One Month Later,
the Massachusetts Teachers Association's (MTA) Anti-Israel, Anti-Jewish Resources Remain.

On February 10, 2025, the President of the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA), Max Page, appeared before the Massachusetts Special Commission on Combatting Antisemitism. The purpose was to address concerns about recently released “curriculum resources.” The MTA prepared these to support “learning about the history and current events in Israel and Occupied Palestine, for MTA members to use with each other and their students.”1 

Over the course of nearly 2 hours of testimony, Page was repeatedly confronted with examples from the MTA’s “curriculum resources,” which evoked language and images that were violent, defamatory, and antisemitic. They included a Star of David made of dollar bills, a workbook that describes Zionists as “bullies” who “stole [land] by force and hurt many people,” and a poster depicting a person wearing a keffiyeh and carrying an assault weapon beside the words, “What was taken by force can only be returned by force,” to name just a few.2

Page argued that he didn’t always agree with all the materials. Nonetheless, one would have anticipated that the leader of New England’s largest labor union would have condemned the troubling words and images presented on the hearing screen.

Short of that, he might have provided assurances that the posters did not reflect the views and goals of his 117,000-member organization or simply offered to investigate the matter. But Page did none of these things. Instead, he explained that his union is a democracy and that the “curriculum resources” reflected the will of the union’s elected leadership.3

A review of the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) leadership’s recent actions suggests that Page accurately depicted the role of the union’s Board of Directors. There is a growing body of evidence that MTA leadership has aligned itself with proponents of radical educational reform, who propose to “liberate” students and educational processes from what they conceive to be pervasive white supremacist oppression. Solidarity with pro-Palestinian activists and opposition to their perceived enemies has become an important component of the MTA leadership’s commitment to this “anti-racist” ideology. The MTA’s curriculum resources appear to be an outgrowth of these beliefs. 

In fact, two days before the hearing before the Special Commission on Combatting Antisemitism, the MTA’s Board of Directors had a meeting at which they heard from Jewish MTA teachers who had formed a group called Massachusetts Educators Against Antisemitism (MEAA). These guest speakers reportedly showed board members some of the same examples from the MTA’s curriculum resources that would be displayed at the commission hearing. The MTA board then considered a resolution to remove the disturbing curriculum resources from its website. It voted overwhelmingly to keep all of them. 

Only after more than a week of punishing viral media reports that attracted nationwide interest did the MTA finally shift its approach. In a statement, short on self-reflection and long on trying to explain away its endorsement of the challenged materials, the MTA offered that “we will remove any materials that do not further the cause of promoting understanding.” It is a statement that allows the MTA’s leadership ample leeway in how they go about addressing widespread public concern. They will likely need it, given the powerful ideological commitments that appear to have inspired the development of the MTA’s controversial antisemitic curriculum resources.

The MTA’s curriculum resources were developed as a result of a December 9, 2023, resolution, adopted by its Board of Directors.4 It called for the development of “a framework for discussing and set of curriculum resources for learning about the history and current events in Israel and Occupied Palestine, for MTA members to use with each other and their students.” The job was assigned to its Division of Training and Professional Learning, led by Ricardo Rosa.5 Two days after Hamas’ October 7, 2023, massacre of 1,200 Israelis and visiting foreigners, Rosa posted on Instagram an image of Palestinian women brandishing slingshots and waving Palestinian flags under the banner “Free Palestine.” 

A cursory review of his social media6 showed that this post reflected his strongly held views about the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis. It also prompted some MTA members to question his suitability for an initiative that would call for nuance and an interest in balance.7

The Massachusetts Teachers Association’s pattern of conduct over the ensuing 14 months, however, has demonstrated that Rosa’s private views appear to have been in alignment with the MTA’s institutional commitments. Its leaders were not interested in supplying union members with nuance or diverse points of view to support learning about a complex, longstanding conflict. Instead, the tilt of the MTA “curriculum resources” was just one piece of a dogmatic, ideologically motivated set of actions, the most likely goal of which has been to influence MTA membership, who teach in K-12 classrooms across Massachusetts. 

