When we think of modern-day anti-Semitism in America, the images that come to mind are often the pro-Palestinian—and, by extension, pro-Hamas—protests that erupted across college and university campuses. Quads and courtyards filled with masked demonstrators in keffiyehs chanting, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free.” Reports of Israel history classes disrupted, staff members barricaded in offices, and campus buildings defaced with broken windows and graffiti have only deepened the sense of unease.
While it is tempting to believe this surge of hostility comes primarily from foreign religions and cultures—which it often does—there is also a viper’s nest much closer to home. Few would imagine that a sinister, anti-Semitic agenda could lurk in the shadows of something as seemingly benign as teachers’ unions. Yet, a new report by the Defense of Freedom Institute suggests just that.
As I noted in a previous piece, the nation’s largest teachers’ unions have long been entangled in the misappropriation of funds and radical far-left political activism, and have contributed substantial financial support to the Democratic Party. But last month’s 48-page report by the Institute, Breaking Solidarity: How Anti-Semitic Activists Turned Teacher Unions Against Israel, also shows how unions have shifted from stalwart supporters to outspoken adversaries of Jews, embedding anti-Semitism into K–12 education, mirroring the current toxic environment in higher education.
From Friends to Foes
According to the report, Eastern European Jewish immigrants helped shape “social unionism,” expanding labor activism beyond wages to include “summer camps, banks, educational opportunities, and housing cooperatives.” American unions later connected with Israel’s labor movement, which “older U.S. labor leaders view[ed] as a nation-state created by organized labor.”
By the 1960s, Jews in America were increasingly regarded as “white,” enjoying the privileges associated with whiteness. This shift intensified tensions within the labor movement and presaged later anti-Israel sentiment. And these tensions came to a head during the 1968 Ocean Hill-Brownsville strikes, which erupted after the local school board in a predominantly black and Latino neighborhood fired 19 white teachers to make room for minority staff. The move challenged the United Federation of Teachers’ authority and pitted the union—backed by many white liberals—against the community’s push for local control and representation. As the strike unfolded, some Black Power advocates employed overtly antisemitic rhetoric, criticizing the UFT’s large Jewish membership and highlighting the number of Jewish teachers and administrators. (Read “Ocean Hill-Brownsville, 40 Years Later.”)
Defense of Freedom Institute’s report incorporates contemporary voices from the Ocean Hill-Brownsville strike days, with one protester complaining, “We got too many teachers and principals named Ginzburg and Rosenberg in Harlem.” The individual’s sentiments were reflected with action; around the same time, Jewish educators were being smeared as “exploiters” and even targeted with violent threats.“Hey, Jew boy, with that yarmulke on your head/You pale-faced Jew boy—I wish you were dead,” was a poem read on-air by a local teacher.
The report argues that anti-Israel activism on the left is inseparable from its broader hostility to Western civilization:
The question why the Left hates Israel is part and parcel of the broader question why the Left hates the West and its institutions. The simple answer to these questions is that the West (and, by extension, Israel) represents classically liberal values like tolerance; freedom of action, speech, and thought; and self-reliance. The Left associates these principles with white supremacy and settler colonialism.
The anti-Israel movement is only a microcosm of the larger radical leftist movement. It, along with groups like Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), all see themselves as “heroic resistance fighters” against the “systemic racism” of the West, according to Christopher Ruffo of the Manhattan Institute, thereby justifying violence as a means of overthrowing their perceived “oppressors.”
[RELATED: Academia Fails to Confront the Anti-Semitism Within]
National, State, and Local Teacher Union Anti-Semitism
The result is insurgent violence against Jews, whom the left ultimately views as an extension of America and the West.
Describing in detail the insidious history of anti-Semitism in twelve state, local, and national teachers unions, Breaking Solidarity unearthed a truly insidious history of outright hateful, violence-inducing rhetoric.
For example, the National Education Association (NEA), the largest teachers union in the United States, watered down the significant effect of the Holocaust on Jews in their 2025 NEA Handbook, replacing it with “Palestinian Nakba Education.”
“The Nakba, meaning ‘catastrophe’ in Arabic, refers to the forced, violent displacement and dispossession of at least 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland in 1948 during the establishment of the state of Israel.”
Worse, at the NEA’s 2025 annual convention, Jewish delegates and educators reported being asked questions like, “How do you feel about the babies dying in Gaza?” and being labeled “white supremacists.” One teacher reported how people “line[d] up, prepared, wearing keffiyehs, waving Palestine flags, wearing shirts accusing Jews of genocide—eager to speak against anything Jewish.” When one Jewish educator recounted how a terrorist burned to death an 82-year-old woman and injured others, including a Holocaust survivor, NEA members reportedly “laughed and clapped.” The vicious behavior unsurprisingly led to Jewish members suffering “panic attacks” and “silent breakdowns.”
