The National Education Association just voted to cut all ties to the Anti-Defamation League

 

In a momentous vote, the National Education Association voted to cut all ties with the Anti-Defamation League. The reason? “Despite its reputation as a civil rights organization, the ADL is not the social justice educational partner it claims to be.”

In a momentous vote, the National Education Association’s 7,000-member policymaking body cut all ties with the Anti-Defamation League. On July 6, the NEA’s national Representative Assembly approved New Business Item 39, committing 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.” 

The ADL has been a ubiquitous presence in U.S. schools for nearly 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. While the ADL has positioned itself as an anti-bias organization (until recently publicly abandoning much of that work), it has increasingly been understood as policing and repressing social justice movements, and deploying “civil rights talk” to derail change.

Now, the NEA, the largest labor union in the U.S. with 3,000,000 members, has finally said no.

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.” Delegates also cited the ADL’s history of suppressing antiracist 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 BIPOC anti-genocide protest over the past twenty months had led people to look more closely. “These are educators who believe in antiracist and social justice unionism. They’re beginning to understand Palestine in that context. They’re intolerant of the justification of violence,” one NEA member said.  (more...)

The National Education Association just voted to cut all ties to the Anti-Defamation League