Jul 25, 2025 minute read

The nation’s largest teachers’ union is facing mounting criticism after its newly released 2025 handbook promotes Holocaust remembrance without mentioning Jews and pushes a false narrative about the founding of Israel. The National Education Association (NEA), which represents nearly three million public school teachers and education professionals and is the largest union in America, outlines these positions in its annual guidebook that sets the organization’s policy priorities and resolutions.

The handbook, which is distributed to NEA leaders, staff, and members across the US, and was obtained by The Washington Free Beacon, encourages educators to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day by recognizing “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.” Notably absent from this description is any explicit reference to the Nazi regime’s central goal: the systematic extermination of the Jewish people, which resulted in the murder of six million Jews.

This omission comes at a time of surging antisemitism and anti-Israel activism within the nation’s public education system, including among teachers’ unions. Earlier this month, the NEA’s Representative Assembly, the union’s decision-making body, voted in favor of a resolution to boycott the Anti-Defamation League’s Holocaust education materials. Although the union’s leadership later rejected the vote, the 2025 handbook suggests the national organization is aligning with members pushing a more radical ideological agenda.

Critics say the NEA’s failure to center Jews in Holocaust remembrance is part of a broader shift within the union toward anti-Israel advocacy. The handbook includes a detailed section on “educating members and the general public about the history of the Palestinian Nakba,” using language that casts Israel’s founding in 1948 as a colonial crime.

The handbook reads, “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.” It adds that understanding the Nakba is “essential” to empathizing with Palestinian-American students and fostering critical thinking about “historical injustices and their contemporary ramifications.”

It makes no mention of the almost 1 million Jews who were expelled from Arab countries at the same time, nor does it mention that Arab countries attacked Israel directly after its founding and told the Palestinians to leave their homes so that their armies could push the farmers and Holocaust survivors who made up the fledgling Jewish state into the sea. There is also no discussion about how Arab countries refused to resettle the Palestinian refugees created by their actions.

Alongside the false and incomplete narratives, the NEA calls on educators to be trained on how to differentiate between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, a stance that has been widely rejected by mainstream Jewish organizations, including the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and the US government, which both recognize that denying Israel’s right to exist often functions as a modern form of antisemitism.

“NEA will use existing digital communication tools to educate members about the difference between anti-Zionism and antisemitism,” the handbook states. “NEA will use its existing media outlets to defend educators’ and students’ academic freedom and free speech in defense of Palestine at K-12 schools, colleges, and universities.”

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