THE TEACHERS' UNIONS HAVE BECOME, LIKE THE MOBS OF PRO-HAMAS STUDENTS, TEACHERS AND ADMINISTRATORS ON COLLEGE CAMPUSES, THE LYNCHPIN OF THE SURGE IN ANTI-ISRAEL AND ANTI-JEWISH HATRED THAT HAS SPREAD ACROSS THE COUNTRY IN RECENT YEARS

Why are America’s teachers’ unions at war with Israel?

The NEA’s decision to cut ties with the ADL illustrates how progressives who think Jews and the Jewish state are “white” oppressors have captured the education establishment. 

 

By Jonathan S. Tobin 

 

JNS

Jul 10, 2025

 

 

The teachers' unions are led by hard-left activists like Randi Weingarten of the AFT.

 

On the list of professions that inspire the most respect among Americans, teachers rank very high. According to Gallup, only nurses scored higher than educators in its annual poll concerning opinions about the professions. Unsurprisingly, only politicians and lobbyists rank lower than journalists, but most people love teachers for good reasons. After all, they perform one of society’s most important tasks, and yet are generally poorly compensated for their efforts.

That’s why it may have come as a surprise to most casual observers when they heard the news that the National Education Association—the nation’s largest teachers’ union—had cut ties with the Anti-Defamation League because of its insistence on opposing antisemitism. The same might have been true for a number of other instances in which such unions have taken stands that promote prejudiced curricula or opposed action against Jew-hatred.

Captured by the left

No one should be surprised.

America’s teachers’ unions—the national organizations like the NEA and its rival, the American Federation of Teachers—and most local associations that represent educators have long been captured by leftist ideologues. That has put them at the forefront of partisan politics, making them among the largest donors to Democratic Party candidates, as well as liberal and leftist advocacy groups. In addition to their role as a partisan interest group, these unions have become an integral part of the culture war roiling American society as so-called progressives have sought to topple the Western canon in the U.S. education system and replace it with a new woke secular faith based on a neo-Marxist obsession with race.

The unions have become, like the mobs of pro-Hamas students, teachers and administrators on college campuses, the lynchpin of the surge in anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hatred that has spread across the country in recent years. Our attention has understandably been focused on those chanting for Jewish genocide (“From the river to the sea”) and terrorism against Jews everywhere (“Globalize the intifada”). That has led to a counter-attack from the Trump administration, which has sought to defund elite universities like Harvard and Columbia that tolerate and encourage antisemitism.

But operating largely without the sort of publicity and scrutiny that has zeroed in on the targeting of Jews in academia, teachers’ unions, whose members staff the nation’s K-12 school system, have played a key role in mainstreaming blood libels against Israel, falsely labeling Zionism as a form of racism, and denying Jewish peoplehood and history.

Why have teachers become the shock troops of the intersectional left?

Their unions are led by hard-left activists like Randi Weingarten of the AFT, and as a consequence, have done far more harm to the nation’s students than good. That was made abundantly apparent when the unions went all-out to keep schools closed during the COVID-19 pandemic long after it was clear that young people weren’t at a high risk of catching the disease and that keeping them out of the classrooms was doing them enormous harm.

Toxic theories

But the context is a broader conflict about how Americans should think about their country and Western civilization. Most teachers—and their unions—are squarely in the progressive camp that has embraced the left-wing critique of the West. As a consequence, they have been indoctrinating a generation of young Americans to buy into the toxic myths of critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism in which the United States is wrongly depicted as an irredeemably racist nation. These divisive doctrines label Jews and Israelis as “white” oppressors always in the wrong, and Palestinians as downtrodden “people of color,” who are in the right no matter what they do.

That’s a completely false understanding of the century-old war to oppose the Jewish presence in the land of Israel, which has nothing to do with race. Yet it has led to their believing that Israelis—the victims of the horrendous terrorism of Oct. 7, 2023, and a war waged against their existence by Iran and its Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthi terrorist proxies—are the villains of the Middle East conflict. And that inevitably means that the Palestinian Arabs—the perpetrators of the worst mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, led by groups bent on genocide—are the good guys.

That’s the context for the NEA’s break with the ADL.

That these two groups should be at odds with each other is not so much ironic as it is a sign of the radicalization of the unions.

Betrayed by their allies

In recent years, under the leadership of CEO and national director Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL has, like the unions and other liberal groups, moved to the left and often acted as a Jewish auxiliary for the Democratic Party rather than sticking to its mission of defending the Jews. It played partisan politics on some issues—and then not only endorsed the antisemitic Black Lives Matter movement but also incorporated some of the far-left’s woke ideology into its popular “No Place for Hate” curricula it markets to school districts.

After the post-Oct. 7 surge of antisemitism, however, Greenblatt and the ADL seem to have at least to some extent remembered why the group was founded and is still needed. They have responded to the crisis by returning to their roots, often calling out the antisemitism on college campuses and elsewhere. Yet, much to their discredit and showing that they still value partisan loyalties over their mission to defend the Jews, they have opposed President Donald Trump’s efforts to defund educational institutions that have mainstreamed Jew-hatred.

