Teachers Union Votes To Cut Ties To The Anti-Defamation League

In a momentous vote, the National Education Association voted to cut all ties with the Anti-Defamation League. The reason? “Despite its reputation as a civil rights organization, the ADL is not the social justice educational partner it claims to be.”

By Emmaia Gelman, Mondoweiss

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.