The NEA Vote: “The ADL Is Not a Social Justice Partner”
BY JENNIFER RUTH
After the often absurd congressional hearings on alleged antisemitism (nine of them in eighteen months), after the withdrawal of federal funding for projects entirely unrelated to antisemitism, after the almost complete destruction of the Department of Education and its ability to run Title VI investigations on antisemitism, people with otherwise very different political viewpoints largely agree now that antisemitism is a pretext for intimidating and controlling institutions of higher education. As my colleague at the blog Hank Reichman put it back in February when Trump announced the Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism:
The historian Richard Hofstadter famously suggested that during the McCarthyite purges of the 1950s ‘Communism was not the target but the weapon.’ Today, it would seem, antisemitism is not the target but a weapon against free speech, wielded by actors who not long ago had postured as free speech’s most devoted champions (which, of course, they have never been).
Antisemitism is a problem but eradicating it is not the aim of the Trump administration. One aim would certainly seem to be using a moral panic around antisemitism to redirect attention away from the Israeli genocide in Gaza. But I’m not convinced Trump cares that much about that either. I don’t know what Trump’s aim is other than power and perhaps creating an opening, once universities and colleges are sad shadows of their former selves, for loyalists and their organizations to step in and “help” these institutions make themselves great again by rebuilding along “patriotic” and “entrepreneurial” lines.
One thing is clear: organizations that support educators should cut ties with groups that help fuel the bad-faith campaign to crush institutions in the name of antisemitism. The biggest offender in this category is the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The ADL provides inflated statistics—numbers that capture speech critical of Israel or supportive of Palestine along with speech expressing hatred of the Jewish people—for Republican culture warriors in congressional hearings and also in the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division. Meeting with Jake Tapper on CNN after the forced resignation of University of Virginia president Jim Ryan, political appointee and Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said she considered UVA in violation of Students for Fair Admissions. Then, referring to herself in the third person, she said:
There’s also discrimination in other areas. There’s significant amounts of antisemitism on the campus. Not according to Harmeet Dhillon but according to the ADL [the Anti-Defamation League]. . . Jim Ryan presided over a failing grade on antisemitism.
Increasingly discredited by many in education due to its conflation of pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist speech with antisemitism, the ADL aggressively pursues educators who try to provide context on Palestine for their students, especially K–12 teachers. It also has a history of undermining other justice efforts and initiatives. Nora Lester Murad writes in rethinking schools:
The ADL’s unfounded attacks on groups working for Palestinian rights and the ways it undermines BIPOC communities, have made it unwelcome among social justice groups. A diverse group of more than 300 organizations—from the Movement for Black Lives to the National Lawyers Guild to the Red Nation—have signed on to the #DropTheADL campaign, which reminds progressive organizations that ‘the ADL is not an ally.’ Since #DropTheADL launched in 2020, there has been a plethora of deep analysis by Jewish and non-Jewish sources into the history of misrepresentation and harm caused by the ADL.
For an in-depth piece on the ADL’s tactics of attacking Arab, Black and queer people, see Emmaia Gelman’s essay “The Anti-Defamation League Is Not What It Seems” in Boston Review.
The good news is that one union is trying to do just this—cut ties with the ADL. The National Education Association (NEA), the country’s largest labor union, held its annual Representative Assembly this summer. On July 6, the Representative Assembly, a 7000-person-strong democratic body, voted to “not use, endorse, or publicize any materials from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), such as its curricular materials and statistics.” The ADL, its meeting agenda noted, “is not the social justice partner it claims to be.” Though the members have spoken, the NEA Executive Committee (EC) has the final word and will take its own vote on the matter in a few weeks.
Gelman reports in Jacobin on the culture shift within the NEA by which grassroots members have come to understand the damage done by the ADL, offering the example of the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA):
Merrie Najimy, former president of the 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. The ADL improperly took those internal materials, cherry-picked elements to claim that presenting Palestinian perspectives amounted to “glorifying terrorists,” and “manipulated [them] . . . to label the state’s largest union of educators as promoters of antisemitism,” MTA leaders wrote in February. The ADL followed with a barrage of denunciations of teachers and the union in state legislative hearings and the press. This 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.
In a piece on Project Esther, Barry Trachtenberg remarks on the significance of the NEA vote. “This decision by America’s largest labor union,” he writes, “reflects growing awareness that organizations like the ADL have abandoned their original mission of fighting antisemitism in favor of policing criticism of Israel.” (For more excellent reporting on the NEA vote, see Marcy Winograd’s “NEA Teachers Celebrate Motion to Drop ADL; Israel Lobby Fumes” in Common Dreams.)
The ADL has responded predictably by calling the NEA educators “pro Hamas.” It has mobilized an extensive email campaign, amplified by the Jewish Federation, to influence the Executive Committee to vote against the resolution. If you wish to be a counterbalance to the ADL’s campaign, please consider signing one of the letters that are circulating. As appropriate, you can sign and distribute:
- this action for Jewish members of the NEA
- this action for all members and allies of the NEA
- this action by Jewish Voice for Peace
- this action by CODEPINK
And follow and amplify:
- Campaign to Drop the ADL from Schools (info@DropTheADLfromSchools.org) + their Fact Sheet on the NEA vote
- NEA Educators for Palestine
- Labor for Palestine
I hope that other educational organizations and unions (including the AAUP) take note. The weaponization of “antisemitism” undermines educators’ ability to teach the truth about Palestine while simultaneously, as Trachtenberg writes, “diluting the concept’s power to identify and combat actual anti-Jewish bigotry.”
Jennifer Ruth is co-author, with Michael Bérubé, of It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom and coeditor, with Ellen Schrecker and Valerie Johnson, of The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom. She is the co-director, with Jan Haaken, of the film The Palestine Exception: What’s at Stake in the Campus Protests?
