The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has been a ubiquitous presence in US 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 (NEA) has finally said no.
In July 6 vote, the NEA’s seven-thousand-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…
Auteur: Emmaia Gelman
