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Members of Educators Union Say Its Capitulation to ADL Betrays Workers, Students

August 9, 2025 by Nora Lester Murad

This article was originally published in Truthout.

On July 5, the highest deliberative body of the country’s largest union, the National Education Association (NEA), voted at their 2025 Representative Assembly to call on the NEA to “not use, endorse, or publicize any materials from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), such as its curricular materials or its statistics. NEA will not participate in ADL programs or publicize ADL professional development offerings.” Less than two weeks later, the NEA board overturned this democratic decision from the delegates — yet another capitulation to an organization that many educators and others have called a bully.

The ADL, which has long represented itself as a civil right organization, was exposed as a right-wing, Israel-aligned political advocacy organization by #DropTheADL. More recent campaigns like Drop the ADL from Schools have argued it should not be considered a social justice partner to schools. The campaign to drop the ADL from schools contend s that the group:

is an anti-Palestinian, Islamophobic, and racist political advocacy organization that censors learning and undermines inquiry;

produces faulty statistics about antisemitism to create alarm;

misconstrues anti-Zionism and antiwar protest as antisemitic, undermining our constitutional rights to speech and assembly;

falsely accuses educators and educational institutions of hatred of Jews using reputational slander and lawfare;

distracts attention from actual antisemitism coming from the U.S. government, right-wing activists, and white Christian nationalists.

NEA member educators celebrated the July 5 vote as a coup against the stranglehold of the ADL on education. The win — a result of multi-year organizing by the Educators for Palestine and Arab American caucuses of the NEA — was visible proof that public opinion in the United States has shifted, with a large majority of voters expressing disapproval of Israel’s assault on Gaza.

Immediately after the vote, NEA leadership invoked its standing rules, claiming that the measure, known as New Business Item (NBI) #39, constituted a boycott or sanction and therefore had to be referred to the executive committee.

After those rules were invoked, hundreds of NEA member educators coalesced on Signal in an ad hoc support group to demand that NEA leadership respect the democratic will of the representative assembly. NEA members and allies sent more than 20,0000 letters to the executive committee in support of dropping the ADL, including nearly 1,200 letters from Jewish NEA members specifically.

But the ADL and its allies lobbied harder. On July 14, the ADL released what it called a “communal letter” to NEA President Becky Pringle, signed by hundreds of Jewish congregations, nonprofits, and advocacy groups framing the union’s vote as antisemitic. It also reaffirmed its disdain for pro-Palestinian actions by teachers’ unions in California and Massachusetts, citing them as evidence of “open hostility toward Jewish educators, students and families coming from national and local teachers’ unions and their members.” According to recent reporting from New York magazine, the ADL’s CEO Jonathan Greenblatt blamed the measure on a “pro-Hamas” faction in the union.

“The ADL’s lack of trust in teachers is evident in the way it leveraged power to quash NBI #39,” Danielle Bryant, a former ADL education director whose recent exposé argued that the ADL prioritizes politics over education, told Truthout. “It is a stark reminder that the ADL claims a monopoly on arbitrating what is and isn’t antisemitism, and anyone who doesn’t share their definition is labeled an antisemite,” Bryant told Truthout of the ADL’s reaction to the vote.

Pro-Israel media also played a part by misrepresenting the intent, content, and significance of NBI #39. The news outlet Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, for example, said that if upheld, the measure would prohibit the union from using ADL materials about antisemitism and the Holocaust, as if the purpose was to deny students access to resources about Jewish history. The Washington Times quoted the president of the conservative watchdog group Accuracy in Media saying it was “alarming — but not surprising — that the NEA decided to terminate its relationship with the ADL when antisemitism is at an all-time high,” cynically invoking skewed statistics from the ADL itself.

Emboldened Republicans introduced legislation to revoke the NEA’s federal charter, citing both the vote to repudiate the ADL, as well as a separate vote calling on the NEA to “defend democracy against Trump’s embrace of fascism.” The Republican attack — not the first attempt to discredit what the GOP considers the left-wing politics of the NEA — echoed the ADL’s lobbying language.

Less than two weeks after the vote, on July 18, the NEA executive committee met with almost no public notice. That was followed immediately by a meeting of the NEA board of directors, which decided to overturn the democratic vote taken in the Representative Assembly. In a statement, NEA President Pringle claimed to have determined “after consideration” that “this proposal (sic) would not further NEA’s commitment to academic freedom, our membership, or our goals.” To reach this decision, the NEA said it consulted with “NEA state affiliates and civil rights leaders, including Jewish American and Arab American community leaders, and we also met with ADL leadership.” The decision to overturn the vote did not, however, allow for rebuttal by state NEA affiliates — the procedure called for the same rules that NEA leadership used to claim jurisdiction over the final decision.

