In a pivotal vote on July 7th, the Representative Assembly of the National Education Association (NEA) voted to cut all ties with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), declaring that, “Despite its reputation as a civil rights organization, the ADL is not the social justice educational partner it claims to be.” NEA is a labor organization that comprises 3 million American teachers. I have been a member since the start of my career in 1997. It has long promoted excellence in teaching which centers diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Now, thanks to campaigns like #dropADL, as well as robust internal pressure, a resolution to break from the ADL had finally been passed. NEA’s public declaration in support of pro-Palestinian voices was highly commendable and signaled a momentous shift in policy. I immediately posted the news on my social media, proud of my affiliation as a veteran teacher.
My elation, however, was short-lived. After a “thorough review” by the executive committee, NEA President Becky Pringle determined that such a resolution “would not further NEA’s commitment to academic freedom.” The rest of the statement was full of equally cowardly equivocation. That our leadership would allow itself to be coerced into ignoring its majority of constituents who believe in forging genuine social justice partnerships is highly problematic. Perhaps even more disturbing was the fact that Pringle and the executive committee also chose to ignore ADL’s deeply flawed methodology in hate crime reporting as well as its deplorable redefinition of antisemitism to include anti-Zionist activism.
But even if a resolution were passed, it would have come too late.
The genocide in Gaza is approaching its second year. The reported death toll has surpassed 62,000, though the undocumented number is much higher. More than 225 Palestinians have died from malnutrition and starvation, while over a thousand more have been killed as they attempted to secure food from the grotesque Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
How has the ADL, a decades-long partner in public education, contributed to this horrific moment?
The grim reality is that the ADL’s work has never really been rooted in tolerance, unity, and compassion, but rather in shaming and intimidating educators and activists.
By constantly invoking the Holocaust, the ADL has been able to manifest a particular brand of shame in American teachers.Long before the creation of DEI departments formally driving pedagogy in public schools, the ADL had proudly hailed itself as an organization that combatted antisemitism and other forms of bigotry. On the surface, its mission was a noble one—who could be opposed to guiding teachers and their students toward greater tolerance of marginalized groups?
This was especially appealing to liberal-minded educators who so fiercely internalized the horrors of the Holocaust as the worst man-made calamity in history, but even the conservative ones bought in, eager as they were to supplant America’s legacy of slavery and genocide with an atrocity more recent, particularly one for which they bore no real responsibility. For US educators, it has been much easier to deliver an isolated, digestible Holocaust unit to students than to detail the horrors of the Native American genocide or the lingering legacy of slavery and Jim Crow in their communities.
Furthermore, by constantly invoking the Holocaust, the ADL has been able to manifest a particular brand of shame in American teachers, pressuring them to uphold a narrative of perpetual and singular Jewish victimhood. This narrative became one of Zionism’s most powerful weapons, and it continues to serve Israel’s lethal national mythology today. As anti-Zionist American activist Sim Kern states in their book, Genocide Bad, “if you’ve only consumed stories of Jewish persecution from the time you were very small, then it’s hard to see it when Jews are the ones doing the persecuting.”
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Illinois, the state in which I teach, is one of 38 states to legally mandate Holocaust education. Back when I was a novice teacher in the late 1990s, ADL’s World of Difference training was required during professional development institute days at my school. Cheerful, well-intentioned trainers showed up on our campus and eagerly distributed materials that on the surface appeared innocuous. In the late 1990s, the logo for World of Difference was a child-friendly image of interlinking crayon-colored hands. For five hours or so, a hyper-awareness of antisemitism was injected into us. While I shrank low in an uncomfortable student desk, an ADL facilitator enumerated the myriad horrors of the Holocaust.
Afterwards, they offered us a superficial connection to present-day discrimination of BIPOC communities (excluding, of course, any mention of Arabs, Muslims, or Palestinians). We were then separated into small groups to fill out worksheets and discuss ways to combat this “bigotry”—a vague word the ADL still uses to blanket its hollow championing of other minority groups in America. (By December 2023, when Israel’s assault on Gaza had been raging for more than two months, this anti-bias sub-program would be eliminated entirely so that the ADL could consolidate its focus on Zionist messaging.)