Nevertheless, the ADL has continued to advocate for the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism that rightly cites the sort of double standards, blood libels and opposition to the existence of one Jewish state on the planet that is now routine on the left. That and the ADL’s often less than spirited defense of Israel’s conduct of the war on Hamas and opposition to the false claims of a genocide going on in Gaza puts it at odds with the NEA, and others who engage in spreading and teaching these falsehoods.

It is hardly surprising that the ADL’s old allies have not merely turned on them, but now refer to them with the same rage as they do Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israel Defense Forces. In much the same manner as leftists target Jews on campuses, for them, the only good Jews are those on the far left who are willing to disavow their own people and oppose Israel’s existence and even support those, like Hamas, who seek Jewish genocide.

Since the ADL opposes those seeking to kill Jews and Israelis, the NEA believes that it’s wrong to allow the group to help it define or counter antisemitism. Indeed, as one such Hamas apologist/NEA activist put it, the unions regard a group like ADL, which supports Israel, as being akin to fossil-fuel companies they loudly insist are destroying the planet. Unsurprisingly, the openly antisemitic Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) endorsed their vote.

This is just one more in an increasingly lengthy list of actions in which the unions have aligned themselves against efforts to counter Jew-hatred. Just this week, the California Teachers Association opposed an effort to create a state office to combat antisemitism. Their reason left not much doubt about their motivation. The association feared that any such state program would impair its ability to spread misinformation about Israel and indoctrinate students to treat the Jewish state as an illegitimate entity that is not only committing heinous war crimes against Palestinian Arabs, but has no right to exist. In essence, they oppose any definition of antisemitism that won’t give them a pass to commit it.

‘Hamas tunnels’

To those who have been fighting against the spread of Jew-hatred in the schools, this is nothing new. Lori Lowenthal Marcus, legal director of The Deborah Project, a nonprofit legal defense organization that fights antisemitism across the United States by advising parents and teachers, in addition to taking school systems and colleges to court, says that a big part of the problem is the unions.

“What we’ve found in public K-12 schools is that the majority of the antisemitic materials used in the classrooms are shared and strongly encouraged by the leadership of the teachers’ unions,” says Marcus. “We refer to those unions as the Hamas tunnels; they are the delivery source through which the hate-inspiring materials are burrowed, largely undetected, to be used to poison the hearts and minds of students with Jew-hatred.”

This didn’t start on Oct. 7.

In California, a long-running debate about an ethnic-studies requirement in high school hinged on the way that the school curriculum was not just excluding Jews as a minority group worthy of being highlighted in any such program. Its teachings promoted an anti-Israel narrative in which Jewish history and rights are erased, and the Jewish state is delegitimized. 

More than that, as Marcus notes, students and families have often been targeted, shunned and harassed because of their Jewish identity while teachers and administrators look the other way. In some cases, they tacitly encourage it because they see it as merely instances of people venting their understandable hatred for anything they associate with Israel or Judaism.

“We’ve seen the malign influence of the teachers’ unions repeatedly,” says Marcus. “The unions are behind it, whether it’s launching a ‘Teach-In for Palestine’ instead of regular academic classes in Oakland in December 2023, or instructing teachers to teach about the settler colonialism and oppression of Israel and to hide what they are teaching in Los Angeles, or simple Jew-hatred, pure and simple, by the Massachusetts Teachers Union which is occurring now.”

Some of this might be ascribed to the natural tendency of any union to stand by its teachers, no matter what they do. Still, when educators are accused of using their positions to promote antisemitism and anti-Zionism, they often declare that there’s nothing wrong with stating their own personal opinions about the issues of the day. As Marcus notes, the unions are telling teachers that they “are entitled to express their own political opinions in their classrooms. But every court in the country that has addressed that issue says that is not so.”

The engine of antisemitism

As a group, teachers deserve our respect and support. The unfortunate truth, though, is that as much as we rightly complain about what is being taught in elite schools today, a generation of Americans has already been influenced by woke doctrines. And they are now in place teaching not just at Harvard and Columbia, but in elementary, middle and high schools across the country.

That is especially true among those who are union activists. The NEA, the AFT and many state and local teachers’ associations have become the engine of the normalization of antisemitism in the schools. They are doing everything they can to resist the pushback that they are finally getting from those who are doing all they can to turn back the antisemitic tide that has already swept over the education system.

So, what can we do about it?

For one, efforts like those of the Deborah Project and other nonprofits that are waging this struggle one district at a time need more support. A destructive partisanship has prevented major liberal Jewish groups like the ADL and the American Jewish Committee from supporting the Trump administration’s campaign to defund institutions that tolerate antisemitism. But if successful, that effort could go a long way toward forcing the schools and academia to disavow leftist doctrines, lest they too be stripped of federal aid.

What is also necessary is for families and communities to rise up, and make it clear to the unions and the teachers that they won’t tolerate their extremism any longer. Those teachers who dissent from this woke plague also need to be supported as they wage a difficult fight to change the unions from within. Until they do, there should be an end to any illusions that teachers’ unions should be regarded with the same affection that their profession still holds in the minds of the public. The NEA and AFT, and other similar organizations should be labeled for what they are: groups that are spreading hatred rather than knowledge.