“It Is More So an Education Issue than Ever Before”: Why NEA Members Voted to Support Palestine
Left Voice spoke with an anti-Zionist Jewish educator who helped organize a recent vote by the National Education Association in solidarity with Palestine. She discussed how the movement for Palestine intersects with attacks on education and why teachers need to organize their unions to support students and social movements.
Gwen Lee and Samuel Karlin August 18, 2025
On July 5 the policymaking body of the National Education Association voted to cut ties with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a right-wing and Zionist organization. While the executive board of the NEA quickly overruled the vote by its member delegates, this remains one of the strongest examples of labor in the United States expressing solidarity with the movement for Palestine.
Left Voice members interviewed Judy Greenspan, a longtime anti-Zionist Jewish activist and educator. Greenspan was the person who brought forward the action item to cut ties with the ADL to the floor at the NEA convention.
This transcript of the interview was lightly edited for length and clarity. The full conversation is available on YouTube, linked below.
~
What is your background in the Palestine movement? Why was it important for you to take this up as an education worker?
I’ve been supporting Palestine and fighting for the freedom of Palestine for decades, and in many different times, different arenas. I think most consciously since 1967, which would put me at about 14 or 15 years old. Palestine is an issue that I think is important to bring into all of the other struggles.
It’s an issue that’s often marginalized because up until recently, the Zionists have controlled the conversation. I feel like at this point, the horrific crimes that Israel has been committing against the Palestinian people have changed the narrative and made it easier for those of us who are both Jewish and not Jewish to not only criticize Israel, but condemn Israel for its genocide.
As an educator, to me, it’s so important that students are part of the struggle. I know when I was in high school during the Vietnam War, anytime I asked about it, I was shot down and told, “What does that have to do with education?” It has everything to do with education. It has everything to do with growing new leadership and teaching students or helping students, assisting students take the leadership in terms of being involved in the movement for justice.
In a sense, Trump and the policies of the federal government have done a lot of the organizing for us because there’s lots of young people who just really want to know what’s going on and want to be involved in stopping it, whether it be Palestine, fighting ICE, or actions against the terrorism of the police. There are so many things that young people want to be involved in. As teachers, it’s important that we not censor what’s going on in the world but try to involve students as much as possible.
As an aside, I’m a Jewish person. I was raised not as a religious Jew, but as a secular Jew who was taught at a very early age that Judaism is about fighting for social justice. To me, it’s important to constantly, as a Jew, speak out against what’s going on in Palestine, to my siblings in Palestine.
What was the purpose behind the recent vote the NEA took to cut ties with the ADL? Give a little bit of background on the ADL, its ties to schools, and speak to how the organizing around cutting ties with the ADL played out.
Let me just say that what I presented on the floor of the NEA, New Business Item 39, I was the one who moved it, but I didn’t write it. I actually am new to Educators for Palestine. I’ve been very active on a local level with Oakland Education Association for Palestine (OEA for Palestine), and also a group called Bay Area Labor for Palestine. But I hadn’t dabbled at all on a national level with the NEA, except to know what their positions have been in the past and things like that.
The resolution was very straightforward and very simple. It just said that the NEA will cut all ties to the ADL, that the ADL is not a social justice organization.
The ADL has for years masqueraded as a civil rights organization. But if you dig deep — you don’t even have to dig that far — you can see all of the crimes that they have committed against our movements. Not just against the Free Palestine movement, but against the Black movement and the Indigenous community. They spoke out against Black Lives Matter. They have not embraced, for example, DEI, which you could say there’s lots of problems with DEI, but they have not embraced antiracist teachings, and that’s a big problem.
They’re a free curriculum, so a lot of teachers look at it and go, “Oh, Anti-Defamation League. Stop hate. This is great. I’m going to use it in my classroom.” But they very clearly define antisemitism as anyone who criticizes Israel.
They have been involved in doxxing and harassing both Jewish educators and other people who are not Jewish who dare to speak out against Israel. They’ve also been responsible for providing names to federal investigative committees. In California, in the East Bay, over the past two or three years, there have been federal investigations, and the ADL has been part of providing names, providing information to the feds. At this point, it’s pretty scary about anyone who provides anything to the feds because it’s going to be used for deportations or it’s going to be handed over to ICE.
When I agreed to raise NBI 39 at the convention, I knew it would cause a commotion, but I didn’t know it was going to cause as much of a commotion as it did. Just so people know, first of all, it was NBI number 39, but the items didn’t go in numerical order in the NEA. They put things in buckets. This was put into some random bucket at the very end of the convention.
Last year, Educators for Palestine and some of the Arab-American members had all of their items put in the bucket for the last day. Well, what happened at that convention last year is that the NEA workers went on strike. And so they never got to several of the last buckets, the conference ended. Educators for Palestine walked the picket lines. But we think that the NEA leadership knew that this was going to happen, that they planned the strike for the last day because they don’t want to deal with this issue. They are part of the Palestine exception. They were pushed to pass a resolution about a year and a half ago with other labor unions about supporting an arms embargo against Israel, but they haven’t done anything about it.
