In three weeks the New Jersey Education Association will begin its two-day annual convention which will feature a session called “Teaching Palestine” intended to “uplift Palestinian voices, challenge oppression and antisemitism, and foster justice-focused, inclusive curriculum in alignment with NJEA Consortium values.”

That would be fine except NJEA and its mothership, National Education Association (NEA), funded this through a partnership with two groups, Rethinking Schools and the Zinn Education Project. As delineated by K12 Extremism Tracker, teachers will be taught to tell students the founding of Israel was a “nightmare that followed the immigration of Jewish refugees to Palestine.” Sample lessons include  “simulat[ing] the apartheid system in Israel,” “understanding the frustrations that led to Oct. 7,” and explaining “the leaders of the United States and Israel are committing a genocide — in public.”*

Last week NEA sent its 3 million members a map that erased Israel and renamed the whole area, from the river to the sea, Palestine.

On top of the news of the Teaching Palestine feature at the convention and NEA’s erasure of the Jewish homeland, we just found out NJEA’s magazine editor  publicly argues “Israel killed many of its citizens with tanks and incendiary missiles, then called them victims of Hamas,“ “[Egyptian President] Sisi is filthier than the Jews,” Zionism is worse than Nazism, and Hamas is a “resistance movement” filled with “martyrs.” 

(Reps. Josh Gottheimer and  Mikie Sherrill have asked NJEA to fire the editor. NJEA says it is  “addressing it through our established internal processes.”)

I know it’s hip to hate on Jews these days, more so than ever in my lifetime. (As the Irish statesman Conor Cruise O’Brien once remarked, “antisemitism is a light sleeper.”) And, yes, I understand the niceties of the distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism but that line is feeling mighty thin these days. My granddaughter’s synagogue toddler class hired security guards on October 7th to protect two-year-olds and their teachers. Students at this NJ high school plan to dress up for Halloween as Holocaust victims. The presumptive next mayor of NYC didn’t condemn the phrase “globalize the Intifada” until this past July. The far-left frame of oppressor/oppressed insists Jews — 0.2% of the world’s population! — are privileged honkies while the far-right loves Hitler and muses on Jewish space lasers controlling the weather. 

(At least they agree on something; unity is where you find it.)

As NJEA leaders crow about their upcoming convention (NJ is one of only three states in the country that shuts down schools for two days so a few teachers can party in Atlantic City) and how NJ has the “best schools in the nation,” they might want to lighten up on the delusional talking points and, instead, examine why, according to the most accurate assessments, only 44% of NJ fourth-graders are proficient in reading and 37% of eighth-graders are proficient in math? Why don’t they think about how, when achievement is demographically-adjusted, NJ actually ranks 12th among US school systems? Why don’t they lobby for incorporating some of the teaching and learning strategies that have elevated Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee schools to the top of the heap, leaving Northern states in the dust?

Why don’t they expend their efforts on what our children and their teachers actually need?

A word to the wise, NJEA: when you’re in a hole, stop digging.

*To his credit, Michael Gottesman of the NJEA-affiliated New Jersey Public Education Coalition, asked NJEA to cancel the Teaching Palestine session. “Everyone needs to be reminded that people of the Jewish faith are also a marginalized community representing .2% of the world population and just 2.4 % of the United States population,” he wrote in an email. “Yet of all religiously motivated hate crimes reported to the FBI, 69% to 70% were anti-Jewish…The NJEA should remove “Teaching Palestine” and any Zinn Education Project materials from its convention and professional offerings. Our classrooms and union spaces must remain places of learning, inquiry, and respect for diverse perspectives—not political indoctrination.” (Emphases his own.)