Nora Lester Murad - The View From My Window in Palestine

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

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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 contends 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.

On Teach Truth Day of Action: The Movement to #TeachTruth Includes Palestine, Too

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This article was originally published in LA Progressive on June 6, 2025. See LA Progressive for a video interview with me about the topic. You can listen to the article below here.

Erasure and censorship of Palestinians and Palestinian narratives is a denial of Palestinian humanity.

There is a veritable battle in US schools over if and how to teach about the Middle East. But the disagreement isn’t between people who want to teach a pro-Palestinian view and those who want to teach a pro-Israeli view. It is between those who want to teach the truth and those who want to silence it.

“Teach Truth” is a phrase and movement that emerged in response to right-wing efforts to silence teaching about racism in the United States. The driving idea is that if students know the truth about historical structural inequality, they will understand that it doesn’t serve their interests, no matter who they are, and they will be motivated to change it. In a society that peddles falsehoods to perpetuate the status quo, the truth is disruptive, even dangerous, to those who benefit from inequality.

More than half of all K-12 students in the United States already study in schools where law restricts the teaching of the truth. In Florida, for example, there are five books that if mentioned by a teacher constitute a felony violation punishable by up to five years in prison. When Palestine comes up in the classroom, teachers may be smeared by false accusations of antisemitism, causing severe disruption to their careers and lives. And given recent abductions and deportations of students and teachers by the Trump administration, it seems sure that attacks on teaching and learning will increase.

The purpose of this censorship is to prevent students from accessing materials and inquiry that would support their critical thinking. Looked at this way, censorship of Black history clearly doesn’t harm only Black students, it harms all students, and the same dynamic can be seen in the fight over the teaching of current events in Palestine/Israel.

Erasure and censorship of Palestinians and Palestinian narratives is a denial of Palestinian humanity. Palestinian students and teachers who are dehumanized in K-12 schools are harmed, and their dehumanization leads to more harm, including the active and passive support of U.S. taxpayers in the 19-month-long slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Moreover, students who do not learn Palestinian history, who do not respect the humanity of Palestinians, and who cannot engage respectfully with Palestinian narratives cannot be effective U.S. or global citizens. But too many teachers still think that teaching about Palestinians is somehow anti-Jewish, as if legitimacy is a fixed resource and any inclusion of Palestinians comes at the expense of Jews.

How do we get the ADL out of schools? A conversation with Nora Lester Murad of #DropTheADLfromSchools.

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This interview with me was originally published by The Specter of the Bund on May 30, 2025 and republished by Portside on June 5, 2025.

Since as far back as the 1980s, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has sponsored programs aimed at fighting discrimination in K-12 education. In recent years, however, the organization has narrowed its focus almost exclusively to antisemitism at the expense of other marginalized communities. In doing so, the ADL has created a coercive environment that encourages carceral solutions and monetary donations as a fix for systemic issues. Since the start of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in 2023, the ADL’s illiberal leanings have been put on full display as it voiced support for the detainment of Mahmoud Khalil, dismissed Elon Musk’s Nazi salute, and done everything in its power to silence criticism of the state of Israel by labeling pro-Palestinian language and activism as “antisemitism” in its public advocacy and statistics, putting the self-proclaimed “anti-hate” organization in alignment with the likes of the Trump administration and Heritage Foundation.

Der Spekter editors spoke to Nora Lester Murad, a member of the core organizing team of the #DropTheADL movement, about what educators are facing in their schools and what needs to be done to replace the ADL’s programs with truly progressive, anti-racist solutions.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Mark Misoshnik, Der Spekter editor: Please tell us about yourself and then more about this movement that you’re a part of.

Nora Lester Murad: I’m originally from California. I live now in Massachusetts, and I’m Jewish. I married a Palestinian Muslim, and we raised three daughters in the West Bank. I’ve been involved with social justice work since my parents dragged me to demonstrations in a car seat, and I come from the same stock that you folks come from: both the villages around Kyiv as well as the Brooklyn left. I’m committed to social justice issues and particularly have been involved in this one even before I got married, which was 40 years ago. So it’s been a real, real long time. I think I’ve always been an anti-Zionist. My parents were anti-racist, so they were basically anti-Zionists.

