[[link removed]]

HOW DO WE GET THE ADL OUT OF SCHOOLS?  
[[link removed]]


 

A conversation with Nora Lester Murad of #DropTheADLfromSchools
May 30, 2025
Der Spekter
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_ The ADL is project to conflate criticism of Israel with
antisemitism, is also a leader in promoting anti-BDS policies, has
also taken a leadership role in the attack on ethnic studies in
California. _

, Two signs from an anti-war protest in Massachusetts. Photo courtesy
of Nora Lester Murad.

 

Since as far back as the 1980s, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has
sponsored programs aimed at fighting discrimination in K-12 education.
In recent years, however, the organization has narrowed its focus
[[link removed]] almost
exclusively to antisemitism at the expense of other marginalized
communities. In doing so, the ADL has created a coercive environment
[[link removed]] that
encourages carceral solutions and monetary donations as a fix for
systemic issues. Since the start of Israel's genocide against
Palestinians in 2023, the ADL's illiberal leanings have been put on
full display as it voiced support for the detainment of Mahmoud
Khalil, dismissed Elon Musk's Nazi salute, and done everything in its
power to silence criticism of the state of Israel
[[link removed]] by
labeling pro-Palestinian language
[[link removed]] and
activism as "antisemitism" in its public advocacy and statistics,
putting the self-proclaimed "anti-hate" organization in alignment
[[link removed]] with
the likes of the Trump administration and Heritage Foundation.

Der Spekter editors spoke to Nora Lester Murad, a member of the core
organizing team of the #DropTheADL
[[link removed]] movement, about what
educators are facing in their schools and what needs to be done to
replace the ADL's programs with truly progressive, anti-racist
solutions.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

MARK MISOSHNIK, DER SPEKTER EDITOR: Please tell us about yourself and
then more about this movement that you're a part of.

NORA LESTER MURAD: I'm originally from California. I live now in
Massachusetts, and I’m Jewish. I married a Palestinian Muslim, and
we raised three daughters in the West Bank. I've been involved with
social justice work since my parents dragged me to demonstrations in a
car seat, and I come from the same stock that you folks come from:
both the villages around Kyiv as well as the Brooklyn left. I’m
committed to social justice issues and particularly have been involved
in this one even before I got married, which was 40 years ago. So it's
been a real, real long time. I think I've always been an anti-Zionist.
My parents were anti-racist, so they were basically anti-Zionists.

Obviously the last 18–19 months have been particularly difficult for
anyone who is either Jewish or Palestinian for different reasons. And
it was during the genocide that the “Drop the ADL From Schools”
campaign was birthed and then launched. Around 2020 there was an
effort to drop the ADL, which still exists at droptheadl.org, and it
focused on helping progressive organizations understand that the ADL
is not an ally to progressive groups. There's also a long history of
surveilling and attacking social movements of communities of color,
even while they allied with some more conservative and integrationist
civil rights organizations when necessary, contributing to the ADL's
undeserved reputation as a civil rights organization over the last
several decades.

The 2020 effort to drop the ADL has resulted in over 300 organizations
signing on to an open letter
[[link removed]] saying the
ADL is not an ally. Those organizers were being contacted by educators
asking for more education-specific materials, talking points,
strategies, etc., and so they reached out to several of us who'd also
been asking, saying, “Yeah, why don't you pull some materials
together and we'll throw them up on our site?" But when this group of
educators across the country began to meet around a year ago, they
didn't just want materials that focused on schools. They wanted a
proper campaign. They wanted the ADL out of schools. And the reasons
are not exactly the same as the reasons that progressives would want
the ADL out. And that's important. For example, the Drop the ADL folks
say the ADL works with police. And progressives go, “Oh, my God,
that's horrible.” But schools don't. They go, “Yeah, we work with
the police too. That's one reason why we like the ADL.” So if you're
going to talk to schools, whether it's educators, parents, students,
principals, superintendents, school boards, you have to have an
argument that is not just about progressive values. You have to have a
pedagogical and education-specific argument. And so we developed that
argument, the messaging, advocacy materials, and our own open letter,
which is an open letter to educators the ADL is not a social justice
partner. That is the language that schools use: they frequently refer
to the ADL as a social justice partner. And we're saying, “No,
they're not.”

