The National Education Association, Antisemitism, and How Jews Navigate America’s Decline

America has declined before. Cycles of decline and revival are not unusual in American history. The US has always bounced back. Today, America is in another period of decline.

Its economy has fallen away from what historian Mark Lilla called “the Roosevelt dispensation.” Vast groups among the poor remain neglected, left to the mercies of a drug epidemic of mammoth proportions, while capital floats to the top 1%, birth rates plummet, and a shallow form of identity politics seduces huge numbers of Americans on the Left and the Right.

For Jews, history shows that societal decline carries its own set of dangers. As has happened so often in the nearly four millennia of Jewish history, a crisis of society generates bizarre enthusiasm for actions against Jews. That is the context in which we must view the decision by the assembly of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, to cut ties with the ADL. True, the resolution passed by a very narrow majority, and the decision still requires a process of confirmation by the Executive Committee and the Union’s Board of Directors. But it passed.

The radicalized NEA is problematic across a broad front of issues, alienating many. However, the attack on the ADL is in a class of its own. A mainstream American education organization voted to cut ties with a Jewish defense organization that has a well-established reputation for excellence in preparing educational materials to teach about antisemitism. The presenting issues (as a sociologist might call them) go to the content of these materials, specifically the ADL’s promotion of the widely accepted IHRA definition of antisemitism.

Such action is evidently unprecedented. My Perplexity AI reports: “There is no evidence that the National Education Association (NEA) has previously decided to cut ties with any minority defense or civil rights organization over disagreements regarding the content of educational materials. The NEA's 2025 decision to sever its relationship with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) over concerns about the ADL's educational content and its stance on Israel appears to be the first of its kind on record.”

A powerful union created an unprecedented nationwide challenge for many Jews. If your child’s public school teacher supports the measure, can you trust your child’s education in civic values to such a bigot?

Will American Jews accept this victimization? Or will they act on a grassroots level to create consequences for practitioners of antisemitism?

Who is positioned to lead such an effort? The Orthodox sector of the community is not. They are probably best equipped to limit the immediate damage of the Jewish community’s growing isolation because they are the most self-isolating, especially in education. They invest effort, expertise, and money into running institutions that function independently. For example, in NY City the UJA-Federation estimates that 95% of its Orthodox Jewish children and just 10% of Reform Jewish children attend Jewish day schools or yeshivas. That self-isolation means that they are shielded from bigoted NEA-affiliated teachers. However, it also means that they are not well-positioned to combat the challenge at a grassroots level.

Reform, Reconstructionist, and Conservative Jews are deeply invested in the institutions of American society that promote integration and social equality. Public schools, seen as instruments for learning American liberal values, have always been a component of the thinking of non-Orthodox Jewish parents when choosing how to educate their children. This makes non-Orthodox Jews and their children vulnerable to the failure of America’s educational institutions. However, it can also place them well for a counter-attack.

NEA just threw down a challenge to American Jews that can be couched in a question. Will America’s Jews get to work on the grassroots level to make bigoted teachers pay a price for voting in favor of their bigotry? Unless anti-Jewish bigotry carries costs, antisemites will be incentivized to repeat their actions, and to escalate them.

American Jews have the power to make such antisemitic behavior a painful exercise in futility. This can happen on the national political level, where, for example, Harvard is learning the hard way that allowing antisemitism to flourish can be a dangerous failure.

However, for effective change to occur, it needs to happen at the grass roots. NEA just handed America’s Jews a spectacular opportunity to organize and act in defense of their children. The synagogue organizations exist nationwide. Let them coordinate this effort. Let every synagogue organize to reach out to the community’s public school teachers, so that they may be helped to see the bigotry in the action of the agency that purports to represent them.

The bizarre, bigoted NEA decision is a direct assault on the ability of American Jews to use the social mechanisms of education to defend their children against a prejudice deeply embedded in Western Civilization.

Hopefully, Jews will fight back against this act of bigotry, and it will fail.