[News] The National Education Association just voted to cut all ties to the Anti-Defamation League

[Anti-Imperialist News]

mondoweiss.net
<https://mondoweiss.net/2025/07/the-national-education-association-just-voted-to-cut-all-ties-to-the-anti-defamation-league/?ml_recipient=159358474432545948&ml_link=159358451486557889&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=2025-07-08&utm_campaign=Daily+Headlines+RSS+Automation>
The National Education Association just voted to cut all ties to the
Anti-Defamation League
Emmaia Gelman
July 7, 2025
------------------------------
[image: 2025-delegates-solidarity-fists-1024x577.jpg]
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
<https://www.nea.org/professional-excellence/conferences-events/annual-meeting-and-representative-assembly/about-ra/ra-at-a-glance>
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
<https://mondoweiss.net/2025/03/schools-are-no-place-for-the-adl-examining-the-adls-no-place-for-hate-program/>
of students, parents, and educators. While the ADL has positioned itself as
an anti-bias organization (until recently publicly abandoning
<https://jewishcurrents.org/adl-shutters-flagship-anti-bias-program> much
of that work), it has increasingly been understood as policing and
repressing <http://droptheadl.org/> social justice movements, and deploying
“civil rights talk
<https://manifold.umn.edu/read/ces0802-09/section/6ee631f3-bbda-4567-8203-3db1babea41c>”
to derail change.

Now, the NEA, the largest labor union in the U.S. with 3,000,000 members,
has finally said no.
[image: New Business Item 39 at the NEA's 2025 Representative Assembly.
(Photo: National Education Association)]New Business Item 39 at the NEA’s
2025 Representative Assembly.

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
<https://jewishcurrents.org/examining-the-adls-antisemitism-audit> 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 <https://droptheadl.org/the-adl-is-not-an-ally/>,
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
<https://massteacher.org/news/2025/02/mta-statement-on-reviewing-member-resources-on-the-conflict-in-the-middle-east>
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 <https://massteacher.org/news/2025/02/pagetestimony> 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
<https://archive.ph/2025.07.07-184441/https://www.adl.org/resources/article/adl-calls-nais-lead-change-independent-k-12-schools>
the National Association of Independent Schools, which offered keynote
talks on human rights <https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/call-on-nais>,
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
<https://droptheadlfromschools.org/statement-to-educational-associations/>
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
<https://drive.google.com/file/d/1s4W7CjSahv8XGu4hiOjWFXUaK73mrHBk/view?usp=drive_link>
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
<https://manifold.umn.edu/read/ces0802-09/section/6ee631f3-bbda-4567-8203-3db1babea41c>
it.

The NEA caucuses that organized the “Drop the ADL
<https://mondoweiss.net/2024/10/open-letter-to-educators-the-adl-is-not-a-social-justice-partner/>”
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
<https://archive.ph/2025.07.07-182823/https://k12trackers.substack.com/p/the-national-education-association>
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.

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

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.
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