ALEX LANTSBERG, DER SPEKTER EDITOR: Have you ever described the ADL
as a supremacist organization?

NORA: No, though I do think of farther-right organizations, like
CAMERA (The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and
Analysis) and ICAN (Israeli American Civic Action Network) as
supremacist organizations. There are some others, but I don't quite
put the ADL in that category, not because they're not horrible, but
because they're maybe smarter. I always talk about an ecosystem of
organizations, and the ADL is the famous one: the AIPAC of the
educational ecosystem. The whole ecosystem is problematic, but it
doesn't mean that they're all exactly the same. They play slightly
different roles. One will step forward when others step back; another
steps forward, and another steps back. So they're all part of the same
dance. 

I think they do actually end up supporting the same agenda, but there
are important reasons why I would not put them in the same bucket. One
is because CAMERA’s tactics are very predatory and aggressive.
CAMERA will come up to you at a demonstration…and scream, “Rapist,
rapist, rapist!” for 10 minutes. The ADL doesn't do that. Why it's
important to distinguish is that it's easy for people to either say,
“Oh, the ADL are the good guys. So we don't want CAMERA; we want the
ADL because they're the good guys,” or just to completely overlook
[the ADL] and excuse them because they're not the worst of the worst.
So when we talk about it, we talk about the ecosystem. And I think
labeling them a supremacist organization doesn't add any value because
it's very easy for them to defend against it. 

Charles Jacobs, the founder of the Boston chapter of CAMERA,
continuously yells "Rapist!" and other insults at a Newton library.
Video courtesy of Nora Lester Murad.

As we were pulling all these materials together and the messaging and
thinking it through — and it's not a completely finished project;
it's like a strategy that's emerging in response to information we get
about what's working and what's not — the magazine Rethinking
Schools [[link removed]] heard
about us and asked for an exposé of the ADL. Rethinking Schools is
the preeminent social justice magazine for K-12 teachers, and it was a
huge honor to be asked to do that work. They published it in their
Fall issue, around October 1, 2024, and that was our launch. 

We launched the article
[[link removed]],
we launched our open letter, and now we've launched all of
our advocacy materials
[[link removed]]. And we have
over 90 organizational signatories and 500 or 1,000 individual
signatories. We have a core group that's kind of a leadership team.
Most of the educators in that group cannot be publicly identified as
working with us because they are working educators, and their jobs
would be at risk, or because they've already been attacked by the ADL.
And then we have an accountability group, which could be a bit more
active, if you ask me. But there are about 20-25 people who were
involved with the development of materials and are in an ongoing way
informed about what we're doing and asked to be critical and hold us
accountable to our principles and to our mission. 

And then we have an educators' chat for educators around the country
who are working on these issues. There are some parents in that group
who are also working on the ADL, and another piece I think that is
important is that we're really trying hard to get mainstream media
coverage of not only the ADL but also the issues that concern us, like
attacks and smears against teachers, lawfare, etc., [as well as] the
conflation of support for Palestinians with antisemitism. When an
activist goes to a principal and says, “We want to get rid of the
ADL,” and the principal Googles it, they are going to get 50 pages
of the ADL talking about themselves. But we also want there to be some
critical materials in credible, reputable, mainstream places so that
the principal feels maybe there are some legitimate questions about
the ADL.

MARK: What can you tell us about the people that are supporting this
movement? For example, teachers, union members? Are there multiple
chapters? Are there locals, or is it just a national thing?

