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On 7.8.2025, the National Education Association (NEA) voted to cut ties with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and not accept the ADL’s definition of antisemitism. This was a regretful decision that undermines the many efforts ADL undertakes to combat any form of racism and discrimination generally and antisemitism particularly, and puts many, if not most Jews around the country on high alert as it comes in the midst of a palpable and significant rise in antisemitic acts around the country following the October 7th attacks and the war that followed.

While being Jewish, I find the NEA decision deeply troubling and upsetting, it was not nearly as upsetting to me as an Instagram post shared and liked by a council member and mayoral candidate, Willie Burnley, following the NEA vote. In this post, a statement was made by a delegate of the NEA: “Allowing the ADL to determine what constitutes antisemitism would be like allowing the fossil fuel industry to determine what constitutes climate change”. This statement, and the highlighting of it, are deeply troubling for several reasons. First and foremost, the statement itself is so overtly antisemitic that it could fit well in the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”. Just to spell it out, whether or not you agree with the ADL or its definition of antisemitism, comparing a Jewish organization focused on the prevention of bigotry against Jews to an industry that is synonymous with corruption, greed, and “sucking the blood of the planet and destroying it” is a classic antisemitic trope. In all of history, Jews have been blamed for doing the worst imaginable things, which in our day and age (and in particular political circles) it’s climate change. That some delegate from the largest teachers’ union in the country wrote it, and a mayoral candidate repeated it, teaches me that antisemitism no longer carries social penalties. On the contrary, it is celebrated and paraded. To add injury to insult, the celebration of a decision that many, if not most, Jews in our community find concerning also suggests that Councilmember Burnley does not value our feelings or our safety. Ironically, this just highlights the need for the ADL at this moment in time.

The second reason this statement is troubling is the selection of “good” and “bad” Jews. This is not unlike the strategy taken by the political right, saying that Jews who don’t support a right-wing ideology are “bad Jews” and Stephen Miller types are “good Jews”. The Left has taken a similar strategy – if you support the state of Israel’s right to exist and don’t accept the “white settler colonialism” tenets, you’re pegged as a “bad Jew”. The ADL, now being “bad Jews” for saying that calls for the eradication of the Jewish state are antisemitic (but not criticisms of Israeli policy) cannot be permitted to say what antisemitism is. We will now select, no doubt, “good Jews” who agree with our philosophy and will tell all other Jews what they should or shouldn’t feel.

Jews are, therefore, stripped of our ability to regulate discrimination against us. Like a man “mansplaining” to a woman what misogyny is or isn’t, the NEA is “Jewsplaining” antisemitism to us, to the cheering calls of some Somerville city officials. But we don’t need to be “Jewsplained”, we don’t need the NEA (or the ADL for that matter) to tell us what antisemitism is, it is imprinted in our DNA. For me, it was branded on my soul in middle school by a kid that yelled at me “you f$%^ing Jew!”, by the uber driver that explained to me that the problem in the US is “the Rothschilds”, by the person that shouted at my 10-year-old son from a moving car “f$%^ Israel” and by thousands of years in which my people have been blamed for all worst offenses. It is imprinted on me in the same way I imagine racism is imprinted on African Americans by hundreds of years of enslavement, torture, and mistreatment. I would never be so bold as to tell an African American what racism is, or a woman what misogyny is, and no one needs to tell me what antisemitism is and who is allowed or not to set the criteria. It is the NEA and people who celebrate antisemitic statements that need the ADL to warn them that their statements might be perceived as antisemitic.

We need the ADL, now more than ever.

Michael T
Somerville Resident