – in response to a wave of resolutions opposing Israeli genocide and scholasticide. This is also not the first conflict between the NEA and the ADL over antiracism. In 1982, when the NEA joined with the National Anti-Klan Committee to develop curriculum on white supremacy, the ADL denounced it as too critical of the U.S. state’s role in racism. The NEA curriculum was never implemented, and the ADL’s own “tolerance” curriculum supplanted it.
The NEA caucuses that organized the “Drop the ADL” vote also reflect shifts in U.S. political culture. Several years ago, Najimy says, saying the word “Palestine” at the NEA convention would be called out of order. But a new Arab-American Caucus, a multiracial partnership with BIPOC and Jewish delegates, began working for educational resolutions on terms like “Nakba” in 2018. In 2024, the addition to the federal census of a Middle East/North Africa ethnic category led to formal recognition of a MENA Caucus at the NEA, entitled to full participation and rights – “not tied to somebody else’s acceptance of us,” Najimy said. That recognition helped members understand Palestinian rights as a necessary part of the union’s commitments to antiracism. At the same time, as the Gaza genocide catalyzed a global reckoning with Zionism as racist violence, a surge of newly politicized NEA members helped catalyze an Educators for Palestine caucus. Through one-on-one conversations and state-by-state organizing, the two caucuses broke through old myths that conflated supporting Jews with supporting Zionism.
The NEA’s worker-led, bottom-up rejection of the ADL interrupts the ADL’s strategy of building influence over education from the top down, entering schools and universities through high-level administrators, donors, and lawyers. The ADL leveraged spurious antisemitism claims to demand that schools bring it in to set policy and provide programming. For instance, after publishing “report cards” that panned universities where protests occurred, the ADL announced that 40% of those universities had “engaged in consultations” and adopted measures that improved their grade. The ADL’s recommended measures generally include conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism, escalating punitive discipline, and implementing ADL trainings that set the terms of allowable speech.
Backlash against the NEA vote has already begun, but union organizers are ready for it. The anti-woke/anti-CRT North American Values Institute (formerly Jewish Institute for Liberal Values) denounced the measure as antisemitic, and additionally attacked NEA members as “lemmings” for defending DEI against Trump’s incursions. Educators for Israel falsely claimed on X that Jewish teachers speaking about antisemitism – meaning Zionist teachers conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism – were “met with booing, jeering, yelling, and mockery.” But NEA members have already seen through those tactics, and they have seen a genocide on their phones. The ADL’s continued attacks seem only to help them see even more clearly.
The ADL’s continued attacks seem only to help them see even more clearly. As NEA delegate Stephen Siegel said from the assembly floor, “Allowing the ADL to determine what constitutes antisemitism would be like allowing the fossil fuel industry to determine what constitutes climate change.”
Additionally, the urgency of talking about Palestine has become an organizing engine within the NEA. “We have always had people of color, educators who are part of liberation struggles, in solidarity with us. But they’ve never had a place inside of NEA to be organized around it, until the Arab American Caucus and Educators for Palestine became a space to organize,” said one delegate.
The NEA’s legal team has designated the approved measure “a boycott”, even though it seems unlikely that a decision not to partner with another racist organization would be received as a boycott. With that designation, the measure is subject to additional procedural steps before the NEA implements it. Each step will be a chance for the ADL to use its considerable influence to attack the NEA again — but also a new chance for NEA members to show that their commitment to antiracist education and antiracist unionism is strong, and that they’re not for sale.