NORA: It's just a national thing, and it's really an umbrella. We
don't instigate anything on the ground. The ADL turns up in different
schools and different districts in really different ways, so each
person who comes forward needs to figure out what the ADL is doing
that concerns them and also what they can do about it given their own
positionality. If they're high school students, they have different
constraints and different opportunities than if they are educators;
parents also have different constraints and opportunities. So we're
interested in organizing all those groups. We don't organize them, but
they organize themselves and tend to reach out and connect with us,
either for materials or advice or to tell us what they're doing. And
we have heard some great success stories just with people coming
forward and saying, “Hey, we got the ADL out of our school.” And
we're like, “That's amazing. How did you do that?”

[We work with] educators, parents, students, and then the last group
are educators who are wearing their union hats. That's important for
three reasons. One is attacks and smears on teachers can happen for
their protest activities as individuals, and they need support from
their unions. It can also happen for the protest activities of the
unions themselves, and we're finding that unions are getting attacked
as unions. Particularly right now, Massachusetts Teachers Association
and United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) are targets of right-wing
groups — both Zionist groups and union-bashing groups — whose
messaging and efforts are converging in at least those two places and
some others. And thirdly, and this is something I want to really
emphasize: teachers and educators are getting in trouble, not only for
protesting the genocide. They're getting in trouble for teaching
[about the genocide], literally doing their job.

[A protest sign that reads, "Schools are no place for the ADL"]

A sign at an anti-war protest in Massachusetts. Photo courtesy of Nora
Lester Murad.

ALEX: I wanted to ask you, are you guys doing any action calls on
the ethnic studies bill
[[link removed]] [AB
715, which critics say
[[link removed]] would
enact censorship against Palestinians and anti-Zionists] that's in
front of the California state legislature right now?

NORA: We are following closely, and in relationship with those
organizations, we will amplify what they're doing. I'd like to do
more, but our capacity is really limited. They are completely amazing,
both the Berkeley parents and the CODEPINK folks. 

Ways that we work with people or with other groups include amplifying
what they're doing; they might consult us on certain things, or we
would direct journalists to them, or even pitch those stories to
journalists. Marcy Winograd writes
[[link removed]] in
Counterpunch and other publications about SB 1277
[[link removed]] [this
created the Teachers Collaborative on Holocaust and Genocide Education
in California] and now the more recent ethnic studies bill. Sometimes
grassroots activists will send us drafts of articles so that we can
make suggestions either about framing or different things that might
be happening in other parts of the country that they might not know
about so that we can paint the bigger picture.

ALEX: Yeah, I was making phone calls a little bit earlier today. Part
of the reason why I'm interested in your work with organized labor is
that I was looking at the board member list of the Jewish Labor
Committee, and I see that a lot of teachers are on that board right
now. I imagine it's a mixed group. But Randi Weingarten [President of
the American Federation of Teachers] is the secretary of the
organization. So I was just wondering if you guys had made any
outreach to them, if there had been any dialogue, and whether or not
you're making headway with actual international unions, rather than
just the locals themselves?

NORA: I didn't know about this group, although the page looks
slightly familiar. All that I have done with labor are three things:
to support and amplify the resistance of the Massachusetts Teachers
Association and UTLA. Different unions were contacting us, so we put a
union chat together so they could talk with one another. I personally
am interested in the convergence of the union-busting attacks with the
Zionist attacks and I do have an investigative journalist who's
interested in this convergence issue. 

But I think we could do a lot more. I mean, I just need to be really
honest and say, wow, there's a lot of people interested in this
subject, and people come forward and work on something for a little
while. We have $0, zero staff, so I think we need to institutionalize
a little bit more. It's particularly hard because the urgency of the
genocide redirects all of our attention away from long-term things
onto short-term emergencies. The need to support educators in real
time — that's a very, very time-consuming thing. There are weeks
where I might get five calls, like a call a day, from an educator who
has been fired or is at risk of being fired, and I've learned a lot
about how to support people through that. It's very much a one-on-one
thing that evolves on an hourly basis, as far as whether people feel
safe talking to you, whether they want to speak with a journalist or
they don't, whether they want to leave their house or they don't,
whether they want to quit their jobs or wait to be fired, which lawyer
they might want to work with, whether they have money or they need a
free one — it's really a lot. So I think for all these reasons, it's
important that this campaign to “Drop the ADL from Schools” gets a
bit more capacity so that we can be responsive and still stay
sustainable, because we’re getting pretty tired.

