Jewish teachers, fed up with their own unions’ spate of antisemitic actions in recent years, notched a win this summer when the National Education Association reversed a decision to sever ties with the Anti-Defamation League.
The victory, while gratifying for these educators, is hardly the norm. Jewish teachers say they’ve been forced into defending their support for Israel or fighting against discrimination for expressing their views in public schools that have become bastions of anti-Jewish rhetoric. This troubling development has occurred against a backdrop of labor unions straying from the mission of representing teachers in workplace negotiations, while morphing into politically partisan organizations agitating for a variety of progressive causes.
Jewish teachers are now engaged in legal battles on multiple fronts and in several cities across the country where teachers’ unions have supported anti-Israeli mantras and causes amid international division over the war in Gaza.
The NEA, the nation’s largest teachers union with nearly 3 million members, recently walked back a proposed boycott of the ADL, which has fought antisemitism as well as other forms of bigotry for more than a century. The ADL has also long provided anti-discrimination curriculum and highly regarded Holocaust teaching materials to as many as 2,000 schools nationwide.
NEA President Becky Pringle said NEA’s board of directors voted not to implement the proposal after consulting with NEA state affiliates and civil rights leaders, including Jewish American and Arab American community leaders, as well as ADL’s leadership.
“There is no doubt that antisemitism is on the rise. Without equivocation, NEA stands strongly against antisemitism,” Pringle said in a statement after the union’s reversal on ADL. “We always have, and we always will. Our Jewish students and educators deserve nothing less.”
“We know antisemitism and anti-Arab bigotry are very real and urgent problems in this country and around the world,” she added. “They are insidious forms of hate, which is why NEA and our members actively work to fight them in our classrooms, on our campuses, and in our communities.”
The NEA’s reversal came after an outcry by numerous Jewish groups, including the NEA’s Jewish Affairs Caucus, which sent a letter to Pringle taking issue with a member-backed proposal to sever ties with the ADL and detailing harassment of Jewish teachers at the NEA conference in Portland, Oregon, in early July.
NEA delegates at the Portland conference adopted a measure to bar the use or endorsement of any ADL materials, including Holocaust curricula, statistics, and programs. Because it was a “sanction item,” it required referral to the NEA executive committee, which decided to reject the vote by the 7,000-member representative body.
Yet there were signs of trouble even before the proposed ADL boycott. Jewish educators took issue with the way NEA depicted the Holocaust in its 2025 member handbook – without mentioning Jews, but instead referencing victims “from different faiths” and stating that Israel was founded through “forced violent displacement and dispossession.”
After the Portland conference, Jewish delegates who attended complained that they were mocked, harassed, and threatened at the event in “ways that dishonor our union,” the NEA Jewish Affairs Caucus wrote in its letter to Pringle.
The caucus reported that other delegates laughed and clapped as a Jewish delegate from Colorado referenced the death of Karen Diamond, an 82-year-old Holocaust survivor who was burned alive by a Molotov cocktail during a demonstration in Boulder on June 30.
The union’s choice to hold its conference in Portland, a city known for racial riots organized by Antifa militants, demonstrated little concern for dissenting Jewish members. Portland’s public schools have become hotbeds of pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli protests over the last two years. In May, a Portland high school math teacher who is an Israeli Jew sued the city’s school district, teachers union, and school board, arguing that they discriminated against him by distributing and promoting antisemitic and pro-Palestinian material and messaging, without a “balanced perspective.”
The teacher, identified in the suit as John Doe, out of “fear for his physical safety,” alleged that the Portland Association of Teachers worked with Oregon Educators for Palestine to co-publish guides called
“Teach Palestine!” and “Know Your Rights!” and held training sessions in which teachers learned how to “teach and advocate for Palestine within Portland Public Schools.”
Jewish leaders, teachers, and parents in Portland last year took issue with the Portland Association of Teachers’ hosting of a pro-Palestinian advocacy meeting in which organizers encouraged teachers to display Palestinian flags in their classrooms, wear T-shirts emblazoned with pro-Palestinian messages, and teach lessons on the war in Gaza that critics argue are inaccurate and antisemitic.
The suit referred to one of the union’s lesson plans for elementary children that describes the state of Israel as a “group of bullies called Zionists.” The curricula focused on the death and upheaval experienced by Palestinians without mentioning that the Israel-Hamas war began with the unprovoked slaughter of 1,200 Jews, most of them civilians, on Oct. 7, 2023.