Obviously the last 18–19 months have been particularly difficult for anyone who is either Jewish or Palestinian for different reasons. And it was during the genocide that the “Drop the ADL From Schools” campaign was birthed and then launched. Around 2020 there was [also] an effort to drop the ADL, which still exists at droptheadl.org, and it focused on helping progressive organizations understand that the ADL is not an ally to progressive groups. There’s also a long history of surveilling and attacking social movements of communities of color, even while they allied with some more conservative and integrationist civil rights organizations when necessary, contributing to the ADL’s undeserved reputation as a civil rights organization over the last several decades.

The 2020 effort to drop the ADL has resulted in over 300 organizations signing on to an open letter saying the ADL is not an ally. Those organizers were being contacted by educators asking for more education-specific materials, talking points, strategies, etc., and so they reached out to several of us who’d also been asking, saying, “Yeah, why don’t you pull some materials together and we’ll throw them up on our site?” But when this group of educators across the country began to meet around a year ago, they didn’t just want materials that focused on schools. They wanted a proper campaign. They wanted the ADL out of schools. And the reasons are not exactly the same as the reasons that progressives would want the ADL out. And that’s important. For example, the Drop the ADL folks say the ADL works with police. And progressives go, “Oh, my God, that’s horrible.” But schools don’t. They go, “Yeah, we work with the police too. That’s one reason why we like the ADL.” So if you’re going to talk to schools, whether it’s educators, parents, students, principals, superintendents, [or] school boards, you have to have an argument that is not just about progressive values. You have to have a pedagogical and education-specific argument. And so we developed that argument, the messaging, advocacy materials, and our own open letter, which is an open letter to educators [saying] the ADL is not a social justice partner. That is the language that schools use: they frequently refer to the ADL as a social justice partner. And we’re saying, “No, they’re not.”

Alex Lantsberg, Der Spekter editor: Have you ever described the ADL as a supremacist organization?

Nora: No, though I do think of farther-right organizations, like CAMERA (The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis) and ICAN (Israeli American Civic Action Network) as supremacist organizations. There are some others, but I don’t quite put the ADL in that category, not because they’re not horrible, but because they’re maybe smarter. I always talk about an ecosystem of organizations, and the ADL is the famous one: the AIPAC of the educational ecosystem. The whole ecosystem is problematic, but it doesn’t mean that they’re all exactly the same. They play slightly different roles. One will step forward when others step back; another steps forward, and another steps back. So they’re all part of the same dance. 

I think they do actually end up supporting the same agenda, but there are important reasons why I would not put them in the same bucket. One is because CAMERA’s tactics are very predatory and aggressive. CAMERA will come up to you at a demonstration…and scream, “Rapist, rapist, rapist!” for 10 minutes. The ADL doesn’t do that. Why it’s important to distinguish is that it’s easy for people to either say, “Oh, the ADL are the good guys. So we don’t want CAMERA; we want the ADL because they’re the good guys,” or just to completely overlook [the ADL] and excuse them because they’re not the worst of the worst. So when we talk about it, we talk about the ecosystem. And I think labeling them a supremacist organization doesn’t add any value because it’s very easy for them to defend against it. 

Charles Jacobs, the founder of the Boston chapter of CAMERA, continuously yells “Rapist!” and other insults at a Newton library. Video courtesy of Nora Lester Murad.

As we were pulling all these materials together and the messaging and thinking it through — and it’s not a completely finished project; it’s like a strategy that’s emerging in response to information we get about what’s working and what’s not — the magazine Rethinking Schools heard about us and asked for an exposé of the ADL. Rethinking Schools is the preeminent social justice magazine for K-12 teachers, and it was a huge honor to be asked to do that work. They published it in their Fall issue, around October 1, 2024, and that was our launch. 