MARK: You talked a little bit about the ADL’s history, and you did
touch a little bit on how they endorsed surveillance
[[link removed]]. I know
that one of the most famous things that comes up is that
they defended apartheid South Africa
[[link removed]].
So what we're seeing now just feels like a continuation of that, while
still claiming to be a social justice civil rights organization. What
can you tell us about their history, when they started to become more
blindly supportive of Israel, when they started calling anti-Zionism
antisemitism, and how it's a major part of their program, to the best
of your knowledge?

NORA: An expert on the ADL is Emmaia Gelman, who's also the founder
and director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, and
she has a book coming out about the ADL and has been seeding social
media with excellent critique. What I understand from Emmaia is that
the ADL was founded in 1913, which is pre-Israel. But they started
very much wanting to represent and to facilitate Jews entering white
society and being respectable, and they did that by affiliating with
state institutions and not criticizing or resisting any kind of state
power, and that was from the beginning. But as far as the project to
conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism, I think that's been a
multi-year project, but it very much gained steam around 2015 with the
International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) redefinition of
antisemitism
[[link removed]]. 

Now what's interesting recently is that the ADL is explicitly saying
[[link removed]] they
do not think it should be codified in law; I think because they know
it won't stand up. But they achieve their objective by pushing the
conflation anyway and by pushing policies like demanding that schools
adopt the IHRA definition as part of their efforts against
antisemitism. The ADL is also a leader in promoting anti-BDS policies,
which affect not only people wanting to criticize Israeli politics,
but it affects teachers, like the teacher who's featured in the Just
Visions film “Boycott,”
[[link removed]] where she was
required to sign an anti-boycott contract clause in order to be a
speech therapist in a school. And the ADL has also taken a leadership
role in the attack on ethnic studies in California. They split ethnic
studies into [2 groups]: liberated ethnic studies, which got
marginalized, and this watered-down kind of ethnic studies, which got
institutionalized. That actually is not surprising, because the ADL is
not an anti-racist organization. It’s an anti-bias organization, or
claims to be. And people who really understand education will
understand the difference. When you talk about an anti-bias approach,
you're looking at interpersonal microaggressions. There's no systemic
analysis, there's no historic analysis, there's no economic analysis,
and there's no critical thinking. It's like, “You said that name to
me, and that hurt my feelings. Oh, you didn't mean to hurt his
feelings. Why didn't you apologize to him? And then let's all play.”
That is the approach the ADL has taken, and one reason why they are so
accepted in schools [and why] the schools can bring the ADL in. They
take prepackaged, off-the-shelf activities that are bad pedagogy,
they're not educational, and they're definitely not critical in any
way. They implement them on students in a very formulaic way, and then
the school can check off, “We did the diversity thing.” So the ADL
actually prevents anti-racist work. It does not do anti-racist work.
It prevents it because it takes this big real estate in schools and
allows the school to [avoid doing] critical work. 

One thing I want to mention about the ADL in schools is, it is
horrible to realize and to admit that public schools are outsourcing
some important educational decisions to a private political
organization like the ADL. So, for their No Place for Hate
[[link removed]] program, the
school has to, first of all, make a pledge that at least 70% of staff
and students have to sign, which can be very coercive. They have to do
it publicly, and you're supposed to get 100% compliance on the pledge.
That's so bizarre and offensive to me, like I can just imagine a kid
saying, “I don't want to sign the pledge,” and [teachers and
administrators] say, “But we're going to have 100%; you just have to
sign it, and just go to that flip chart paper in the hallway, and you
sign it, and we'll have 100%!” Then, in order to be designated as a
No Place for Hate school, the school has to complete three
ADL-approved activities. You either choose from the ADL-approved list,
or you propose an activity submitted to the ADL, and they have to
approve it for you to get credit as one of your three activities. In
what world do we outsource education to a private, politicized
nonprofit? It's so bizarre to me. Overall, I think the ADL benefits
greatly from the No Place for Hate program, and schools don't benefit
at all and are harmed by it. 