“NEA opposes efforts to shut down debate, to silence voices of disagreement, and intimidation. We recognize the underlying concerns of the authors and supporters of the proposal, and we are committed to ongoing discussion with our community,” the statement read. “Not adopting this proposal is in no way an endorsement of the ADL’s full body of work. We are calling on the ADL to support the free speech and association rights of all students and educators.”

Even though the NEA capitulated, the GOP continued its campaign against the union. House Republicans introduced the anti-union STUDENT Act (Stopping Teachers Unions from Damaging Education Needs Today Act), which threatens to modify the NEA’s charter and weaken the union. In a statement announcing the proposed legislation, GOP lawmakers quoted Aaron Withe, the CEO of the right-wing, anti-union Freedom Foundation.

While many supporters of the campaign to drop the ADL felt blindsided by the NEA’s betrayal, some experienced union members were not surprised. They say this isn’t the first time the NEA disregarded the votes of members when they don’t align with the interests of union executives. For example, when members voted to endorse progressive Bernie Sanders, NEA leadership decided instead to align with Hilary Clinton — perhaps, some argue, because NEA leadership positions are seen as a fast-track to the Democratic Party. “Last year, the NEA locked out its own staff from their own union,” said Alison, an organizer supporting Educators for Palestine who did not want her last name used for fear of repercussions. “How are we supposed to trust them to represent teachers’ interests?”

A longtime labor organizer who also didn’t wish to be named to avoid negative impact on their career said, “The majority of U.S. unions have headquarters in Washington, D.C. in order to capitalize on political relationships, which can take priority over organizing and communicating with members.”

When it comes to supporting Palestinian rights, backlash from the ADL and its allies has fallen squarely on activists, students, and educators, with individual teachers, schools, districts, and educational associations being targeted with what activists call bad faith accusations of antisemitism. These include reputational slander or lawfare attacks like Title VI civil rights complaints that mix instances of real antisemitism with support for Palestinian rights that is misrepresented as antisemitic. For workers, the cost of being targeted have included disciplinary measures, loss of livelihood, loss of professional credibility, severed relationships and mental health problems. “Since the ADL has so much influence over teachers at the national level, it’s not surprising that educators have lost jobs or contracts for teaching in a balanced way that falls short of what the Israel lobby wants,” said Angela, an NEA member and Representative Assembly delegate who teaches in Maryland, who asked for her name to be withheld to prevent further professional repercussions. The NEA, like other unions, has often been uneasy about supporting members like Angela, who was disciplined by her district for publicly opposing the genocide in Gaza. She said, “My local protected my due process, but there was no political support. I think they saw paying for arbitration for me as a waste of their political capital.”

Educators were therefore not surprised that the ADL’s bullying tactics were so effective. The NEA is only the most recent addition to the list of educational organizations that ADL has strongarmed into supporting its aims over those of their own members.

In 2024, at least two educational associations caved to political pressure from the ADL, calling into question the strength of the country’s K-12 educational infrastructure. An accusation of antisemitism by the ADL against a pro-Palestinian speaker at the National Association of Independent Schools’ People of Color Conference led to an immediate apology from the association, despite support for the speech from attendees. Soon after, the association announced that its flagship equity programs — which include that conference — were “paused,” which many educators fear is a euphemism for cancellation. Soon after, the ADL accused a speaker on an equity panel at the annual conference of MassCUE (the Massachusetts state affiliate of the International Society for Technology in Education) of antisemitism. This led to the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents severing ties with MassCUE, a longtime partner. Subsequently, the MassCUE executive director was dismissed and the board of directors resigned, the organization went dark, and then seemed to relaunch with new leadership and without any explanation to member educators.

The Trump administration has engaged in similar bullying tactics targeting education, threatening to cancel university funding as punishment for supposedly rampant antisemitism, which inexplicably can be washed away by the payment of large fines by Columbia, Harvard, and the University of California, among others. The ADL’s response to the Trump administration’s bullying varies, with Greenblatt calling Trump’s crackdown on Harvard “overreach” back in March, but then praising Columbia’s role in the detention of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil in the same month. Organizers note that the Trump administration’s use of accusations of antisemitism to extract political concessions mirrors the yearslong weaponization of Title VI civil rights law by the ADL and other pro-Israel advocates, including against both universities and K-12 schools.

“People are generally so afraid to get antisemitism wrong or of being called antisemitic, they act out of fear, even when it means undermining educators’ longstanding commitment to creating safe and inclusive learning environments,” said Bryant.

