How do we get the ADL out of schools?

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 almost exclusively to antisemitism at the expense of other marginalized communities. In doing so, the ADL has created a coercive environment 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 by labeling pro-Palestinian language and activism as "antisemitism" in its public advocacy and statistics, putting the self-proclaimed "anti-hate" organization in alignment 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 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 [also] 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 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, [or] 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 [saying] 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. 

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 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, we launched our open letter, and now we've launched all of our advocacy materials. 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 [that] 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 [that] 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, [the] 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.

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

Nora: We are following [it] 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 in Counterpunch and other publications about SB 1277 [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. I know that one of the most famous things that comes up is that they defended apartheid South Africa. 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. 

Now what's interesting recently is that the ADL is explicitly saying 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,” 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 [up] 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 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, 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 [opportunity], a teachable moment. You don't criminalize it because [then] 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.

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 — 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 allies. 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, 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 [only] 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 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’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.” 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 or the Nexus Project? 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 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. And then four or five days later, they made an accusation against MassCUE, the Massachusetts Computer Using Educators, which is the state affiliate of science and technology teachers (The National Science Teachers Association) 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.