In Monumental Vote, NEA Teachers Join Chorus Against ADL

Sonia Chajet Wides
Tell me a bit about where and what you teach and about your previous involvement in the NEA.

Judy Greenspan
I’m a substitute teacher in East Oakland, at the same school I retired from and taught sixth-grade math and science. I’m a Jewish educator, and I was involved locally in the Oakland Education Association and Palestine teach-ins for years, but this is the first time I have tried to impact the NEA nationally.

Merrie Najimy
I’m Arab American, and my anti-racist pedagogy as an educator was formed as a result of my experiences as a Lebanese kid in school, feeling alienated and marginalized. I am a veteran elementary school teacher in Massachusetts, and I have been a union activist for the better part of three decades. I was the president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association and co-founded MTA Rank and File for Palestine. I’m also one of the co-founders of the Arab American Caucus of the NEA, and from that grew Educators for Palestine.

S.C.W.
As people who have been involved in Palestine work at these different levels, what do you see as teachers’ unions’ role in this fight?

M.N.
Teachers’ unions, especially in the last dozen years, have become on the front lines of ​“bargaining for the common good.” Labor has always been in solidarity with workers around the world, including the trade unions in Palestine. And there’s also the protection of workers: When educators teach the counternarrative about Palestinians, they get anything from doxxed to threatened with physical harm to having their jobs on the line. It is the job of the union to step up and protect our academic freedom. Thirdly, our job is to advocate for liberatory education, and the only way we can do that successfully is if it’s done through the union. 

S.C.W.
What do you see as the main issues with current curriculum surrounding Palestine?

M.N. There’s a new ​“anti-Palestinian racism” framework that came out of the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association, and it has several manifestations: erasure of the Palestinian people and their history; dehumanization, which leads to the justification of violence; defamation, this false notion that all Palestinians are antisemitic and anti-democratic; and exclusion. 

That plays out in the curriculum itself: The dominant narrative that all of us grew up with is ​“a land without a people for a people without a land.” That’s erasure, that’s racism. And organizations like the ADL have, for decades, worked hard to push out the Palestinian narrative. They falsely conflate the criticism of Zionism and Israel with antisemitism, and then they target educators who speak up for Palestinian rights.

S.C.W.
Tell me about the origins of this resolution and your experience proposing it.

J.G.
I brought the motion to the floor, but I didn’t write it; I don’t want to take the credit for it. The resolution sort of cracked open the whole issue of antisemitism and support for Israel. And that’s why people got so upset about it, because people had to think. Even the NEA leadership had to think about the ramifications of connections to the ADL. I had a lot of pressure on me from the executive committee. I was called in twice on the day of the resolution, and I got asked to withdraw it. I was told it was going to cause irreparable harm to the NEA.

M.N.
Educators for Palestine operates in a very democratic way. We meet regularly, we draft things together. Before Educators for Palestine started, the Arab American Caucus started moving resolutions on Palestine — mostly things like educating about Palestinian people, culture, history, the Nakba. We were a very small team, and the debates were racist and harmful, and we lost. But we didn’t give up. Every year we came back with new resolutions, and every year we lost a little less badly. Two years ago, as genocide started livestreaming into all of our devices, people’s consciences were shocked. Suddenly, all of these non-Arabs, including anti-Zionist Jews, started finding the Arab American Caucus, saying, ​“I want to be involved.” And that’s when we intentionally formed the separate caucus Educators for Palestine.

And then we did what good old union organizers do: We had a table, we had flyers, we had as many one-on-one conversations as possible. There is no secret. Union organizing, no matter what the issue is, is that process.

And we won. It was just remarkable. It took seven years, but between the genocide itself and the rank-and-file organizing, we did it.

S.C.W.
What would this ADL resolution have done?

J.G.
It’s very short: ​“NEA will not use, endorse or publicize any materials from the Anti-Defamation League, such as its curricular materials or its statistics. NEA will not participate in ADL programs or publicize ADL professional development offerings.” And there’s a very short rationale: ​“Educators embrace the urgency to respond to the questions of racism, injustice, and all forms of bigotry. Despite its reputation as a civil rights organization, the ADL is not the social justice educational partner it claims itself to be.”

When I got up to present the motion, NEA President Rebecca Pringle interrupted me and said, ​“This is a boycott, by the way, and because of that, we’re going to have to put it to the executive committee.” But they didn’t give us any feedback on that beforehand. I think that was their responsibility. There’s a whole resolutions committee that could have gone back to us to say, ​“Maybe you want to change the wording of your resolution, because boycotts are not accepted as items that we can support.” Maybe we would have tweaked it. But there was no communication. They just didn’t want it to be passed, and honestly, it’s because they didn’t want to have to explain.

S.C.W.
Had there been a past of the ADL partnering with the NEA in any way, or the NEA using ADL resources?

M.N.
No.

J.G.
When they called me in in the morning, they said, ​“I just want you to know we are scrubbing our website right now to make sure that we don’t have anything to do with the ADL. Would you please just withdraw?” I said, ​“It’s so great you’re scrubbing it, but I’m not withdrawing the resolution.”

M.N.
I think it just goes to show they understand the political fight that this was going to bring on, and they are unwilling to take it on. My comment from the floor told the story of the smear campaign that ADL is involved with here in Massachusetts, against the Massachusetts Teachers Association. My last words were, why would we partner with an organization that wants to harm us? And the irony is, they did exactly to the NEA what they’re doing to the MTA, and the NEA was unwilling to learn the lesson and stand up against it. Instead, they capitulated.

