National Education Association (NEA) President Becky Pringle speaks during a “May Day” rally in Washington, DC on May 1, 2026. Several protests took place in the city centering on progressive causes including workers’ rights, immigrant rights, and climate change. Photo by Bryan Dozier via Reuters Connect

The largest teachers union in the US has been accused of proliferating antisemitism across its interstate network of chapters, offices, and K-12 schools in a new disturbing civil rights complaint filed with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) on Monday.

The National Education Association (NEA) blocks Jews from promotions, mentorship opportunities, and participation in social justice initiatives, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law alleges in the action. The advocacy group further argues that antisemitic discrimination at the NEA is more than an invisible, bureaucratic force which disappears Jews from prominent roles. According to the Brandeis Center, anti-Zionist NEA officials want to be seen and recognized as a legitimate force in the union, and to that end have led in-person mobs against Jewish delegates attending union conferences; “physically intimidated” them; and even once took the step of excising Jews from its guidance on teaching students about the Holocaust.

During an annual conference held in 2025, the NEA ordered security to remove metal detectors from the entrance amid threats against the lives of Jewish delegates, according to the complaint. In many cases, the union allegedly ignores complaints of antisemitism which reach high-level officials through reporting channels the NEA itself composed. Virtually no one accused of having abused Jewish NEA members has been punished, let alone subject to a formal investigation, the Brandeis Center says.

The complaint adds that the NEA in 2025 also took the widely derided step of proclaiming that Holocaust commemoration must decentralize Hitler’s program to exterminate European Jews and “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.”

Historically, such a move has been taken to minimize Jewish suffering and the role that antisemitism played in Nazi ideology and World War II.

“The NEA’s conduct is both completely illegal and morally unjustifiable. All educators, regardless of their ethnicity, deserve a safe workplace and support from the people whose job it is to protect them. In this case, the hostile, antisemitic environment propagated by the NEA is not confined to the union; it touches every school and every classroom in which an NEA member works,” Brandeis Center chairman and founder Kenneth Marcus said in a statement. “This is exactly the type of discrimination against which Title VII was designed to protect.”

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin in any program or activity receiving federal funding.

“Fighting to protect our NEA members from bigotry, we’re also fighting to protect our children from an environment that allows discrimination and antisemitic tropes,” Marcus added. “Unions are supposed to protect their members’ rights. The NEA is actually violating them.”

What the union promotes within its ranks inexorably appears in K-12 classrooms, the Brandeis Center says, pointing to a surge in antisemitic incidents in K-12 schools, a slew of which have been brought before civil courts and federal agencies. Just this month, another Jewish advocacy group, The Deborah Project, sued the San Leandro Unified School District (SLUSD) in California for standing down while a Jewish high school student was abused at its “Social Justice Academy” program. In another case, a teacher filmed her students saying that “the Jews” are “the people who took over, basically just stole the Palestinians’ land.”

Worker’s’ advocacy groups maintain that unions have played a role in promoting the “new antisemitism” which masks its antisemitic viewpoints with appeals to anti-Zionism, human rights, and other liberal values to squeeze anti-Jewish hatred through the Overton window.

In New York City, the federal government is investigating reports that members of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) are procuring students for membership in anti-Zionist study groups teaching that Israelis are “genocidal white supremacists” and that Hamas terrorists are “martyrs.” The initiative there is funded by a nonprofit titled “Rethinking Schools,” which itself has been a recipient of exorbitant financial gifts from the NEA.

“The historical record shows that, whatever their shortcomings, previous generations of teacher-union leaders stood up to antisemitism in K-12 schools on behalf of their Jewish members and promoted strong US support for Israel in the face of existential attacks on that country,” union antisemitism expert Paul Zimmerman wrote in a damning report on the subject published in September. “Now, antisemitic activists grossly dishonor that legacy by weaponizing teacher unions to spread antisemitism, intimidate Jewish teachers, and recast the classroom as a battlefield against the West.”

Meanwhile, students at Columbia University recently escalated their fight against a graduate workers union dominated by anti-Israel advocates by filing a federal complaint with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

The students allege that the bosses who run Student Workers of Columbia (SWC), an affiliate of United Auto Workers (UAW), devote more energy and resources to pursuing “radical policy proposals” than improving occupational conditions. In collective bargaining negotiations, it allegedly pressures the university to adopt the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel and to enact other measures, such as ending its partnership with the New York City Police Department (NYPD) and closing a dual-degree program with Tel Aviv University.

“All of this adds up to a union that is out of control, and I note that they don’t have an agenda against the mullahs in Iran, against the dictator who runs Turkey, against the Chinese communists who oppress their citizens or the North Koreans. But they have an agenda against Israel, the one democracy in the Middle East,” Glenn Taubman, staff attorney for the National Right to Work Foundation (NRTW), told The Algemeiner during an interview.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.