The State of the Unions

What the NEA debacle can teach us about the exploitation of labor unions.

In early July, delegates at the National Education Association Representative Assembly in Portland, Oregon, narrowly voted to cut ties with the Anti-Defamation League. After an intense period of review, the NEA board rejected the proposal. According to a statement from NEA president Becky Pringle, “this proposal would not further NEA’s commitment to academic freedom, our membership, or our goals.” Jewish communal organizations, which rallied behind the ADL, breathed an all-too-familiar sigh of relief.

While the crisis was averted, it’s not going away. The question of how the NEA, the United States’ largest union with over 3 million members, nearly cut off a relationship with the ADL, a mainstream anti-hate organization founded in 1913 and dedicated to stopping the “defamation of the Jewish people” and securing “justice and fair treatment to all,” necessitates a deeper look into how activists inside public sector unions are strategically isolating Israel and avoiding charges of anti-Semitism by pitting “good” Jews against “bad” Jews.

The National Education Association Representative Assembly votes to cut ties with the ADL

The vote that shook the NEA should not have come as a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention. Progressives have become more ideologically captured by the anti-Israel narrative while gaining more power in Democratic spaces, and education unions have a symbiotic relationship with the Democratic Party, which has always been more supportive of public education funding. In 2024, the NEA gave almost $28 million to its lobbying arm, the NEA Advocacy Fund, which pours money into fighting Republican candidates during election years. It also contributed over $4 million to the Senate Majority PAC and thousands of dollars into other Democratic organizations.

Just look at the Northwest. The Washington Education Association, the state’s biggest labor union, collected $56.5 million in 2023. Aside from paying its top staff upwards of $300,000 a year, the WEA also directs some of the money toward its PAC, which doles out donations to Democratic candidates around the state.

The WEA also supports the Northwest Teaching for Social Justice (NWTSJ) conference; in 2024, the keynote address was about teaching Palestine. WEA president Larry Delaney claimed to know nothing about this program and told The Cholent at the time that “WEA’s only role is that we have provided a nominal grant to NWTSJ annually for the last several years.”

Delaney did not respond to a question about the appearance of the WEA on a list of 200 Washington labor unions calling for a ceasefire in November of 2023. That list included Seattle Public Library employees, AFT 1789 Seattle Colleges, and the Seattle Education Association (SEA). None of the labor unions The Cholent contacted for comment responded.

The SEA has the been the most adversarial union. Back in 2021, it endorsed a BDS resolution without much pushback. Anti-Israel activists in the SEA overlap with Democratic Socialists of America, which is notoriously antagonistic toward Israel’s existence. In a Marxist magazine article from 2024, two self-described Jewish SEA members discuss the momentum picking up for the anti-Israel cause within the NEA: “We desperately need to grow the anti-war movement in every labor union and in every local. We have no time to lose as our government, led by war-profiteering corporations, march us closer and closer to regional wars and World War III.”

Annice Benamy, the chair of the NEA’s Jewish Affairs Committee, says she noticed the infiltration of pro-Palestinian viewpoints into the union about nine years ago.

“I was seeing a lot of delegates speak against Israel and in support of the Palestinian struggle,” she says. “They are women, and they talk about their struggle and their kids’ struggles, and all these things that are true or not true, and people feel bad. So, we become hated. The Jewish people become hated.”

This has picked up over the past six years, Benamy adds.

“The more the women started talking, the more people were believing it,” she says. “There was this outside influence coming in. Now, based on what we had to go through this year, Educators for Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace made this RA very contentious and painful. They have an organized campaign to erase us.”

The effort to convince the NEA to sever ties with the ADL does appear to be organized. A website solely dedicated to this cause called #DropTheADLFromSchools features an “open letter to educators” about why the ADL is not the civil rights or social justice organization it claims to be.

This site is a spinoff of another site, #DropTheADL, which features “an open letter to progressives” and an “open letter to the National Education Association.” Their domains were registered in 2024 and 2018, respectively. Benamy calls the anti-ADL ploy the Project 2025 for the left: “They’ve been working on this for years.”

The letters and resources on the sites conflate critiques of the ADL’s positions with its support for Israel and the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism to paint a uniquely evil portrait of the organization whose work in schools includes anti-bullying initiatives, Holocaust lessons, and diversity-friendly reading lists.

“ADL Pacific Northwest has reached thousands of Pacific Northwest students and educators in Washington and Oregon in recent years, providing critical programming to equip schools to combat antisemitism and hate and teach Holocaust education,” regional ADL director Miri Cypers said in a statement. “Schools rely on the expertise and experience that ADL provides when handling hate-based incidents and working to improve school culture so that Jewish students — and all students — can be safe.”

The initiative to cut the ADL out of education is more than pushback on an organization whose policies or leadership might be problematic. It’s an effort to change the entire narrative around anti-Semitism to effectively allow attacks on Jewish students and faculty if they are related to Israel. And they have Jewish spokespeople ready to talk.

While anti-Zionism has been gaining ground among American Jews, Jewish support for Israel, even if critical, far outweighs the number of Jews who believe a Jewish state should not exist, or that Israel has been committing a genocide since October 7th.

The open letter to educators on #DropTheADLFromSchools has more than 90 signatories. Nearly half of them are affiliated with Arab, Muslim, or Palestinian causes. The others are a smattering of socialist, cultural, and leftwing educational causes. Seven identify as Jewish, and of those seven, only two, JVP and IfNotNow, have any real following. (Jewish Boomers Against Occupation in Palestine does not seem to have a website.)

Yet the letters and supporting materials on these sites center Jewish identity by claiming that the ADL “distorts the definition of ‘antisemitism’ in ways that stoke fear among many Jews and pit Jewish comfort against Palestinian rights”; “pushes local, state, and federal educational policy that defends Israel at the expense of the rights of Palestinians, other people of color, and Jews who reject ethnonationalism”; and adheres to a definition of anti-Semitism that “falsely conflates critiques of Zionism and the Israeli state with antisemitism.” JVP and IfNotNow are held up as examples of Jewish communities that represent an alternative to the mainstream.

By contrast, some 400 Jewish organizations took the side of the ADL and spoke out against the vote. This suggests not only that anti-Zionists are in the minority, but that they are only a small, token piece of the anti-Israel movement. Most critically, they willingly serve as a wedge to help isolate Israel and, by extension, the majority of the global Jewish community while deflecting accusations of anti-Semitism.

With this setup and a target in range, anti-Israel activists can lob ideological grenades to distract and confuse leaders and members who don’t fully understand the issue or how they are being manipulated. The unions make the perfect theater of war: already deeply liberal and packed with far-left thinkers, they become the vanguard for a destructive and hateful political movement that has absolutely nothing to offer American public school students. Want it darker? Socialist-oriented American Jews leading the charge are the vanguard for Islamism.

For now, the attack has been called off, but in the days leading up to the executive decision, Benamy was nervous about Jews quitting the union.

“I’m trying to get people to stay in,” she says. “If we lose Jewish members, they win. And what are we left with? What Jewish organization are they going to go after next year?”

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