We launched the article, we launched our open letter, and now we’ve launched all of our advocacy materials. And we have over 90 organizational signatories and 500 or 1,000 individual signatories. We have a core group that’s kind of a leadership team. Most of the educators in that group cannot be publicly identified as working with us because they are working educators, and their jobs would be at risk, or because they’ve already been attacked by the ADL. And then we have an accountability group, which could be a bit more active, if you ask me. But there are about 20-25 people who were involved with the development of materials and are in an ongoing way informed about what we’re doing and asked to be critical and hold us accountable to our principles and to our mission. 

And then we have an educators’ chat for educators around the country who are working on these issues. There are some parents in that group who are also working on the ADL, and another piece I think that is important is that we’re really trying hard to get mainstream media coverage of not only the ADL but also the issues that concern us, like attacks and smears against teachers, lawfare, etc., [as well as] the conflation of support for Palestinians with antisemitism. When an activist goes to a principal and says, “We want to get rid of the ADL,” and the principal Googles it, they are going to get 50 pages of the ADL talking about themselves. But we also want there to be some critical materials in credible, reputable, mainstream places so that the principal feels [that] maybe there are some legitimate questions about the ADL.

Mark: What can you tell us about the people that are supporting this movement? For example, teachers, union members? Are there multiple chapters? Are there locals, or is it just a national thing?

Nora: It’s just a national thing, and it’s really an umbrella. We don’t instigate anything on the ground. The ADL turns up in different schools and different districts in really different ways, so each person who comes forward needs to figure out what the ADL is doing that concerns them and also what they can do about it given their own positionality. If they’re high school students, they have different constraints and different opportunities than if they are educators; parents also have different constraints and opportunities. So we’re interested in organizing all those groups. We don’t organize them, but they organize themselves and tend to reach out and connect with us, either for materials or advice or to tell us what they’re doing. And we have heard some great success stories just with people coming forward and saying, “Hey, we got the ADL out of our school.” And we’re like, “That’s amazing. How did you do that?”

[We work with] educators, parents, students, and then the last group are educators who are wearing their union hats. That’s important for three reasons. One is [that] attacks and smears on teachers can happen for their protest activities as individuals, and they need support from their unions. It can also happen for the protest activities of the unions themselves, and we’re finding that unions are getting attacked as unions. Particularly right now, [the] Massachusetts Teachers Association and United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) are targets of right-wing groups — both Zionist groups and union-bashing groups — whose messaging and efforts are converging in at least those two places and some others. And thirdly, and this is something I want to really emphasize: teachers and educators are getting in trouble, not only for protesting the genocide. They’re getting in trouble for teaching [about the genocide], literally doing their job.

The convos jumbled in my heart and head

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There were too many feelings and ideas, too big to name or hold. They were jumbled in my heart and head and still are. I had to shake them off me, expel them, or at least release some of the pressure, so I could reclaim my body. I needed to look at my guilt, despair and fury outside my body, so I could understand how they collide inside me as I witness the slaughter of Palestinians. Month after month, ten feelings pop up in a conversation, and before I process or respond, ten different feelings take over preventing all connection. I can’t catch up with myself. Or breathe.

Watching a genocide in real time through WhatsApp messages from friends is heavy and isolating. I feel crazy most of the time. Am experiencing generational Holocaust trauma for real now, understanding how so many people let it happen to us, to others, because I see so many people let it happen again. I confessed my anxiety to a friend in exercise class and she said, “You can only do what you can do.” She let herself off the hook for doing more before she had done anything. Nobody gets it. I moved away.

So, to be able to climb out of my overwhelm and refocus on the political challenge, I sat down to write. I wrote a letter to a girl in Gaza, the daughter of a friend. I wrote a letter to a Jewish influencer I know who 18-months in still posts photos enjoying meals at cafes with smiling friends. And I wrote a letter to Anne Frank who, unlike me, had the maturity and wisdom to see the beauty amidst the ugly.

I printed each letter out on different colored paper and cut each letter into bites. I interspersed them on my dining table, letting them crash and converge, and while the whole thing makes no sense–not the conversations nor the genocide–I feel calmer having expelled these toxins from my body, slightly stronger to face more. There is so much more to face.

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