The NEA’s capitulation is another feather in the ADL’s cap and a win for the Trumpist interests that organize to weaken labor unions’ advocacy for their members’ democratic rights. The ADL’s willingness to undermine democracy to get what it wants reveals its true nature as a pro-Israel political advocacy organization, not a civil rights advocate. “The NEA has been attacked directly by right-wingers. You would think they would realize that aligning with them will not protect them the way backing their members would,” said Alison.

Although NBI #39 was overturned, the member educators who oppose the ADL’s anti-Palestinian interference in schools do not plan to give up. “The NEA’s turn away from its members and toward the ADL transforms it from being an ally to call in to an advocacy target that must be called out,” said Alison, who noted the danger to the labor movement as a whole when workers’ voices are ignored. Rethinking Schools magazine also released a statement with the same sentiment:

“[I]t’s not too late. The voices calling for justice — Palestinian, Jewish, Black, Indigenous, queer, Muslim, and working-class educators — aren’t going away. They are the future of this union. They are organizing in defense of academic freedom, in solidarity with Gaza, and in pursuit of a world where no child learns under occupation and scholasticide no educator is threatened for teaching about those crimes.”

Members of the NEA, who are both educators and workers, voted to oust the ADL because they are committed to teaching the truth and developing skills in critical thinking that young people need to act as socially responsible global citizens, and because they understand that the ADL’s anti-democratic efforts to undermine education also harm them as workers. This makes the NEA’s repudiation of the ADL an important inspiration for all workers, not only NEA members — because all workers are threatened by organizations like the ADL that ally with right-wing forces to undermine workers’ rights and the integrity of the labor unions mandated to protect them.

ADL’s Stats Twist Israel’s Critics Into Antisemites

February 19, 2025 by Nora Lester Murad

This article was originally published by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting

Media outlets continue to print headlines about antisemitism based on Anti-Defamation League statistics known to be faulty and politicized. In doing so, they grant undeserved credibility to the ADL as a source.

Producing statistics helps the ADL to claim objectivity when they assert that antisemitism is increasing dramatically, prevalent in all fields of society, and emanating from the left as well as the right. Those “facts” are then used to justify policy recommendations that fail to respond to actual antisemitism, but succeed in undermining the free speech rights of Palestinians and their supporters, including those of us who are Jews.

Smearing Israel critics as antisemites

James Bamford (The Nation, 1/31/24) : “The New York Times, PBS and other mainstream outlets that reach millions are constantly and uncritically promoting the ADL and amplifying the group’s questionable charges.”

While it frames itself as a civil rights organization, the ADL has a long history of actively spying on critics of Israel and collaborating with the Israeli government (Nation, 1/31/24). (FAIR itself was targeted as a “Pinko” group in ADL’s sprawling spying operation in the ’90s.)

Though it professes to document and challenge antisemitism, it openly admits to counting pro-Palestinian activism as antisemitic: In 2023, the ADL changed its methodology for reporting antisemitic incidents to include rallies that feature “anti-Zionist chants and slogans,” even counting anti-war protests led by Jews—including Jewish organizations the ADL designated as “hate groups.”

The ADL’s political motivations are clear in its advocacy for the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which alleges that criticizing Israel based on its policies (e.g., “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” or “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis“) is antisemitic. The ADL and their allies also deem speech supporting Palestinian human rights to be coded antisemitism.

Criticism of the ADL is increasing. In 2020, activists launched #DropTheADL to raise awareness among progressives that the ADL is not a civil rights or anti-bias group, but rather an Israel advocacy organization that attacks Palestinians and supporters of Palestinian rights in order to protect Israel from criticism. Last year, a campaign to Drop the ADL From Schools launched with an exposé in Rethinking Schools magazine, and an open letter to educators, titled “Educators Beware: The Anti-Defamation League Is Not the Social Justice Partner It Claims to Be,” that garnered more than 90 organizational signatories. These efforts build off research that exposes the ADL’s work to normalize Zionism and censor inclusion of Palestinian topics in the media, policy circles, schools and in society at large.

In 2023, some of its own high-profile staff resigned, citing the group’s “dishonest” campaign against Israel’s critics. In June 2024, Wikipedia editors found the ADL regularly labels legitimate political criticism of Israel as antisemitic, leading the popular online encyclopedia to designate the group an unreliable source on Israel/Palestine.

Critiquing the ADL’s statistics does not serve to argue that antisemitism is acceptable or less deserving of attention than other forms of discrimination. Rather, it demonstrates that we can’t rely on the ADL for information about the extent or nature of antisemitism—and neither should media.

A dubious source

This New York Times report (10/6/24) obscured the fact that many of the “antisemitic incidents” counted by the ADL were chants critical of Israel.