Without blinking, my colleagues magnanimously entered into contracts to “foster tolerance.” I, however, was trembling with questions: What about the occupation of Palestine? What about the Nakba? But I dared not utter them aloud, the words freezing on my lips. My silence felt like cowardice, stemming from a fear of alienation, of feeling unsafe—exactly what the ADL, unironically, pledges to ameliorate in school settings.
So why hasn’t this anti-discrimination organization ever taken up the struggle of Palestinians? A ludicrous question to ask when the answer is so glaring: it could not stand with Palestinians without confronting Israel’s atrocities against them. Since it was awarded non-profit status in 1948, the year of the Nakba, the ADL has been committed to strategically conflating Jewishness with Israel. Since October 7th, the ADL has strategically—by which I mean starkly and lethally—conflated Jewishness with Zionism. Its mission of teaching tolerance has long been shadowed by its mission to sustain normalization of the apartheid state of Israel and to suppress pro-Palestinian activism. The latter is precisely what NEA members rallied against in their vote to cut ties with the organization. Long before its history of spying on students became widely known, the ADL’s weaponization of victimhood had already pervaded our public schools.
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Civic society’s most influential sector is education, its teachers purveyors of history and information. Knowledge is power, as the saying goes, and knowledge wielded to dismantle empire and systems of oppression is dangerous to imperialism and capitalism. To prevent teachers from meaningfully implementing social justice education, white patriarchy and supremacy have diluted our textbooks, sanitized the study of oppression and war, and passed “anti-woke” legislation. To ensure that the Holocaust is the first (and often only) thing students think of when they think of Israel and Palestine, the ADL has made teachers foot soldiers in its war of indoctrination.
If critically and honorably taught, the Holocaust demonstrates how “Never Again” embodies a moral imperative that never fulfilled its destinyThe issue here is not with students learning about the Holocaust. Holocaust education is a necessary window into how modern fascism and white supremacy construct dangerous national mythologies to justify war, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. If critically and honorably taught, the Holocaust demonstrates how “Never Again” embodies a moral imperative that never fulfilled its destiny, quickly crumbling after the Nakba of 1948. It operated as propaganda pumped into educational institutions.
To absolve Israel of responsibility for its undisguised ethnic cleansing, the ADL appropriated “Never Again” into a lucrative monopoly on suffering and trauma. Who would dare argue against the ungodly devastation Jews experienced? Such empirical human suffering cannot be denied. It is a fact. Just as the active genocide in Gaza, as concluded by Amnesty International, is a fact. Yet the ADL has not devoted any efforts toward even humanizing Palestinians, let alone acknowledging the atrocities committed against them. Instead, it has rigorously weaponized Jewish victimhood in order to foment fear. Teachers do not want to be accused of antisemitism and so they rigidly adhere to ADL guidelines. In a classroom setting, the very existence of Palestinians must either be ignored or presented through the lens of Israeli victimhood. This invisibilizing of Palestinians obscures Israel’s crimes against humanity.
The ADL has helped to strengthen the lie that Israel is “the only democratic nation in the Middle East,” hosting “the most moral army.” The genocide has since thoroughly debunked such flimsy pretenses, as evidenced in the endlessly documented sociopathic behavior of IDF soldiers in Gaza. But it is important to remember that such behavior is not necessarily in opposition to American values. The military state of Israel mirrors that of the United States, and as the current administration accelerates its aggressive militarism on its own citizens, the ADL, steered by CEO Jonathan Goldblatt, continues to ingratiate itself with Trump, while alienating its own membership and sponsors. Most recently, a long-time volunteer and regional board member aptly pointed out this contradiction as a failure “to stand up against the spread of hatred, the erosion of the rule of law, and the threat of authoritarianism.”
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In that very first training back in the late 1990s, I was surrounded by colleagues who had only a vague knowledge of Palestine and who typically associated Palestinians with terrorism. That pernicious lack of knowledge, sadly, persists to this day.
But what would have happened if Nakba education had existed in conversation with antisemitism education? How might teachers have disrupted or prevented future atrocities if permitted to engage their students on the Palestinian right to life and liberation?