And another thing that's important is that the ADL, their relationship
with police, is not only in this deadly exchange program
[[link removed]],
where the ADL takes local police to Israel to study
“counterterrorism,” but when there is an antisemitic incident,
like a swastika in a bathroom, which is the most likely incident, the
school often calls the ADL, and the ADL calls the police. If the
school didn't already call the police, the ADL calls the police. So
this creates almost like a parallel to the school-to-prison pipeline,
where something like a fifth grader [drawing a] swastika on a desk
becomes criminalized, with the police coming in completely
unnecessarily and completely counter to actual child development and
pedagogical guidelines. If a 12-year-old acts out, first of all, that
is actually expected. That's normal behavior, not abnormal behavior.
And when they act out in ways that are bigoted or discriminatory, it
needs to be handled as a learning , a teachable moment. You don't
criminalize it because nobody learns what a swastika is or why it's a
problem. There's no openness to think together about what kind of
community we want to be, how we should respond to these things. It's
all perpetrator-focused. It's all punitive and discipline, and then it
just happens again. It's the opposite of actually addressing
antisemitism.

MARK: And, I mean, that's not how kids learn from their mistakes,
right? So, yeah, like you said, it's very counterintuitive. I like the
parallel you bring to the school-to-prison pipeline, because that's
exactly the thought process I had. When you're dealing with something
that's potentially just a behavioral issue — it's not a criminal
issue — why would you get the ADL involved? It feels like [the ADL]
really benefits from these kinds of things happening, because they
entrench more and more of their power, their existence. They justify
it by being like, “Well, see, we told you this still happens. So we
need to be here.”

NORA: And in fact, they have as a policy that when there is a
swastika in the bathroom, the school is supposed to send an email
saying that they have a zero tolerance policy to the whole school
community. They don't do that for the N-word. They don't do that in
response to bigotry against any other group. They just do it for
antisemitism. So they exceptionalize antisemitism, and then some
members of the Jewish community actually get frightened, like it
actually scares people, and then the media picks up on it, and then
it's like, oh, there's an antisemitism problem at such-and-such Middle
School. And then the school's like, “Oh my god, what should we
do?” And the ADL says, “You need to bring us in for training.”
So then the school brings the ADL, who's the accuser in the first
place, in for training. It's all about further entrenchment and
further punitive and more alarmist approaches and more need for money
because antisemitism is escalating. You know, help us. Support us.
Send your dollars now.

[A protest sign that reads "The ADL is not the social justice partner
it claims to be"]

A sign at an anti-war protest in Massachusetts. Photo courtesy of Nora
Lester Murad.

MARK: Yeah, and it's something that we've definitely discussed as a
publication and in the Jewish Labor Bund as a whole. This, as you
mentioned, exceptionalization of antisemitism, this elevation of our
own victimization above other people. This is the most important
thing. And I think that goes hand in hand with what you were saying,
how when they were initially founded, they were looking to assimilate
to white, middle-class culture, to the state, to the police, all of
these things. And that's what I've always been thinking:
[organizations like the ADL] don't care to look at material conditions
and larger issues and how we can actually change this systemically,
because their ultimate goal is not to actually fix these things. It's
to exceptionalize us as victims and to just continue, for lack of a
better term, their grift. They just want to continue expanding their
power, their money, all that kind of stuff.