And yet corporate media use the ADL uncritically as a source for reports on antisemitism. For instance, the New York Times (10/6/24) not only headlined the ADL’s assertion that “Antisemitic Incidents Reach New High in the US,” it chose to contextualize the ADL’s findings “in the wake of the Hamas attack,” and called the ADL a “civil rights organization.”

Important media outlets like The Hill (4/16/24), with outsized influence on national policy discussions, ran similar headlines, failing to note the ADL’s highly controversial methodology.

At least the Wall Street Journal (1/14/25) acknowledged that the ADL has been challenged for counting criticism of Israel as antisemitism. But it immediately dismissed the applicability of those challenges to the ADL’s Global 100 survey, which found that 46% of adults worldwide hold antisemitic views. (The ADL’s Global 100 survey was criticized for its flawed methodology as far back as 2014, when researchers found it “odd and potentially misleading.”)

The media’s willingness to accept ADL claims without scrutiny is evident in CNN’s choice (12/16/24) not to investigate the ADL’s accusations of antisemitism against speakers at a recent conference of the National Association of Independent Schools, but rather to simply repeat and amplify the ADL’s dishonest and slanderous narrative.

Methodological faults

A Jewish Currents report (6/17/24) concluded that “the ADL’s data is much more poised to capture random swastika graffiti and stray anti-Zionist comments than dangerous Christian nationalist movements.”

Even setting aside the ADL’s prioritization of Israel’s interests over Jewish well-being, the ADL’s statistics should be thrown out due to methodological faults and lack of transparency.

Even FBI statistics, frequently cited by the ADL, don’t tell a clear story. Their claim that 60% of religious hate crimes (not mere bias incidents) target Jews is misleading, given the systemic undercounting of bias against other religious groups. Because of the history of anti-Muslim policing, Muslims are less likely to report than people of other religions.

In fact, a national survey of Muslims found that over two-thirds of respondents had personally encountered Islamophobia, while only 12.5% had reported an incident. Almost two-thirds of respondents who encountered an Islamophobic incident did not know where or how to report it. When Muslims experience hate, it is less likely to be pursued as a hate crime.

On the other hand, the ADL has an unparalleled infrastructure for collecting incident reports. It actively solicits these reports from its own network, and through close relations with police and a growing network of partners like Hillel International and Jewish Federations.

Perpetrators’ motivations are also relevant and should not be inferred. In 2017, Jews were frightened by over 2,000 threats aimed at Jewish institutions in the United States. It turned out that nearly all came from one Jewish Israeli with mental health problems. Without this level of investigation, policymakers could enact misguided policy based on the ADL’s sensationalism, like CEO Jonathan Greenblatt’s claim that “antisemitism is nothing short of a national emergency, a five-alarm fire that is still raging across the country and in our local communities and campuses.”

Bad-faith accusations

David Klion (Zeteo, 2/4/25): “How did the ADL, which for generations has presented itself as America’s leading antisemitism watchdog, find itself prostrated before the most powerful enabler of white supremacy in recent American history?”

Although critics have long argued that the ADL’s politicized definition of antisemitism and flawed statistics cannot be the basis of effective policy, policymakers continue to rely on media’s deceptive journalism.

Massachusetts State Sen. John Velis cited ADL statistics to claim the state has “earned the ignominious reputation as a hub of antisemitic activity,” and therefore needs a special antisemitism commission. In Michigan, ADL reports of escalating antisemitism led to a resolution that will affect policy in schools across the state. In Connecticut, the ADL referenced its statistics in a government announcement about changes to the state’s hate crimes laws. The ADL’s statistics undergirded the logic of President Joe Biden’s National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism.

But how can politically distorted research be the foundation for effective policy?

Antisemitism is surely increasing. Hate crimes have increased in general—most targeting Black people—especially since the first Trump presidency, and hate incidents generally rise during violent outbreaks like the war on Gaza, and during election periods. But since most antisemitism originates in the white nationalist right wing, why focus primarily on people—including Jews—who are legitimately protesting their own government’s support for Israeli actions against Palestinians? Or on Palestinians themselves, who have every right to promote the humanity and rights of their people?

The ADL’s bad-faith accusations weaponize antisemitism to protect Israel at the expense of democratic and anti-racist principles. Anyone who doubted the ADL’s politics should be convinced by its abhorrent defense of Elon Musk’s Nazi salute (FAIR.org, 1/23/25) and its support for Donald Trump.

To pursue effective public policy, policymakers and the public should refuse to cite the ADL’s flawed statistics, and instead develop thoughtful and nuanced ways to understand and address antisemitism and other forms of bigotry and discrimination. Media can play a key role by exposing the politicization of antisemitism by the ADL, including its prioritization of protection for Israel from criticism over the free speech that is fundamental to democratic discourse.