S.C.W.
Can you talk about your concerns about the ADL in an educational setting and why you think it’s important for the NEA not to use or publicize the ADL’s resources?

M.N.
It’s both in the education setting but also their sordid history. I already talked earlier about how they dehumanize Palestinian people. They falsely conflate antisemitism with criticism of Zionism, and then they target educators. They file Title VI complaints against a group or a school department and they get the Zionist community at large to bombard this principal, superintendent, school committee with a campaign calling for the firing of the educators.

They also have a long history of surveilling the Palestinian liberation movement from the ​’60s through the ​’90s, the South African anti-apartheid movement, anti-Zionist Jews who participated in either or both, Greenpeace, I think the NAACP. They sponsor municipal police to take trips to Israel to learn anti-terrorism tactics. It’s an intersectional struggle. It’s not just about their curriculum.

But their curriculum, pedagogically, it’s not sound. They do not look at systems and structures of oppression. They look at individual acts of discrimination and hate, which, of course, are important to look at, but they don’t put them in the broader context.

J.G.
Everyone on the left seems to have a story about some run-in that they’ve had with the ADL, or some attempt by the ADL to shut them down. And Wikipedia now states that the ADL is no longer a reliable source.

M.N.
Jewish Currents has done a really spectacular job unpacking the ADL. They’ve analyzed why the ADL data is flawed, and they talk about things like the ADL’s reliance on vague reports, lack of verification, lumping together weighty antisemitic acts with trivial incidences and, certainly, the conflation of the criticism of Zionism with antisemitism.

S.C.W.
Did you originally see the purpose of the resolution as being a symbolic statement of disapproval of the ADL, or did you see it as more about the ADL’s role in education specifically? Or both?

M.N.
I see it as symbolic, and I see it as an educational opportunity. We changed so many minds in that room.

One quick story from the floor: I was standing at a microphone to speak in favor, and another delegate, who I didn’t know, was standing at the same microphone. She had been asked by a member of the Jewish Affairs Caucus to go to the microphone and yield her time to somebody from their caucus to oppose this. When she heard one of our NEA for Palestine members speak about the history of the ADL targeting the Black Lives Matter movement, she dropped her jaw, and she looked at me and she said, ​“Why am I standing here ready to yield my mic to somebody who opposes this? I don’t support this.”

But it just goes to show how crafty the ADL is in their messaging and selling, that they convince your everyday person that they’re a civil rights organization. My guess is a lot of people in the room had a revelation like hers.

J.G.
Unfortunately, educators are very overworked. So if they have an option to get free curriculum from this group, which has this anti-hate message, they will. The resolution was so important for educating people on what the ADL really is. This is not just free curriculum. The ADL has a history, and right now, they’re the people doxxing. They’re helping with the congressional hearings. They’re helping create a new McCarthy Era.

S.C.W.
Among the people that you spoke with that you were able to move or educate, what were some of the common concerns about the resolution, and how did you respond to them?

M.N.
I didn’t hear as many concerns as ​“I didn’t know that,” or ​“I had a sense, but I didn’t know this much in-depth.”

J.G.
People were worried about appearing antisemitic. But I really think we broke through the lie. When the resolution came up, three speakers talked about how the resolution was antisemitic. People still voted for it. So that means there was some consciousness that they couldn’t be scared away or bullied by that.

S.C.W.
Did you know anything about the board process that followed the vote?

J.G.
There was no transparency.

M.N.
The standing rule that a boycott has to get sent to the executive committee — the language is, many of us think, intentionally confusing. And this all happened within a week. They just rammed it through, claiming they talked to Jewish leaders and they talked to Arab leaders. I’m one of the leaders of the Arab American Caucus. They didn’t talk to me, or other caucus leadership. So what Arab leaders did you talk to?

J.G.
It was a learning experience for us, too. We didn’t move quickly enough. I really thought it would be at least a month before they overturned the vote.

M.N.
We found out from ADL social media about the board vote ten minutes before I got the message from President Pringle. That’s disturbing.

S.C.W.
Around 7,000 delegated members voted for the resolution, but then it went to the Board of Directors. You were not alerted beforehand that it would need board review — which then happened swiftly. How did you feel about all that from a union democracy standpoint?

M.N.
It’s infuriating, it’s anti-democratic, and it is 100% unsurprising. Democracy doesn’t lie in the top of the union. Democracy lies, if it does sit at all, in the rank and file.

J.G.
There’s a level of bureaucracy even with the most well-meaning leadership. It just seems when people get into leadership, they lose contact with some of the really important issues.

M.N.
No matter what the board voted on, this is still a victory. Because it doesn’t stop us from continuing to act and continuing to organize. We’re going to continue the education work around dropping the ADL, work state by state, local by local, and we will be ready at the next annual meeting to come back and take this up as another issue again. We’ll just figure out new ways to maneuver.

J.G.
And I actually hope that we’ll come with broader resolutions like divesting our pension funds in whatever way we can, calling for an arms embargo. And also talking about the fact that the money that all of our districts need is now being used to send weapons of destruction to Palestine. All of that needs to be argued on the floor of the NEA.