NORA: But if you'd asked me, you know, three months ago, I would have
talked about material conditions too. I would say, “Yeah, okay, I'm
Jewish, and somebody might make a rude comment about my nose or
whatever, and they do, but I'm not three times more likely to die in
childbirth like a Black mother is.” But now that Trump is leveraging
and weaponizing antisemitism, I think it really does put Jews at risk
in a very new, historically significant way. If hospitals are going to
lose funding, and universities are going to lose funding because of
antisemitism, I will not be surprised if that backfires against Jews,
and also that that is part of their intention of doing it that way.

ALEX: This is one of those things — I don't know if you listen to
the Bad Hasbara podcast
[[link removed]] — one
of the points that they make is that it's funny that when they come
down like this, with this level of force, it's almost like bringing
the stereotype to life of, just like Mark said, exceptionalizing
antisemitism to make it the worst thing imaginable, not really finding
any space for other sorts of discrimination and racism, and then
basically exerting their financial and, I guess, cultural power, or
institutional power, to just really squelch any opposition.

MARK: I think what you were saying about Trump sort of leveraging
antisemitism — that's also been an ongoing discussion. Even in more
liberal Zionist organizations, I have seen quite a shift, because I
think they're starting to recognize that a little bit more. I wish it
had happened sooner. I wish it happened faster. But, you know, this is
the reality we live in, and I think it positions us as both victims
and then also scapegoats, right? Because we're the victims of this, we
need to have more money in programs that take money and programs away
from other people; therefore, we're at fault, even though it's mostly
Christian Zionists that are at fault here. I think that's another big
aspect that people don't seem to grasp. And I don't know 100%; I would
have to do my research on this, but I'm pretty sure there were
multiple directors, board members, whatever, of the ADL who have
mentioned that Christian Zionists are great
[[link removed]] allies
[[link removed]].
And if you say it that explicitly, I think that really gives the game
away, right? Because I can't think of bigger antisemites than
Christian Zionists, besides maybe explicit neo-Nazis, right? Their
whole ideology is based on us being annihilated. So how can you
possibly say these are our allies? Just because they're not actively
pushing for it in the way that neo-Nazis are, if you're rooting for
our downfall, how could you be our friend? That doesn't make any sense
to me. So I think everything you said is spot on. 

And so, kind of off of that, what would you see as the necessary next
steps to drop the ADL or continue dropping the ADL if you found
success prior?

NORA: Well, there's so much that we need to do and are trying to do,
but not fast enough. I think that we need to continue to discredit ADL
statistics. ADL statistics are driving a lot of policy, but their
statistics are bad
[[link removed]],
and it's pretty easy to show it. It's just hard to get people to
change, so discredit ADL statistics. 

A former ADL education director named Danielle Bryant published an
op-ed in the New York Daily News exposing the ADL from the inside as
being uncommitted to fighting racism and being closed to critique from
within. She pointed out that the ADL education site had a content
update, which may still be there if you look. It says the ADL is no
longer supporting anti-bias work, and they are focusing on
antisemitism, Jewish identity and the Holocaust. I think that is
significant and useful for us. Since we can now say, “Hey, the
anti-bias work was crap, and they're not doing it anyway.” Schools
can no longer say, “Yeah, we know there's a problem with the Israel
stuff, but we're only using them for anti-bias.” They've literally
taken down more than 150 resources. It may be more than that by now.
So they're not updating and servicing any of their anti-bias work
anyway. 

When I last checked, the No Place for Hate program was still kind of
operational, but they had let go so many staff that it had the effect
of pulling back the program. We should spread the news about them
pulling back on their anti-bias work. We need to focus more on the
carceral approach that they have to antisemitism in general. It's a
very anti- or non-educational way to go about anything, and they do
not only do it in schools. For example, when they accused Whoopi
Goldberg of antisemitism, they literally prevented a discussion about
what antisemitism is by creating this big hysteria. And it got
Jonathan Goldblatt on every single major station and in every
newspaper for an entire week. And it’s like “The Emperor's New
Clothes.” Everyone goes, “Oh my god, what she said was
horrible.” But they’re quietly wondering, “What was so horrible,
exactly? They must get something I don't get.” So those are three
pieces, I would say, from the messaging down and then from the
grassroots up. 