The teacher’s lawsuit said his school became a “forum for one-sided, anti-Israel rhetoric,” with the administration allowing the posting of Palestinian flags and maps of Palestine that eliminated the state of Israel. He said he asked if he could display the Israeli flag, but was rebuked and told it would be “too disruptive,” according to the lawsuit.
In late July, seven Jewish teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District renewed their fight against a California law that compels them to be represented by the United Teachers Los Angeles, exclusively, in all bargaining and workplace protection matters. Under the law, the UTLA must represent all teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District, even those, such as this group of Jewish teachers, who have severed ties and stopped paying dues because of what they view as antisemitic positions the local union has taken over the course of several years.
The lawsuit lists the members of the California Public Employee Relations Board and LAUSD Superintendent Albert Carvalho as defendants.
“My parents on my mom’s side were Holocaust survivors. Grandmother was in the camp and grandfather was in the forest [hiding],” Barry Blisten, one of the plaintiffs in the suit, told RealClearPolitics. “My grandpa used to say, ‘It could happen again – you need to be careful.’ I thought he was crazy to say that in America. I was first-generation. But he was so right. Everything is cyclical.”
On July 21, U.S. District Court Judge Stephen Wilson dismissed the First Amendment religious freedom case, citing precedent that determined that a group of members within the union that has been designated as the exclusive bargaining representative cannot reject the UTLA and find an alternative. The judge referred to a previous Supreme Court decision in a Minnesota case that determined that a group of community college faculty members who wanted to seek an alternative representative from the union couldn’t do so, because the union’s position as the sole collective bargaining representative hadn’t infringed on the faculty group’s freedom to speak on any education or related issue or “associate or not associate with whom they please.”
Blisten and the other plaintiffs, with the support of the Freedom Foundation, a free-market conservative think tank based in Washington State, have since appealed, vowing to fight the issue all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which has taken up several issues involving religious freedom in public schools this year.
The UTLA didn’t respond to RCP’s request for comment.
Blisten argues that his problems with the UTLA began six years ago when a group called Union Power seized control of UTLA’s leadership and started pushing divisive social and political agendas instead of focusing on teacher welfare, wage increases, and tenure protections.
The new leaders endorsed the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement and voted for the immediate cessation of U.S. aid to Israel. Over the years, Blisten said the hostility toward Jewish members became more and more overt, with Jewish teachers systematically removed from online Zoom meetings for simply questioning positions they believed were antisemitic.
Even before the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre, UTLA President Cecily Myart-Cruz referred to Los Angeles’ Museum of Tolerance, which teaches about the Holocaust, as “the enemy.” The plaintiffs argue that more recently the UTLA used member dues to subsidize antisemitic school board candidates, curriculum, and rhetoric.
Just a month after the Oct. 7 attack, UTLA’s Political Action Council of Educators endorsed school board candidate Kahllid Al-Alim and spent more than $700,000 backing his candidacy. Jewish teachers pointed to numerous antisemitic posts on Al-Alim’s social media accounts, including one in which he calls the Nation of Islam’s Book, “The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews,” “mandatory reading in community schools.”
According to the ADL, the book blames Jews for promoting a myth of black racial inferiority and makes conspiratorial accusations about Jewish involvement in the slave trade and the cotton, textile, and banking industries.
On his campaign website, Al-Alim later issued an apology for endorsing the book.
“I was wrong. I have connected with educators and community members and have since learned about the issues,” he said. “I fully rescind that post. It has no place in our schools.”
Still, the disclosure prompted the UTLA to rescind its endorsement and immediately cease campaigning for Al-Alim, who lost his election in November.
Blisten describes an incident in which UTLA members were on a Zoom conference call, where one member used expletives and disparaging language when discussing Jews and the war in Gaza.
Jewish teachers then interjected, arguing that such expressions are deeply offensive.
“Then they systematically kicked the Jewish teachers who were raising concerns out of the meeting, because that’s what they do,” he said. “I mean, it’s a microcosm of our government here in California, especially Los Angeles. There’s no accountability, and as soon as you ask the hard question, they dodge it or don’t answer. So, this is where we’re at.”
The UTLA isn’t really acting like a union anymore, Blisten added.
“They’re aligning themselves with so many different [political] organizations, instead of concentrating on teacher issues. I mean, it’s crazy.”
This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.