This year, I was worried that NBI 39 wouldn’t even come up because they put it on the last day. The very last day of the convention, early in the morning, I was called into the back room to speak to a member of the executive committee who urged me to withdraw the NBI, saying this is going to cause irreparable harm to the NEA. I said I wouldn’t withdraw it, so they proposed I instead refer it to a committee, and then it can come back again some other day or maybe next year. I said no. Then the third option was, “Well, if you like, you could announce it, you could read it on the floor, but then we won’t discuss it. We won’t vote.” I said, no, that’s not good. This actually happened twice before I actually got to move it onto the floor. I was called in another time, and they asked me the same things.
We didn’t know if we were going to win or lose, but it’s an important discussion to have. We wanted to alert the thousands of teachers, the tens of thousands of teachers who might think that the ADL’s curriculum is a good curriculum to use.
So when it came up on the floor, when I got up to move the motion, before I even opened my mouth, President Pringle said, “I just want you to know that we consider this a boycott, that the motion is calling for a boycott.” This is a problem because every union, unfortunately, has their hands tied. They can’t call for a boycott. But the wording of the resolution doesn’t mention a boycott anywhere. We’re not calling for a boycott. We want the NEA to take a political stand against this organization which has created great harm for many different progressive communities and seems to be a tool that is being used by the Right Wing at this point.
After three separate votes, it passed. Pringle announced that it passed, but she immediately said that they were referring it to executive committee. We were so elated that we passed it, but we didn’t prepare for the backlash. We didn’t prepare for the Zionist onslaught, which happened immediately. Everybody at the convention who wore a keffiyeh was publicly doxxed on something called the K-12 tracker. They took pictures of people, got their names, where people taught. They also recorded and published video of the resolution. They recorded my introduction. They recorded all of the conversation that happened on the floor before the vote was taken. There’s strict rules about how you cannot record the convention. I guess those strict rules don’t matter, certainly not to the Zionist.
The leadership, two weeks later, basically nullified the vote on the technicality that it’s calling for a boycott, and they can’t support calling for a boycott. Still, we thought it was a very important political move. Particularly for the veterans who have been in there for 10 years now trying to pass resolutions, they felt vindicated. People just felt like there was a change in people’s minds. They felt like all of their work that they’d been doing for years to talk to people about supporting Palestine and the importance and the differentiation between antisemitism and support for Palestine really paid off.
I feel like this gets into a larger question of union democracy. What does this say about the difference in how rank and file union members are engaging with the movement and the role union bureaucracies are playing?
First of all, there were many resolutions that got amended during the week, and it was possible to amend resolutions. In some instances, the Resolutions Committee got back to the people who made the resolution and said, “There’s a problem with your resolution. If you want it passed or if you want it to come to the floor, you’re going to have to change this.” No one reached out to us. If someone from the Resolutions Committee had reached out to us and said, “This might be interpreted as a boycott,” we would have changed the wording a little bit. We would have tweaked it so that they wouldn’t have that as an excuse. But no one reached out to us. And by the time President Pringle raised the boycott issue, it was too late to amend it.
It really shows the difference, light-years difference between the rank and file teachers and the leadership. It’s scary because there are attacks on people who teach Palestine. And in Oakland, we’ve had teachers not just doxxed, but fired. This comes as the government has virtually dissolved the Department of Education. They’ve taken away grants from schools, and you see that the universities are falling all over themselves, trying to distance themselves from any progressive stance that they ever took.
The NEA leadership had an opportunity not to fall in line, but they didn’t take it. They said they talked to Jewish groups, and they talked to Arab groups, but none of us involved in the vote can come up with any Arab groups that they talked to. And they certainly didn’t talk to any anti-Zionist Jewish groups. They certainly didn’t talk to Jewish Voice for Peace or IfNotNow. They just went to the same old washed-up Zionist groups. And It does not bode well because capitulating on Palestine means they’re going to be capitulating on ICE raids. Becky Pringle gave this resounding speech about how important DEI is. Will the NEA defend DEI when it comes down to it? I don’t know, because a lot of schools are already folding.
Teachers have a lot on their plate. We have, of course, worrying about the success of our students, worrying about the safety of our immigrant students, of our Black students who are more likely to be suspended than just about any other population in a school.
We have a lot of issues that we’re working on right now. But we also have to rise up on the question of Palestine. A lot of educators might say, “Well, what does this have to do with my school district and my students’ success?” To me, it’s quite clear. First of all, the students are really concerned about what’s going on. They’re looking at it on TikTok, on Instagram. We have a very large Yemeni population here in Oakland, and they are very concerned. They’re out all the time protesting. Then we have Donald Trump basically withholding money to all of the schools demanding action on letting ICE in and different things that would supposedly restore the money. Just imagine if we could take the money, the billions that have been spent sending planes and caterpillar tractors and all of the things that have been used to destroy Gaza and Palestine.
If we could stop that war pipeline to Israel, and use that money to basically rebuild and restore our cities, we would have a very different educational system. I’m sitting in a building that’s over 100 years old that has no airflow whatsoever. They have no money. We have lead in the water in Oakland because we need the pipes changed. We’re told there’s no money for that. But there’s lots of money. The federal government, which just ended all the funding to public schools just about, has billions of dollars to spend to basically butcher and murder children and women and to try to beat back the resistance movement in Palestine. So this is an education issue. It is more so an education issue than ever before. I hope that people will figure out a way to be involved.
Gwen Lee
Gwen is a special education teacher in New York City.
Samuel Karlin
Samuel Karlin is a socialist with a background in journalism. He mainly writes for Left Voice about U.S. imperialism and international class struggle.
