NEA Cuts Ties with ADL
By 
The Anti-Defamation League has been a ubiquitous presence in U.S. schools for forty years, pushing curriculum, direct programming, and teacher training into K-12 schools and increasingly into universities, often over the objections of students, parents, and educators.
Now, the three million-member National Education Association has finally said no.
In July 6 vote, the NEA’s 7,000-member Representative Assembly cut all ties with the ADL.
The body approved a measure that the NEA “will not use, endorse, or publicize materials from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), such as its curricular materials or statistics.” The reasoning: “Despite its reputation as a civil rights organization, the ADL is not the social justice educational partner it claims to be.”
Union members speaking on the floor rejected the ADL’s abuse of the term “antisemitism” to punish critics of Israel, its use of hyperinflated statistics on hate crimes to gin up fears about Jewish safety, and its characterization of calls for Palestinian rights as “hate speech.”
“Allowing the ADL to determine what constitutes antisemitism would be like allowing the fossil fuel industry to determine what constitutes climate change,” said NEA delegate Stephen Siegel from the assembly floor.
NEA members also cited the ADL’s history of discouraging anti-racist organizing, including attacking the anti-Apartheid and Black Lives Matter movements.
If the ADL’s history was not widely known before, its attacks on Jewish, Palestinian, and anti-genocide protesters over the past twenty months led people to look more closely.
Merrie Najimy, former president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, 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.
The ADL is basically a fascist organization at this point. No respectable person should associate with it.