It's just really doing more organizing, supporting parents, supporting
educators, supporting union members and supporting students
themselves, and that includes [talking about] the genocide, because
obviously what the ADL is doing is manufacturing consent in the short
term by shutting down critical thinking about what's happening and in
the long term by normalizing unconditional support for Israel in the
curriculum and in teaching. We gotta do that while we are protecting
the direct victims of the ADL’s lawfare and slander. It's a lot.

MARK: As you were talking about the ADL no longer supporting the
anti-bias trainings, I looked it up, and I totally forgot about the
fact that Wikipedia is no longer using them as a source. And I think
at that point more people should have been like, “Oh, okay, that's
definitely not an organization to be trusted.” But it just was water
off a duck's back—

NORA: And they defended
[[link removed]] Elon
Musk's Nazi salute! So when you add all these things up together, it
becomes pretty shocking that the ADL isn't more discredited than it
is. I think one reason why this might be important for the Bundist
approach is that when the ADL took on the fight against antisemitism,
I think a lot of antiracists ceded that territory to the ADL. And so
now when you look at anti-racist organizing, it doesn't always include
antisemitism, and it should. It should include it in its own way,
because each form of bigotry and discrimination works differently, but
definitely not the way the ADL does. 

So, the fact now is that when we want to offer schools an alternative
to the ADL, there isn't one. I want to be able to say, “This
anti-racist organization is addressing antisemitism, not
exceptionalizing it, but including it in their anti-racism,” and it
doesn't really exist at scale. That's a big, huge hole. I think it
makes sense that principals and superintendents have to show they're
opposing antisemitism. And if there's only one way to show it, which
is by codifying the IHRA definition and closing down dissent, they
will do it. But if we could put something in front of them [to show]
that you can oppose antisemitism the ADL way, or you can oppose it in
an anti-racist way, hopefully more of them would choose that
anti-racist way. But that is a hole that we need to fill, and it will
take some time, but we at “Drop the ADL from Schools” are working
on that. We care very much about making sure that policymakers have a
choice that we would support them choosing. You can't just say,
“Don't do this, don't do this, don't do this.” What do we want
them to do? What do we _want_ them to do about swastikas in schools?
There's something they should do about it, and they don't know because
the ADL has been the main group that’s been talking about it.

ALEX: In San Francisco, there was a big hullabaloo not too long ago
about the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) trying to get one
of their approved curricula going in there. And I think the Council on
American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and some other folks — I think
Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) came out proposing an alternative, an
open, more solidaristic, I guess, approach to dealing with hate
crimes. How do you feel about that?

NORA: The JCRC pushes the Institute for Curriculum Studies (ICS)
because it was a program of theirs; it just split off to be
independent last year in 2024, which is why we don't have independent
990s (tax paperwork for nonprofits) for them yet. But what we’re
trying to do is to push forward PARCEO
[[link removed]]’s antisemitism training in
a framework of collective liberation. And thank God for PARCEO that
they're doing it. But it's not a curriculum that a teacher can
implement in school yet. So it's amazing, and it's fantastic, and we
need to continue to iterate that down to things that teachers can do
with students, because that's what the ADL does so effectively. I have
a big binder of “A World of Difference
[[link removed]].”
It's [an anti-bias program for schools] from the 1980s; the ADL was at
the forefront. They were a pioneer in creating very simple,
easy-to-follow anti-bias lesson plans for teachers, where it says,
“Here are your materials, here's your preparation, here's your
procedure, here are your discussion questions, here are your slides,
here are your handouts. Here's how you evaluate it.” And there's
nothing that's parallel to that that gels with our antiracist
politics.

MARK: And teachers are already so overwhelmed with things that they
have to do. How are they going to come up with these things on their
own? They don't have the time, so obviously, this is easier. 

