Jew-Hatred Is Rampant in Teachers’ Unions
The National Education Association and other teachers’ unions are rife with radicals who despise Israel and Jews.
48-page report released in September exposes the depth of the nation’s teachers’ unions’ hostility toward all things Jewish. “Breaking Solidarity: How Anti-Semitic Activists Turned Teacher Unions Against Israel,” published by the Defense of Freedom Institute in September, explains how unions have worked to embed anti-Semitism into K–12 education.
This anti-Semitism was brought to light after Hamas’s horrific attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, the deadliest single attack on Jews since the Holocaust.
The DFI report states that while the teacher unions that once proudly invested in Israel and fiercely affirmed its right to defend itself, “now demand boycotts of, divestments from, and sanctions against the world’s only Jewish state. Union activists use their influence to infect teacher trainings and curricular materials—beginning in preschool—with propaganda opposing Israel and the Zionists.”
The report notes that a few weeks after the 2023 attack, union radicals began blaming Israel for the murder of about 1,200 innocent Jews and the kidnapping of hundreds more. Unions held actions like “teach-ins” and “walkouts” that included anti-Semitic materials and hateful slogans and chants, such as “from the river to the sea,” which harassed and intimidated Jewish students.
The National Education Association, the largest union in the country, now supports curricula from pre-K through high school that depict Israelis as bullies guilty of genocide. In the latest NEA handbook, issued in July, the union outlines its priorities for the coming year. It removes all references to Jews as a target of the Holocaust, stating that it will observe International Holocaust Remembrance Day “to recognize the more than 12 million victims of the Holocaust from different faiths, ethnicities, races, political beliefs, genders, and gender identities, abilities/disabilities, and other targeted characteristics.”
While the NEA handbook fails to mention the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust, it manages to criticize Israel and Jews by promoting “Palestinian Nakba Education,” explaining that “the Nakba, meaning catastrophe in Arabic, refers to the forced, violent displacement and dispossession of at least 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland in 1948 during the establishment of the state of Israel.”
Additionally, there was harassment and intimidation of Jews at the NEA Representative Assembly held in July. Jewish educators who spoke out against a resolution that proposed to cut ties with the Anti-Defamation League were shouted down during the proceedings. Just over a week after the assembly’s conclusion, the executive committee of the NEA’s Jewish Affairs Caucus published a chilling letter to NEA President Becky Pringle, reporting that Jewish delegates attending the gathering “were vocally mocked, harassed, and threatened in ways that dishonor our union.”
The letter also states that delegates approached Jewish attendees with questions like “How do you feel about the babies dying in Gaza?” Attendees also laughed and clapped when a Jewish delegate described how a terrorist in Colorado burned an eighty-two-year-old woman to death and injured many others, including a Holocaust survivor, with a Molotov cocktail at a gathering supporting Israeli hostages. Some made anti-Semitic comments that caused Jewish members of their delegations to move to different sections of the venue to feel safe.
An email sent by the NEA to its approximately 3 million members included resources for “teaching about indigenous peoples” and featured a map that completely erased Israel, replacing it with Palestine.
The NEA’s Jew-hatred has also filtered down to its state and local affiliates.
For example, the Massachusetts Teachers Association website provides 89 curriculum resources on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with 67 of them depicting Israel as an illegitimate stateand/or oversimplifying a complex conflict by accusing it of wrongful occupation, according to a public letter sent by the Massachusetts Educators Against Antisemitism and the American Jewish Committee New England. The groups are concerned about a year-long campaign by MTA leadership to demonize Israel and promote anti-Zionist propaganda in classrooms.
One of MTA’s resources includes Palestinian revolutionary posters that feature a Star of David dripping with blood.
Just as vile, in Oregon, the NEA-affiliated Portland Association of Teachers suggests gathering kindergarteners into a circle and teaching them the history of Palestine: “Seventy-five years ago, a lot of decision-makers around the world decided to take away Palestinian land to make a country called Israel. Israel would be a country where rules were mostly fair for Jewish people with white skin. There’s a BIG word for when indigenous land gets taken away to make a country; that’s called settler colonialism.”
The United Teachers of Los Angeles is particularly egregious. UTLA leadership is pro-Palestinian and was sued by Jewish teachers who don’t want to be represented by them because the union supports calls for the destruction of the plaintiffs’ religious homeland and “promotes animosity and violence towards people of Jewish descent.”
UTLA also sees itself as an authority on foreign policy. In October 2024, its governing body voted to back a congressional effort to prevent the sale of over $20 billion in U.S. weapons to Israel, arguing that American-supplied arms were being used against civilians.
So, what can be done about this egregious situation?
The House Committee on Education and the Workforce is investigating the NEA over whether it discriminates against Jews. Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.), the committee chairman, wrote to the union’s president, Becky Pringle, to demand that the union hand over documents related to alleged antisemitic content.
Among other things, Walberg writes that the NEA’s 2025 handbook, which outlines the union’s goals and priorities for the upcoming year, “contains passages and priorities that are hostile towards the Jewish people.”
While Walberg’s efforts are justified and well-meaning, it’s uncertain what they will achieve. The most effective way to fight union antisemitism is for Jewish teachers to resign from the union. By paying dues, they support an organization that despises them. They should also speak with like-minded teachers and encourage them to leave the union as well.
Clearly, the current situation is disgraceful, and not addressing it will only make it worse.
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Larry Sand, a retired 28-year classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network—a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the general public with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues. The views expressed here are entirely his own.
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