Why a major teachers union voted to break ties with the ADL

By Arno Rosenfeld
July 10, 2025

The country’s largest teachers union narrowly passed a resolution this week intended to cut ties with the Anti-Defamation League, escalating tensions between progressive organizations and the Jewish civil rights group that has long been welcomed in liberal spaces.

The National Education Association’s resolution stated that the union “will not use, endorse, or publicize any materials” from the ADL, including “its curricular materials or its statistics,” and was passed by members at the organization’s national conference in Portland.

While the brief resolution did not mention Israel — it said only that “the ADL is not the social justice educational partner it claims to be” — the vote was clearly prompted by disagreements related to the Middle East.

Several local teachers unions, many of which are part of the NEA, have vocally opposed Israel’s actions in the current Gaza war, prompting complaints from some Jewish families and outcry from the ADL.

The resolution, which must be approved by the NEA’s leadership, is unlikely to have any immediate practical impact for students since most of the ADL’s long standing work in K-12 schools is run through districts and not teachers unions.

But it is a symbolic blow meant to undermine the ADL’s ubiquitous presence in public schools around the country, where for decades it has offered, with little controversy, curricular materials and teacher training on combating discrimination and bullying. “The ADL is not what it seems,” Judy Greenspan, a teacher from Oakland, said during debate on the resolution.

Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL’s CEO, has taken an increasingly adversarial approach to teachers and labor unions that he believes are biased against Israel.

In private remarks to Republican officials last month, Greenblatt said that antisemitism in K-12 schools was a growing priority because college student protesters — who he compared to Islamist terrorists — are “not going to work at Goldman Sachs, they’re not going to work at Google, they’re going to become middle school teachers, they’re joining the NEA.”

He also told Fox News on Wednesday that the NEA is “an organization that has clearly has been overtaken by activists” and in an email to supporters this week the ADL said the resolution was brought by “a group of pro-Hamas activists inside NEA.”

While the ADL does not have any active partnerships with the NEA that would be impacted by the resolution, they have historically signed on to coalition letters together, like one about separation of church and state in 2014, and another about hate crimes in 2017.

The NEA has also provided members with links to ADL resources on responding to violence and hate and anti-Muslim bias in publications as recently as 2023.

But in recent years the ADL seems to have soured on the teachers union. In 2022, it listed Stephane Gallardo, a Democratic candidate for the U.S. House, as a “radical anti-Israel candidate” and noted that she was “active in the National Education Association.”

The ADL has also backed away from some of its longest running school-based programs, for example “A World of Difference,” which trained students and teachers to recognize all different forms of bias, in favor of a narrower — and often more confrontational — focus on antisemitism. For example, it filed a federal civil rights complaint against the Philadelphia school district last year over what it called a “viciously hostile” environment for Jewish students.

Teachers unions divided over Israel, antisemitism

The NEA is one of two major teachers unions in the country and has long had a reputation for focusing more on policy advocacy than the American Federation of Teachers, which has been led for nearly two decades by Randi Weingarten, a Jewish educator and vocal liberal Zionist.

Tensions between the ADL and NEA go back to at least the 1980s, when the Jewish group condemned a curriculum about white supremacy being developed by the union for “indicting American society as innately racist.”

Delegates to the NEA’s conference last year were slated to vote on nine resolutions targeting Israel, including one boycotting Israel and another that would have declared “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism.”

But those items never made it to a vote after the convention ended early due to a strike. Staci Maiers, a spokesperson for the NEA, said she was uncertain whether any other resolutions related to Israel were voted on at this year’s conference.

Because the resolution about the ADL was classified as a “sanction item” it must be approved by the organization’s executive committee before becoming official policy, Maiers said.

“NEA believes in hard and honest conversations,” Maiers wrote in an email. “We will not shy away from difficult or complex issues that affect our members, our students, or our schools, nor will we tolerate antisemitism, anti-Palestinian bias, or hateful rhetoric or behavior.”

In March, United Teachers Los Angeles, a local affiliate of the NEA representing 35,000 teachers, asked the Los Angeles school district to remove ADL materials from its website and stop working with the organization because it “conflates antisemitism with anti-Zionism to suppress classroom debate over human rights.”

Critics of the ADL often focus on the organization’s increasingly harsh attitude toward anti-Zionist activists and changes in their data on antisemitism that now includes many demonstrations against Israel in its annual tally of antisemitic incidents.

But teachers have also clashed with other Jewish organizations. Last October, the teachers union in San Francisco backed members who objected to a training about antisemitism organized by the American Jewish Committee and chose to attend an alternative program organized by an anti-Zionist Jewish group.

“We see ourselves as in lockstep with ADL here,” said Laura Shaw Frank, vice president for education advocacy at AJC. “I really don’t think this is about just the ADL, it’s about any Jewish organization that is supportive of Israel.”

Both the ADL and the AJC were part of a coalition that condemned the Massachusetts Teachers Association for sharing resources with its members that included a poster with a dollar bill folded into a Star of David alongside text about American military aid to Israel.

Merrie Najimy, former president of the Massachusetts union, spoke in favor of the NEA resolution on Sunday and cited the ADL’s “smear campaign against the MTA” as an example of the organization’s hostility toward organized labor.

“Why would we partner with an organization who is actively trying to discredit the teachers union?”

Jewish teachers at the convention spoke both in favor of and in opposition to the measure. Lori Goldstein, a union leader from Colorado, described her sadness at the heavy police presence for a Jewish festival in Boulder following the deadly terrorist attack against a pro-Israel gathering in June.

“Is this the kind of country we want to live in?” Goldstein asked. “The prime minister of Israel is a fascist — just like our president — but that is not us, so please oppose this.”

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