So, in that vein, have you spoken to organizations like Bend the Arc
[[link removed]] or the Nexus Project
[[link removed]]? Because they are
heavily opposed to the IHRA definition of antisemitism but are still
very dedicated to that work. I don't think it's part of a broader
anti-racist framework, but I think that talking with them and sort of
seeing what you can organize would be a pretty good step. I don't know
if you've spoken to them yet.

NORA: We are working as broadly as possible, and a lot of that work
is done, but it's not done for K-12, and that's something that I have
to say over and over and over again every time I go to meetings about
repression of Palestinians. Or, you know, just being involved in the
Palestine Solidarity movement in K-12 is always forgotten, and it
shouldn't be, because the reason why we have a problem in higher ed is
because people have to undo what they learned wrongly from K-12. But
the solidarity is so much more difficult for K-12 because every
district has different policies. Every district has a different
configuration of support groups, and it's all very localized. 

The ADL has a new strategy where they're attacking educational
professional associations. Teachers have annual national conferences,
regional conferences. They have journals. They get their CEUs
(continuing education units) there. There's a lot of reasons why
teachers need professional organizations to stay at the forefront of
their fields. So CAMERA infiltrated the National Council for Teachers
of English (NCTE), and then I think the ADL was so impressed by that
that they immediately attacked NAIS, the National Association of
Independent Schools. Their People of Color Conference and their
Student Diversity Leadership Conference have been their flagship
equity programs for decades. They're both now “on pause” because
in December, two conference speakers, Ruha Benjamin — a nationally
known African American, anti-racist educator at Princeton — and
Suzanne Barakat — the sister of one of the three Chapel Hill dental
students killed in an anti-Muslim attack in 2018, as well as the
founder of the Global Health Initiative at San Francisco State
University — both spoke about genocide. The conference was accused
of being antisemitic by the ADL on December 11, the day after the
conference, and by the next day, NAIS had already caved in and
apologized and committed
[[link removed]] to
“implementing meaningful changes to our speaker selection and
content review processes.” So the ADL was able to grab their arm and
twist it so immediately and so tightly that the NAIS itself gave
effect to this false accusation and then put their educational weight
behind it, agreeing to censor their own members. 

The day after the apology, the 13th, the ADL must have said, “Oh, my
goodness, that was so easy. Let's organize all private school parents
in the whole country to put further pressure on NAIS,” which they
did
[[link removed]].
And then four or five days later, they made an accusation
against MassCUE [[link removed]], the
Massachusetts Computer Using Educators, which is the state affiliate
of science and technology teachers (The National Science Teachers
Association [[link removed]]) for the whole
country. And that accusation was for something that had happened back
in October. They had let it go, but then they realized, wow, that was
great. Now we know this thing happened in October. Let's make that
accusation. They made it on the 19th. On the 20th, Massachusetts
superintendents pulled out of MassCUE, and MassCUE closed. The whole
organization shut down. So the ADL shut down a statewide professional
association of teachers, and the executive director was fired, the
entire board was fired, and they reopened about a month ago and have
never accounted for why they have a new board and new staff and what
role the ADL had in it. So it's pretty dangerous, I think, when
organizations like the ADL have that kind of power to change
educational infrastructure, to impose their people and their policies.
I think it's pretty darn frightening.

_Der Spekter is animated by the same spirit of Bundism that has
haunted Zionism since their twin inceptions: we cannot ensure peace
through the application of unjust violence. The only path forward is
true solidarity with the oppressed, not becoming oppressors._

_Der Spekter is editorially independent of the International Jewish
Labor Bund's leadership. Our editorial board members are Bund members
but do not hold any other leadership positions in the IJLB. All
materials published in these pages reflect the views of the author(s)
and are not official communiques of the IJLB or of its local chapters
unless explicitly stated._

* Anti-Defamation League
[[link removed]]
* zionism
[[link removed]]
* Public Education
[[link removed]]
* Rethinking Schools
[[link removed]]

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