When the National Education Association’s members voted to cut ties with the Anti-Defamation League and refuse to promote its guidance on Holocaust education or anti-Semitism in schools, the union’s board of directors still had the power to block the move. And they did. But that didn’t matter much, because the vote itself was an indication of the choices individual teachers will likely make in the classroom in future school years.
And indeed, the release of the nation’s largest teachers union’s 2025 handbook, a set of guiding priorities and governance documents, reinforces this point.
In a list of new business items that were adopted at the 2024 representative assembly is this:
“NEA shall promote the celebration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27 annually on its website and through other appropriate media to recognize the more than 12 million victims of the Holocaust from different faiths, ethnicities, races, political beliefs, genders, and gender identification, abilities/disabilities, and other targeted characteristics.”
So yes, the teachers union plans to “All Lives Matter” the Holocaust.
The Holocaust, of course, was driven by anti-Semitism specifically, though obviously non-Jews were killed as well. Jews were the target of actual ethnic extermination—that is, what makes the Holocaust “the Holocaust” was the Nazis’ genocidal aims regarding the Jews. Top Nazi and state officials didn’t organize the Wannsee Conference to coordinate the “Final Solution” to the “gender identification question” or the “disabled question.” Everything that happened in the Holocaust happened because of the German plan to institute “the Final Solution to the Jewish question.”
Yet the word “Jews” is noticeably absent from the NEA’s bullet point. This is deliberate: the NEA’s members don’t want to secretly slip Holocaust revisionism into lesson plans and quietly appropriate Jewish suffering for their own demented political purposes. They want their intentions to be made clear and public from the start. This is a fight they want to have, because it will force wavering members to announce and to demonstrate their loyalty to the union’s mission of miseducating America’s children.
And why might that be? Why would the NEA “want” the Holocaust for themselves, so to speak?
Well, under the heading “New Business Referred to the Board” we have a couple items that might answer that question.
One of these items is called “Palestine Nakba Education.” The guide claims that “[e]ducating about the Nakba is essential for understanding the Palestinian diaspora narrative and experience, including the ongoing trauma of our Palestinian American students today,” however, the NEA clearly wants to go all-in on the revisionism:
“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.”
In fact, the Nakba was coined by Arab intellectuals to refer to the failure of the combined Arab armies to destroy the nascent Jewish state. In other words, Nakba literally is the mourning of a failed ethnic cleansing of the Jewish people three years after the liberation of Auschwitz.
Additionally, 750,000 Arabs in Palestine were not victims of “forced, violent displacement and dispossession.” Many of those who fled were forced to do so at gun point, no doubt. But many fled because the Arab leaders told them to get out of the way while the Jews were routed, and many others fled because of debunked stories of Zionist atrocities that were spread by Arab leaders in an attempt to rile up the Arab street but which often had the opposite effect.
No doubt those displaced experienced a catastrophe, and usually that catastrophe was at the hands of others. The catastrophe was real, but it wasn’t what “Nakba” was coined to describe, and it isn’t what is described by the NEA either.
Finally, the handbook has an item explaining that “NEA will use existing digital communication tools to educate members about the difference between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.”
Such a program will no doubt go well with the Holocaust revisionism and delegitimizing of Israel planned by the NEA.
“Teaching anti-Semitism” used to be a phrase one used to refer to teaching about anti-Semitism. The NEA clearly means it to be taken literally.
