Teachers Union Opponents Leverage Antisemitism Claims to Enable Government Interference in the Labor Movement
Through distortion and exaggeration, union critics are promoting the myth that teachers unions are hostile to Jews, and are leveraging this myth to encourage government interference with and intervention in the labor movement.
The US Congressional Committee on Education and the Workforce is investigating the National Education Association, America’s largest teachers union, for alleged antisemitism in the wake of controversies surrounding the NEA’s Representative Assembly in July. Committee chairperson Tim Walberg (R-MI) says the committee is considering “legislation to specifically address antisemitic discrimination within labor unions and to combat antisemitism in federally funded schools."
The controversy began when the NEA’s elected assembly delegates voted to recommend that the NEA “not use, endorse, or publicize any materials from the Anti-Defamation League.” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt called the vote "both insidious and vindictive”, and later successfully pressured the NEA leadership to contravene union democracy by rejecting it.
Yet the NEA delegates had good reasons to seek to distance the organization from the ADL. As Emmaia Gelman, founding Director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, explains, “Union delegates speaking on the Assembly floor rejected the ADL’s abuse of the term ‘antisemitism’ to punish critics of Israel, and its use of hyperinflated statistics on hate crimes to gin up fears about Jewish safety and paint calls for Palestinian rights as ‘hate speech’.”
Greenblatt contends that the ADL has been “determining what constitutes antisemitism…for more than a century”, but a JewishCurrents examination of the ADL’s “Audit of Antisemitic Incidents 2023” found more than a thousand items ADL classified as “antisemitic” which were really just “cases of speech critical of Israel or Zionism.” They note that the ADL’s “conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism skews the [ADL’s] data.”
Moreover, Greenblatt, and by extension the ADL, have openly advocated punishing critics of Israel for simply expressing their opinions. In November 2023, Spyglass Media Group dropped actress Melissa Barrera because, as the company explained, it has “zero tolerance for antisemitism.” Yet the Instagram posts for which Barrera was dismissed don’t attack Jews, they criticize Israeli government policies and the American media’s coverage of them.
Greenblatt applauded Spyglass for firing Barrera and, while graciously allowing that there’s “room for criticism of Israel”, said that critics should not have “an open license to wage unfair accusations against Israel.”
Teachers unions are correct in not wanting to “use, endorse, or publicize” the work of an organization that distorts, exaggerates, and shows contempt for both union democracy and dissent.
Walberg, citing a 2023 Pew Research Center polling indicating that a majority of American Jewish adults hold Israel as essential to Jewish identity, also criticizes an NEA board proposal to educate members about “the difference between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.” But regardless of how American Jews view Israel, criticism of Israeli government policies is not antisemitism, despite some of Israel’s supporters' efforts to equate the two.
In “Jewish Teachers Fight Unions in Court”, RealClearPolitics political correspondent Susan Crabtree condemns the NEA handbook for stating that Israel was founded through “forced violent displacement and dispossession”, yet this is how numerous international human rights groups, including groups in Israel, describe what Palestinians call the “Nakba” (catastrophe).
For example, Amnesty International describes the Nakba as “the expulsion and displacement of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes, villages and cities during the one-year conflict that created Israel in 1948 [that]...has been engraved in Palestinian collective consciousness.”
The International Federation for Human Rights, one of the world's oldest human rights organization with branches in over 100 countries, says the Palestinians people were “...forcibly expelled from their homes, lands, and property in their ancestral land during the 1948 Nakba...531 Palestinian villages were destroyed, and…about two-thirds of the Palestinian people became refugees in and around 1948…”
Walberg opposes an NEA suggestion that its members be taught about the Palestinian 1948 Nakba Day because it “insinuate[s] that the creation of the Jewish state was a catastrophe.” Yet while it is certainly true that Israel was a welcome refuge for many desperate Holocaust refugees, it is also true that, for the Palestinians, Israel’s creation was a catastrophe.
The NEA’s suggestion stems from the fact that American Social Studies textbooks overwhelmingly ignore the Nakba–for example, of the three widely-used high school World History textbooks on the bookshelf of my Los Angeles Unified School District classroom, not one even mentions the word. Neither do the two textbooks my school uses to teach ethnic studies.
Of the five books, only three even reference this seminal event in Palestinian history, and one of them, McDougal Littell World History: Patterns of Interaction, tells us only that “while the fighting raged, thousands of Palestinians fled, migrating from the areas under Jewish control. They settled in UN-sponsored refugee camps…”
Walberg, Crabtree, and other critics do have a point when they criticize an NEA reference on Holocaust remembrance to commemorate the “more than 12,000,000 victims of the Holocaust from different faiths, ethnicities, races, political beliefs, genders, and gender identification, abilities/disabilities, and other targeted characteristics.” This sentence is not inaccurate, but language similar to NEA president Becky Pringle’s statement referencing the “systematic murder of 6,000,000 Jews” should also have been incorporated.
According to Crabtree, Freedom Foundation lawsuit litigant Barry Blisten, a former UTLA member, “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.”
Blisten is incorrect. For one, Union Power did not “seize control of UTLA’s leadership”, they were democratically elected twice over a six-year period. Moreover, Union Power did more to help promote “teacher welfare, wage increases”, etc. than any other UTLA leadership in decades. During the presidency of Union Power's Alex Caputo-Pearl, UTLA won the decisive January 2019 teachers strike, which led to myriad benefits for LAUSD educators and schools.
According to Crabtree, Blisten claims Jewish teachers were systematically removed from online Zoom meetings for simply questioning positions they believed were antisemitic. Blisten is referring to meetings of the UTLA House of Representatives, where Israel has indeed been a contentious issue in recent years. But at these meetings, chaired by much-maligned UTLA President Cecily Myart-Cruz, Israel’s defenders have been given every bit as much time to speak as Israel’s critics have–I know, I’m an HoR member and I have attended the meetings referenced. It is also worth noting that many of the UTLA members speaking in favor of the resolutions criticizing Israel are Jewish.
In reality, what Israel’s defenders within UTLA are unhappy about is that most of their fellow UTLA educators simply don't agree with their views on Israel and the war in Gaza. That’s not antisemitism.
The accusations of antisemitism made by Walberg, Greenblatt, Blisten, Crabtree, and many other critics contain little of substance. They are instead part of an effort to silence educators, turn the public against the unions, which represent us, interfere in internal union democratic processes, and provide a pretext for government intervention in union affairs.