Breaking Solidarity includes further evidence of anti-Semitism in smaller city and state-wide unions. The Oakland Education Association (OEA) allegedly “published a statement demanding ‘an end to the occupation of Palestine,’ blaming Israel’s ‘apartheid’ government for the conflict, and accusing Israel’s leaders of ‘espous[ing] genocidal rhetoric and policies against the people of Palestine.’”
When the Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) faced a noxious wave of anti-Semitism following the October 7 massacre, students and teachers were reported to have done the following:
[S]tudents chanted ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,’ and parents reported that they overheard students saying ‘Kill the Jews,’ ‘Fuck Israel,’ and ‘Kill Israel.’ A ninth grade art teacher reportedly screened pro-Hamas videos and placed anti-Israel propaganda and symbols on his classroom walls, including a fist gripping a Palestinian flag punching through a Star of David. A second-grade teacher reportedly displayed a Palestinian flag in her classroom window and posted anti-Israel messages written by students at her behest—including ‘Stop Bombing Babies’—outside the classroom of the only Jewish teacher in the school.
In response, the President of the Berkeley Federation of Teachers (BFT) referred to these actions as “valid perspectives about a global conflict.”
[RELATED: Mamdani’s Anti-IHRA Stance Will Put Jewish Students at Risk]
Present-Day Implications
The progression from national to state to local unions demonstrates how rhetoric at the top legitimizes harassment on the ground. When the NEA reframes the Holocaust and laughs at Jewish suffering, it gives smaller unions like Oakland license to label Israel a genocidal state, which then emboldens teachers and students in Berkeley to chant “Kill the Jews” in classrooms. This cascade of union-approved antagonism turns anti-Semitism from an abstract ideology into tangible hostility for Jewish educators and children.
This inevitably bleeds into larger, national conversations about free speech and violence. In the same way that Berkeley educators and students were told that their venomous persecution of Jewish teachers was a “valid perspective,” culture increasingly views certain speech, religions, and values as moral justifications for brutality.
In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Pennsylvania State Rep. Brian Smith addressed the issue in a press release: “It’s time for Democrat leaders to tone down the hateful rhetoric. Calling conservatives ‘nazis’ and saying ordinary conservative ideals are a ‘threat to democracy’ fuel violent acts like the ones we’ve experienced recently.”
“Toning down this rhetoric,” he advised, “will help lower the temperature and hopefully get us back to a place where Americans can speak their minds without the fear of violence.”
The Defense of Freedom Institute and the Federalist Society’s annual Education Law and Policy Conference fleshed out the same issue in one session entitled Federal Effort to Combat Antisemitism: Restoring Campus Civil Rights or Infringing Academic Freedom?
According to panelist Sarah Parshall Perry, Vice President of Defending Ed, “Anti-Semitism has been the canary in the coal mine that has actually allowed incidents like we saw in the state of Utah to transpire.” She maintained:
The actions of higher education institutions, their defense of Hamas’ violence, their platforming of students for justice in Palestine, their pedagogical matrix of oppressor-oppressed victim mentality and their, essentially, platforming tyranny on college campuses has really led to the common current moment that we experience right now. A full 34% of American college students believe violence is acceptable to stop speech with which they disagree, [while] 7/10 students believe that speech can be as damaging as physical violence, which may indeed … platform an opportunity or an excuse to a moral imperative for responding with violence.
Perry’s statement reflects a tangible reality faced by many Americans. The left’s demonizing of demographics such as white men, Christians—now Jews—and any others that don’t conform to their agenda often find themselves targets of radical liberals’ anti-West campaign, subsequently labeled intolerant, hateful, and inherently oppressive.
Ultimately, the Breaking Solidarity report shows how anti-Semitism in higher education is not just an external import, but part of a larger ideological movement rooted in hatred of the West and running through America’s education system: from K-12 and teachers unions to post-secondary schools. Long before the emergence of pro-Hamas activism on campuses, unions were laying the groundwork for institutional anti-Semitism. In this way, higher ed’s current anti-Semitism crisis is not merely a campus crisis, but part of a broader, long-standing radicalization of education itself.
Image: “National Education Association headquarters Washington, D.C.” by AgnosticPreachersKid on Wikimedia Commons
