NEA Teachers Celebrate Motion to Drop ADL; Israel Lobby Fumes

National Education Association teachers in support of Palestinian rights are celebrating their breakthrough success at the NEA’s Representative Assembly in Portland this summer. After years of organizing with both one-on-one conversations and state delegation talks, NEA delegates voted to pass a Drop the Anti-Defamation League motion that rejects the ADL as a curriculum and professional development partner.

“We are witnessing a sea change in people’s understanding of who the Palestinians are and what colonialism has done to them,“ said Merrie Najimy, former president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) and Founder of MTA Rank and File for Palestine. “In the past, too many people didn’t see the humanity of Palestinians because Israeli propaganda erased and dehumanized them. We call that anti-Palestinian racism.”

While the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), and CODEPINK applauded the motion, the Anti-Defamation League blamed a “pro-Hamas” cabal inside the NEA for rejecting an organization that smears peace activists and slams Muslims and anti-Zionist Jews.

The “pro-Hamas” accusation echoes the verbiage of Project Esther, the Heritage Foundation’s MAGA blueprint for crushing pro-Palestinian voices amid Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The product of Christian nationalists, Project Esther has earned the ire of the Academic Council of Jewish Voice for Peace for blasting anti-genocide protesters as members of a fictitious U.S. Hamas Support Network.

“Allowing the ADL to determine what constitutes antisemitism would be like allowing the fossil fuel industry to determine what constitutes climate change.”

In response to the motion’s passage at the NEA Representative Assembly (RA), an enraged ADL sent out a mass email urging its supporters to tell the NEA executive committee to reverse the NEA delegates’ recommendation that teachers not “use, endorse, or publicize” ADL materials, nor “participate in ADL programs or publicize ADL professional development offerings.”

A national Drop the ADL From Schools campaign has long criticized the ADL’s materials for whitewashing the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, where Zionist militias destroyed over 500 Palestinian villages in the Nakba (Arabic word for catastrophe) of 1947-48 when the State of Israel was declared.

The ADL’s mass email made no mention, however, of Palestine, focusing instead on the urgency of providing resources to fight antisemitism. “Don’t let the radical anti-Israel advocates within the NEA marginalize Jewish voices,” read the ADL email.

Whereas Merriam-Webster defines antisemitism as “hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group” and makes no distinction between the antisemitism that fueled the Holocaust and today’s white supremacist chants “Jews will not replace us,” the ADL’s Echoes and Reflections curriculum, co-developed with the Shoah Foundation and Yad Vashem, includes a unit that defines contemporary antisemitism as “anti-Zionism and opposition to the State of Israel.”

The unit introduces a pro-Israel vocabulary framework—delegitimization, demonization, and double-standards–a 3D test to evaluate whether an incident is antisemitic. Under this rubric, the campus slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is noted 600 times in the ADL’s 2024 audit of antisemitic incidents, according to the magazine Jewish Currents, which conducted a “line by line” examination of the audit. Even the ADL admits that 58% of the incidents cited in its 2024 audit were related to criticism of Israel.

Still, teachers and students who access ADL curriculum—No Place for Hate, Echoes and Reflections, A World of Difference—are encouraged, through links back to the ADL website, to complete a complaint form accusing others of involvement in what the ADL defines as antisemitic incidents.

On the floor of the Representative Assembly, delegate Stephen Siegel of Oregon reminded the delegates that Wikipedia editors determined the ADL is not a reliable source on antisemitism. “Allowing the ADL to determine what constitutes antisemitism would be like allowing the fossil fuel industry to determine what constitutes climate change,” said Siegel.

Backers of the NEA motion object to the ADL’s Zionist framing and stereotyping of all Jews as supporters of Israel.

“The ADL and other Zionist organizations continually try to equate criticism of Israel with antisemitism,” said Judy Greenspan, the Oakland Education Association NEA delegate who introduced the motion that emerged from the Educators for Palestine Caucus inside the 3-million-member union. “The NEA will no longer be bullied into supporting this genocidal war,” added Greenspan, a public school teacher and member of Jewish Voice for Peace who was among the 6,000 delegates at the NEA Representative Assembly.