The MTA has expressed its political commitments in diverse ways. In the winter of 2023-24, the MTA adopted a resolution that accused Israel of genocide while tabling another that condemned Hamas for the October 7 massacre of Israeli civilians.8 Then in March 2024, the MTA sponsored a webinar “to explain the settler colonial structure of Zionism, of Israel.”9 Prior to the program, attendees received a survey that asked whether they “felt supported by my administration in teaching about Palestine.” (An analogous question was not asked about Israel.)10 One panelist denounced Zionism, calling it a “multi-million-dollar, Israeli state-funded propaganda machine,” while also contending that “claims about antisemitism are lies” and “cover for Israeli crimes.”11 Another speaker erased nearly 3,000 years of Jewish belief, yearning, and ritual practice by alleging that Zionism is settler colonialism and is distinct from Judaism.12

Subsequently, the MTA Board of Directors adopted a resolution that attacked the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism (IHRA Working Definition).13 The IHRA Working Definition is a simple educational device that helps people understand what may be antisemitic. Nonetheless, the MTA alleged, without evidence, that it is part of a conspiracy “to manufacture hysteria and fear in order to shut down teaching and learning about Israel/Palestine, as they have done with education about racial and social justice.” In fact, the IHRA Working Definition states clearly that “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.” The IHRA Working Definition has been endorsed or adopted by more than 45 countries, many of which have been critical of Israel, and by more than half of the states in the U.S.14 The hysteria whipped up by the MTA’s board, however, is indicative of its commitment to demonizing Israel and its supporters, and of its refusal to even consider the possibility that there may be instances where a critique of Israel strayed into antisemitic invective or action. 

The intensity and consistency of the MTA’s actions prompted a small group of Jewish MTA members to form the Massachusetts Educators Against Antisemitism (MEAA), a group which has been steadily growing over the past year. MEAA reached out to MTA leaders on multiple occasions to ask that they reconsider their decision to issue curriculum resources; that the intended new curriculum resources be vetted by outside experts; that MTA President Max Page address Jewish members’ safety concerns following instances of unchecked intimidation; and to warn that the union was becoming an increasingly toxic environment for some of its members. The MEAA members report that their appeals were repeatedly rebuffed and often received no response at all.15

It is in the context of these actions and others that the MTA issued its now notorious eighty-nine (89) “curriculum resources.” They include books, articles, websites, films and documentaries, posters, charts, and even a virtual tour of a museum. More than 60 of these “curriculum resources” present Israel as an illegitimate state and/or assign Israel full culpability for the conflicts with its neighbors. Many of the articles cast Israel as a settler colonial state. Others attack Zionism, promote the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, or condemn Israel for its actions in the current struggle with Hamas. Most accuse Israel of genocide, ethnic cleaning, and/or apartheid. 

Sources for these articles include well-known, politically charged websites, such as the Zinn Education Project,16 Rethinking Schools,17 and the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights.18 But there are also less well-known contributors, such as Visualizing Palestine,19 Teaching While Muslim,20 the Teach Palestine project,21 and Artists Against Apartheid,22 which offers hundreds of pro-Palestine, anti-Israel posters that can be easily downloaded.23

The curriculum resources also include 18 films and documentaries. None cast Israel in a favorable light or attempt to tell “Israel’s side.”24 Nearly all support the Palestinian struggle against Israel, often by denying Israel’s legitimacy and promoting virulently anti-Israel narratives. It also includes six books, of which five come from pro-Palestine intellectuals, such as Norman Finkelstein, who responded to the events of October 7, 2023, by saying, “I, for one, will never begrudge—on the contrary, it warms every fiber of my soul—the scenes of Gaza’s smiling children as their arrogant Jewish supremacist oppressors have, finally, been humbled.”25 In addition, it contains four books and publications from or about Edward Said,26 whose ideas have become central to the way that the theory of settler colonialism is applied to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

