By Grace Gilson
The National Education Assn., the US’ largest teachers union, has passed a non-binding measure barring the union from using, endorsing or publicizing any materials from the Anti-Defamation League.
The proposal, supported by a slim majority of NEA delegates at the union’s 2025 Representative Assembly in Portland, Ore., will automatically be referred to its executive committee, which will have a final say on the measure, an NEA spokesperson told Axios.
ADL Mountain States Regional Director Susan Rona weighs in
A transcript of the NEA assembly proceedings shows that several Jewish delegates spoke against the passage while more spoke in its favor.
According to Jewish Insider, the vote had to be tallied three times to determine a clear result.
The measure calls for the union to stop using ADL materials about the Holocaust and anti-Semitism as well as ADL statistics or programs.
Its practical impact, if ultimately approved, is not clear, because unions typically do not decide on programming and curriculum in schools.
But the success of the measure nonetheless offered evidence that the #DroptheADLFromSchools movement, which argues that the organization promotes pro-Israel bias in its materials for schools, had achieved a breakthrough.
“Like policymakers and major media outlets, schools mistakenly rely on the ADL as a credible source of information about what constitutes anti-Semitism and its extent in the US today,” a website for the #DroptheADLFromSchools movement reads.
“But analysis by scholars and journalists makes it clear that the ADL systematically distorts people’s understanding of anti-Semitism by including criticism of Israel as an indicator of hatred toward Jews,” the site says.
“They distort the prevalence of anti-Semitism by including legal, nonviolent Palestinian solidarity actions as ‘bias incidents’ in their statistics.”
The ADL condemned the vote.
“With anti-Semitism at record high levels, it is profoundly disturbing that a group of NEA activists would brazenly attempt to further isolate their Jewish colleagues and push a radical, anti-Semitic agenda on students,” an ADL spokesperson told Axios.
“We will not be cowed for supporting Israel, and we will not be deterred from our work reaching millions of students with educational programs every year.”
In 2024, the ADL provided five million Jewish and non-Jewish students with educational materials and programs that include content on anti-Semitism, the Holocaust and Jewish identity, according to the organization’s website.
The ADL has in recent years become a target of criticism by progressives over its defense of Israel and its embrace of the idea that anti-Zionism constitutes anti-Semitism.
The group is also attacked by the far right.
In March, a coalition of progressive Jewish groups organized a protest at the ADL’s annual summit on anti-Semitism and hate over what they saw as the ADL’s support for President Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
Last month, Wikipedia’s editors voted to declare that the ADL is “generally unreliable” on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The NEA vote is not the first breakthrough for the anti-ADL movement in education.
Earlier this year, the teachers union in Los Angeles wrote a letter obtained by Jewish Insider asking the superintendent of the L.A. Unified School District and its school board to stop using ADL materials, because of its “focus on indoctrination rather than education.”
The union, United Teachers Los Angeles, is a chapter of the second-largest national teachers union, the American Federation of Teachers. n