What would have happened if Nakba education had existed in conversation with antisemitism education?If normalization of Palestine had been woven into the fabric of DEI work, I wouldn’t need to debate colleagues on the merits of approving fiction by Ghassan Kanafani (assassinated), or poetry by Dareen Tatour (formerly imprisoned) or Lena Khalaf Tuffaha (the first Palestinian American to win the National Book Award), or assigning a young adult memoir by Ahed Tamimi (formerly imprisoned), political cartoons by Naji Al Ali (assassinated), graphic memoirs by Leila Abdelrazaq, Mohammad Saba’aneh (formerly imprisoned), and Joe Sacco. I wouldn’t have to seek outside resources and networks such as Rethinking Schools to fill the void in my instruction. I wouldn’t have to explain to students why Palestinians are not “the bad guys.” I wouldn’t have to go it alone.
Engaging with the question of Palestine is taboo at my school. The ADL has pressured teachers to repeat the line that “it’s complicated” and “there are two sides,” while obscuring and demonizing the very side that’s fighting to stay alive. In the first year of the genocide, I was censured and censored on campus. In a meeting to address the alleged inappropriateness of my email communications to my colleagues (which contained links to humanitarian organizations as well as information and news sources not represented by Western media), an administrator called my pro-Palestine sweatshirts and pins “paraphernalia,” before admitting that they, “don’t know much about what’s going on over there…”
The immediate re-centering of Jewish harm, victimhood, and safety swiftly erased the actual harm and violence perpetrated against my own Palestinian community.This administration was completely unequipped to humanely support one of two Palestinian American teachers on their campus, yet the very same administration made a point of conducting a wellness check on a non-Israeli Jewish colleague the week after October 7th. Later that school year, a perfunctory and poorly organized Arab Heritage Month celebration was staged to appease my public criticism of the school’s silence on Gaza. My own students huddled into an activity room where they were directed to complete a hastily printed out worksheet on “Arab culture.” Meanwhile, the DEI director approached me and whispered that a swastika had recently appeared in the boys’ restroom and that they now had to contend with a complaint by a Jewish parent about the AHM event.
The immediate re-centering of Jewish harm, victimhood, and safety swiftly erased the actual harm and violence perpetrated against my own Palestinian community, including the October 2023 stabbing to death of Wadea Al Fayoume, a 6-year-old boy, a few miles from my home in Illinois. In a blog post, the ADL cleverly framed this particular hate crime as an act of anti-Muslim bigotry, pointedly not identifying the victim as Palestinian. Its response also failed to address why the child’s family was targeted, framing it within a “Pyramid of Hate” paradigm that isolated this crime and avoided connecting it to the increasing anti-Palestinian violence post-October 7th. This deceptive spotlight on the murder but not the motive ignored the pro-Zionist racism behind the act. It was decontextualization at its most insidious.
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One year, I introduced a poem about the Nakba called “Bint Ibrahim” by Nadia Sulayman to a contemporary literature class for seniors, and an Israeli parent immediately called me to tell me that it had made her daughter feel unsafe. Though I’d included the poem in a departmental poetry packet, my colleagues had avoided sharing it with their own classes. I’d gone rogue again and had to defend my choice without department support.
Can that poem make a difference? I believe it can. Along with other Palestinian literature and media, it affirms our history and our basic human rights. If, years ago, I had been allowed to screen documentaries such as Speed Sisters or 5 Broken Cameras, films that humanized Palestinians and introduced their struggle against apartheid and occupation, my students might have been more shocked by our former President repeating lies about Hamas beheading babies and using rape as a weapon of warfare. Or by 70,000 tons of explosives—the equivalent of six Hiroshimas—being dropped on Gaza since October 7th. Or by the destruction of every single university in the besieged enclave.
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Though it has been heavily discredited over the past two years, the ADL will not go quietly. As recently as July 22nd, the organization partnered with Columbia University to sponsor the expulsion of 80 students. The very institution that once boasted about giving tenure to Edward Said—one of the first globally-esteemed voices from the diaspora to narrate the plight of Palestinians to Western audiences—is now sending a pointed message to future students: you must silence your moral conscience and quash your belief in democracy and freedom for all, or you will not be welcome here.
It was Angela Davis who reminded us that “freedom is a constant struggle.” If only we were allowed to untether our curricula from the dictates of the ADL, to teach our students to acknowledge the dignity and humanity of every human being, we might someday be able to win that struggle.