With two minor exceptions,27 the only contributions from Jewish and Israeli sources that address the current conflict come from those who are aggressively critical of Israel. The MTA curriculum resources are bereft of resources that might provide other points of view. You will not find articles from well-known analysts who explain Israel’s case in Israeli and American media, such as Yossi Klein Halevi, Khalid Abu Toameh, Daniel Gordis, Ilan Troen, Michael Oren, Noa Tishby, Haviv Rettig Gur, Einat Wilf, Dennis Ross, or scores of others. You will also not find mention of an array of Jewish organizations, many of them Massachusetts-based, with extensive experience and knowledge of the region’s history and the conflicts that consume it. You will find little or no mention of October 7, 2023, the thousands of missiles fired at Israel for years, Hamas’ repeatedly professed commitment to the violent destruction of Israel, the five times that Palestinian leadership spurned proposals for a two-state solution, and a wide array of information that would disrupt the MTA’s preferred political narrative.

The MTA’s decision to promote a single point of view is more than a transparent attempt to influence its members. It is an indication that the MTA has been using its considerable political muscle to influence what its members bring to their students on an issue of intense political interest. This makes it especially important that the ideas shaping the MTA’s political choices are brought to light and clearly understood. To learn more, see AJC New England’s December 12, 2024, report, Politicizing K-12 Classrooms in Massachusetts: Ideology, Prejudice, & the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA). 

The MTA’s views on Israel and Palestine are not random or just a response to current events. They reflect ideas and ideological constructions that are deeply embedded in programs, resolutions, and literature that the MTA regularly promotes to its members. Many of these ideas are advanced in the name of racial justice or anti-racism. 

The quest to overcome racism and our nation’s legacy of racial persecution remains one of our most urgent challenges. This said, there are different views as to how we can achieve this. Most still agree that a just and welcoming society requires removing legal and cultural barriers to full integration. In education, many also agree that it is important for students to learn about the contributions of people from marginalized communities.28 This would include learning about some of our nation’s darkest chapters, such as slavery and the destruction of Indigenous American communities, and how these events inform today’s world.

Others contend, however, that such lessons are insufficient. They argue that we live in a capitalist society that is inherently structured to support white supremacy and sustain the oppression of people of color. They urge the adoption of liberatory pedagogies, which they argue will “decolonize” schools, free them from Eurocentric norms and ideas that contribute to the oppression of marginalized people, and “liberate” students so they can resist the forces of white supremacy.29 (Anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and sometimes anti-Jewish content, are commonly a feature of these pedagogies, as will be explained.)

The MTA is not an academic institution that promotes its own educational philosophy. However, its members are nearly all educators, and it provides them with extensive resources and information pertaining to their role as educators. This includes programs, webinars, articles, films, lesson plans, and more. 

A review of available information supports the view that the MTA leans toward the language and ideas arising from radical liberatory pedagogies that prioritize the liberation of schools and students from what they conceive to be white supremacy and the oppressor power structures that sustain it. This was evident on January 29, 2025, when the MTA announced the establishment of a new journal called “Revolutionizing Education: A Journal of Policy and Practice.” 

According to its website, the new journal “is dedicated to challenging entrenched inequities within education. The journal amplifies voices often marginalized in mainstream discourse, advocating for transformative practices that dismantle power hierarchies. We prioritize rigorous critiques of existing educational structures, offering innovative theoretical frameworks and empirical research that envision education as a tool for liberation rather than the reproduction of inequality.”30

The MTA website provides additional evidence with which to discern the MTA’s political and pedagogical orientation. It offers an extensive array of resources that have been housed under titles like “anti-oppression” and “transformative pathways.”31 It includes a section called “MTA Reads,” where one can find recommendations for Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to be an Antiracist” and Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility.”32 And, one can also find articles, lesson plans and films that explain, for example, white supremacy, the meaning of white privilege, concepts of identity, identity mapping, why textbooks perpetuate white supremacy, how to escape the social norms one is born into to become an agent for change, and why Jews need to acknowledge their privilege.33

The MTA website also includes links to six “Racial Justice Organizations,” which all appear to align with the MTA’s views about racial justice and white supremacy.34 Three of them (Rethinking Schools, Teaching for Change, and the Zinn Education Project) treat the Palestine-Israel conflict as if it is an organic component of the struggle for racial justice. The Zinn Education Project, for example, has a section on its website labeled “Teaching Materials” and the first thing the visitor will see is an article entitled “Teaching Palestine-Israel from the Perspective of Civil Rights and Black Power.”35 It is then followed by a series of articles that discuss civil rights and racial justice, but also articles on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, from a decidedly pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel perspective.

