The title of this blog is the title of a just-published article by Jonathan S. Tobin, writing for the Jewish News Syndicate (JNS).
I am showing one segment of Mr. Tobin’s commentary below. But please understand that it is just a tiny sampling of his lengthy, but exceedingly important, analysis:
America’s teachers’ unions—the national organizations like the NEA and its rival, the American Federation of Teachers—and most local associations that represent educators have long been captured by leftist ideologues. That has put them at the forefront of partisan politics, making them among the largest donors to Democratic Party candidates, as well as liberal and leftist advocacy groups. In addition to their role as a partisan interest group, these unions have become an integral part of the culture war roiling American society as so-called progressives have sought to topple the Western canon in the U.S. education system and replace it with a new woke secular faith based on a neo-Marxist obsession with race.
The unions have become, like the mobs of pro-Hamas students, teachers and administrators on college campuses, the lynchpin of the surge in anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hatred that has spread across the country in recent years. Our attention has understandably been focused on those chanting for Jewish genocide (“From the river to the sea”) and terrorism against Jews everywhere (“Globalize the intifada”). That has led to a counter-attack from the Trump administration, which has sought to defund elite universities like Harvard and Columbia that tolerate and encourage antisemitism.
But operating largely without the sort of publicity and scrutiny that has zeroed in on the targeting of Jews in academia, teachers’ unions, whose members staff the nation’s K-12 school system, have played a key role in mainstreaming blood libels against Israel, falsely labeling Zionism as a form of racism, and denying Jewish peoplehood and history.
Why have teachers become the shock troops of the intersectional left?
Their unions are led by hard-left activists like Randi Weingarten of the AFT, and as a consequence, have done far more harm to the nation’s students than good. That was made abundantly apparent when the unions went all-out to keep schools closed during the COVID-19 pandemic long after it was clear that young people weren’t at a high risk of catching the disease and that keeping them out of the classrooms was doing them enormous harm.
But the context is a broader conflict about how Americans should think about their country and Western civilization. Most teachers—and their unions—are squarely in the progressive camp that has embraced the left-wing critique of the West. As a consequence, they have been indoctrinating a generation of young Americans to buy into the toxic myths of critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism in which the United States is wrongly depicted as an irredeemably racist nation. These divisive doctrines label Jews and Israelis as “white” oppressors always in the wrong, and Palestinians as downtrodden “people of color,” who are in the right no matter what they do.
That’s a completely false understanding of the century-old war to oppose the Jewish presence in the land of Israel, which has nothing to do with race. Yet it has led to their believing that Israelis—the victims of the horrendous terrorism of Oct. 7, 2023, and a war waged against their existence by Iran and its Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthi terrorist proxies—are the villains of the Middle East conflict. And that inevitably means that the Palestinian Arabs—the perpetrators of the worst mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, led by groups bent on genocide—are the good guys.
That’s the context for the NEA’s break with the ADL.
That these two groups should be at odds with each other is not so much ironic as it is a sign of the radicalization of the unions.
Does that grab your attention? I hope so. But remember again that it is just a small sample; there is much, much more.
I don’t necessarily agree with everything Jonathan S. Tobin says. I think there are areas where he over-generalizes. But the key points and overall conclusions he is drawing? They are all too real.
Here, again is the link to Mr. Tobin’s full article. Please read every word. It will give you greater understanderstanding of what is going on in so many of our public schools. That information, and the umbilical connection between these unions and today’s Democrat Party – which, to my knowledge, has yet to say a negative word about the unions’ anti-Semitic lurch – will, I certainly hope, horrify and anger you.
One last point: still not one word about this out of Senate Minority Leader/self-professed opponent of anti-Semitism, Chuck Schumer.
Why is that, Chuck?
