The National Education Association, the United States’ largest teachers union, has passed a non-binding measure barring the union from using, endorsing or publicizing any materials from the Anti-Defamation League.
The proposal, supported by a slim majority of NEA delegates present at the union’s 2025 Representative Assembly in Portland, Oregon, over the weekend, will automatically be referred to its executive committee, which will have a final say on the measure, an NEA spokesperson told Axios.
The measure calls for the union to stop using ADL materials about the Holocaust and antisemitism as well as ADL statistics or programs.
Its practical impact, if ultimately approved, is not clear, because unions typically do not decide on programming and curriculum in schools. But the success of the measure nonetheless offered evidence that the #DroptheADLFromSchools movement, which argues that the organization promotes pro-Israel bias in its materials for schools, had achieved a breakthrough success.
“Like policymakers and major media outlets, schools mistakenly rely on the ADL as a credible source of information about what constitutes antisemitism and its extent in the United States today,” a website for the #DroptheADLFromSchools movement reads.
“But analysis by scholars and journalists makes it clear that the ADL systematically distorts people’s understanding of antisemitism by including criticism of Israel as an indicator of hatred toward Jews,” the site says. “They distort the prevalence of antisemitism by including legal, nonviolent Palestinian solidarity actions as ‘bias incidents’ in their statistics.”
The ADL condemned the vote. “With antisemitism at record high levels, it is profoundly disturbing that a group of NEA activists would brazenly attempt to further isolate their Jewish colleagues and push a radical, antisemitic agenda on students,” an ADL spokesperson told Axios in a statement. “We will not be cowed for supporting Israel, and we will not be deterred from our work reaching millions of students with educational programs every year.”
In 2024, the ADL provided 5 million Jewish and non-Jewish students with educational materials and programs that include content on antisemitism, the Holocaust and Jewish identity, according to the organization’s website.
The ADL, once seen by most across the American political spectrum as the arbiter of what constitutes antisemitism in the United States, has in recent years become a target of criticism for progressives over its hawkish defense of Israel and its embrace of the idea that anti-Zionism constitutes antisemitism. (The group is also frequently maligned by the far right.) The political fallout of Israel’s war against Hamas has accelerated that shift.
In March, a coalition of progressive Jewish groups organized a protest at the ADL’s annual summit on antisemitism and hate over what they perceived as the ADL’s support for President Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Last month, Wikipedia’s editors voted to declare that the Anti-Defamation League is “generally unreliable” on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And in recent days, the ADL’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, has faced scrutiny after The Forward reported that he reportedly compared pro-Palestinian protesters to Islamist terrorists.
A transcript of the NEA assembly proceedings shows that several Jewish delegates spoke against the passage while more spoke in its favor. According to Jewish Insider, the vote had to be tallied three times to determine a clear result.
“This body supporting this motion is a message to Jewish educators and Jewish students that we are not safe in education spaces,” a Massachusetts teacher said, according to the transcript.
The NEA vote is not the first breakthrough for the anti-ADL movement in education. Earlier this year, the teachers union in Los Angeles wrote a letter obtained by Jewish Insider asking the superintendent of the L.A. Unified School District and the LAUSD school board to stop using ADL materials, because of its “focus on indoctrination rather than education.” The union, United Teachers Los Angeles, is a chapter of the second-largest national teachers union, the American Federation of Teachers.
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