Portside

The Anti-Defamation League has been a ubiquitous presence in U.S. schools for 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.

Now, the three million-member National Education Association has finally said no.

In July 6 vote, the NEA’s 7,000-member Representative Assembly cut all ties with the ADL.

The body approved a measure 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.”

Union members speaking on the floor rejected the ADL’s abuse of the term “antisemitism” to punish critics of Israel, its use of hyperinflated statistics on hate crimes to gin up fears about Jewish safety, and its characterization of calls for Palestinian rights as “hate speech.”

“Allowing the ADL to determine what constitutes antisemitism would be like allowing the fossil fuel industry to determine what constitutes climate change,” said NEA delegate Stephen Siegel from the assembly floor.

NEA members also cited the ADL’s history of discouraging anti-racist organizing, including attacking the anti-Apartheid and Black Lives Matter movements.

ATTACKED MEMBERS

If the ADL’s history was not widely known before, its attacks on Jewish, Palestinian, and anti-genocide protesters over the past twenty months led people to look more closely.

Merrie Najimy, former president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, 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.

The ADL improperly took those internal materials, cherry-picked elements to claim that presenting Palestinian perspectives amounted to “glorifying terrorists,” and “manipulated ... to label the state’s largest union of educators as promoters of antisemitism,” MTA leaders wrote in February.

The ADL followed with a barrage of denunciations of teachers and the union in state legislative hearings and the press. This 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.

In response to a wave of resolutions opposing Israeli genocide, the ADL has recently turned its attention to “guiding” scholarly and educational associations, urging them to conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism.

This is also not the first conflict between the NEA and the ADL over anti-racism. 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.

CULTURE SHIFT

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 began working for educational resolutions on terms like “Nakba” in 2018. In 2024, the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) Caucus was officially recognized, and helped members understand that Palestinian rights are a necessary part of the union’s commitments to anti-racism.

At the same time, as the Gaza genocide catalyzed a global reckoning, a surge of newly politicized NEA members created 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.

“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.

ADL ‘REPORT CARDS’

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. After publishing “report cards” that panned universities where protests occurred, the ADL announced that 40 percent 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 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 against the measure were “met with booing, jeering, yelling, and mockery.”

Strangely, the NEA’s legal team has designated the approved measure “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 attack the NEA again.

But NEA members have already seen through those tactics, and they have seen a genocide on their phones. The ADL’s continued attacks only to help them see even more clearly.

A version of this article first appeared on Mondoweiss.

Emmaia Gelman is the director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, and author of a forthcoming history of the Anti-Defamation League.