In the days following the RA, photos of delegates who championed the motion were posted on social media, leading to “doxing, harassment, and hate emails,” according to Greenspan.

In contrast, Jason Goldfisher, an NEA Jewish Affairs Caucus delegate, complained on his Facebook page that his Jewish friends did not feel safe following the vote at the NEA convention. “There were tears. Panic attacks. Silent breakdowns,” wrote Goldfisher, who noted the presence of keffiyehs in the assembly room.

“Yes, many of us wore keffiyehs throughout the NEA Representative Assembly,” said Greenspan, “because we wanted to visibly show our support for the Palestinian people who are being brutally murdered by the U.S. and Israel in what can only be called a genocidal holocaust. One of the continuing mantras of the Zionists is that our anti-Zionist activism makes them feel ‘unsafe.’ It is such a false narrative because looking at what is happening in the world objectively, it is the Palestinians who are being brutally massacred by the Israeli government with U.S. bombs and military equipment.”

On the floor of the assembly, a delegate from the “great state of New Jersey” skipped over Israel’s concentration camp in Gaza to “rise in opposition” to the NEA motion. “The ADL defends members of the Jewish community against hate, discrimination, and antisemitism. That support extends to our students and fellow educators who use those resources regularly,” said the delegate whose name was “unclear” in a transcript of the debate.

The ADL, however, did not defend New England teachers who developed a counternarrative to the “land without a people for a people without a land" mythology. Former MTA President Najimy said the ADL launched a smear campaign against the MTA to accuse the union of antisemitism following the MTA’s development of resources on Palestinian history and indigeneity. “So why would we partner with an organization that is actively trying to discredit the teachers’ union?” said Najimy.

In 2024, when the federal census added a new category—Middle East-North Africa—the NEA bestowed formal recognition on a MENA Caucus, which Najimy said helped delegates understand that the union’s commitment to antiracism must include support for equal rights for Palestinians. Israel’s live-streamed genocide also brought new member delegates to the NEA RA, making passage of the motion possible due to widespread outrage, according to Najimy.

The NEA motion rejecting the ADL followed a similar motion passed overwhelmingly last spring by the governing body of United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA), which represents 35,000 educators in the country’s second-largest teachers union, right behind New York City. The UTLA motion asked Los Angeles Unified School Board members, administrators, and educators not to adopt or teach ADL curriculum or partner with the ADL for professional development because “the organization conflates anti-Zionism with antisemitism to suppress debate.”

In its rationale, the UTLA motion referenced the ADL’s history of surveilling activists (UAW, NAACP, ACLU), suing school districts, and sending a threatening letter to college presidents demanding investigations of the nonviolent Students for Justice in Palestine.

With the ADL appealing to the NEA’s nine-member executive committee to reconsider the motion, union President Becky Pringle walks a tightrope as the committee studies whether to say yay or nay to the majority of delegates rejecting the ADL.

Pringle assured the public that the NEA is committed to combating “all forms of hate and discrimination, including antisemitism and anti-Palestinian bigotry.” In a public statement on the actions taken at this summer’s NEA’s Representative Assembly, Pringle reminded critics that the NEA hosted a panel on antisemitism, honored a Holocaust survivor, and voted to honor Jewish American Heritage Month.

The NEA executive committee will forward its recommendation on the motion to the NEA board, which will then circle back with the Representative Assembly for a final vote, according to Najimy.

In solidarity with Educators for Palestine, CODEPINK urged its supporters to reach out to the NEA executive committee, and Jewish Voice for Peace asked its members to weigh in with a one-click tweet to NEA leadership:

Thank you @NEAToday for voting to cut ties with the ADL. The ADL pretends it’s a civil rights group, but really, it’s a pro-Israel lobbying group that smears Palestinian rights, and it should never be trusted as an educational resource. I urge all educators to #DropTheADL.