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.