The tie between the quest for racial justice and pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel activism within the MTA has been evident in other ways. The MTA hosts an Anti-Racism Task Force that is “charged with creating spaces for members to discuss and strategize around anti-racism…and developing anti-racism strategies for our locals, schools and communities.”36 Its purview extended to a webinar addressing “anti-Palestinian racism” held on March 21, 2024. The program characterized Israel as a settler colonial state engaged in war crimes that it covers up with false claims of antisemitism.37 (Additional details from this webinar are provided earlier in the report.)

This content attests to the fact that the MTA’s one-sided, ideologically informed views on the conflict between Israel and Palestine did not suddenly emerge with the publication of its notorious “curriculum resources.” They have been very much a part of the ideological perspective that appears to be embedded in the thinking of MTA leadership long before the February 10, 2025, hearing. For the MTA, solidarity with Palestine has been an essential component of its struggle to fight racism in America.

For many people, it may not be obvious why the urgent fight against racism in the United States might be connected to a longstanding conflict happening 5,000 miles away that is guided by competing claims for land. Understanding how some activists link the two issues turns on the concept of settler colonialism, which was featured in many of the materials provided in the MTA’s curriculum resources.38 Over the last several decades, this theoretical model has been assimilated into a wide range of academic disciplines and become a growing influence on public discourse.39 It has also become central to increasingly popular educational models that seek to “decolonize” schools and classrooms by introducing “liberatory” pedagogies that help students resist the oppressions of their white supremacist society.40

Settler colonialism studies the destruction of Indigenous peoples and cultures by expansionist European societies that eradicated or substantially reduced existing populations in the process of laying claim to their land.41 In the last decade, proponents of Palestinian nationalism have seized upon this theory to argue that Israel, like the United States, Canada, and Australia, is a settler colonial state.42 This idea has caught fire, especially in some political circles that have made the Israeli-Palestinian conflict the focal point of a campaign to undo harm brought about by Western colonialism.43

What makes the settler colonial narrative compelling is that it gives cultural and political expression to historic injustices that have shaped the histories of many people of color in America and others whose ancestors were confronted with the excesses of colonialism elsewhere. Many educators have embraced pedagogies that see ongoing racial injustice as a perpetuation of the colonization of people of color and believe that, in order to succeed, education must focus on decolonization of the classrooms and the students themselves.44

Proponents of Palestinian nationalism have seized upon the settler colonial paradigm and reframed the way they present the conflict with Israel. They now argue that, like people of color in the United States, Palestinians are also victims of settler colonialism. To that end, they argue that their conflict with Israel “is not complicated, it is simple”45 and reduce a complex history to a set of blunt conclusions that do not depend upon knowledge of a long and tragic conflict. 

If people can be persuaded that Israel is a settler colonial state, then it is also presumed that Israel is guilty of heinous crimes associated with settler colonialism—genocide, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and more.46 The result is a sanitized and distorted narrative with predetermined villains and victims. This gross caricature is evident in many of the MTA’s recent initiatives, none of which have displayed interest in considering the Palestinian-Israeli conflict’s complex history, the Jewish people’s historical and emotional attachment to the land of Israel, or a multitude of historical, cultural, and religious considerations that shape this conflict. Instead, Israel (together with the United States) has become the avatar of the evils of settler colonialism. And solidarity with Palestine has become an essential feature of the quest for racial justice. 

It is this ideological perspective that not only appears to inform the MTA’s recent curriculum resources but has been embedded in ideas that the MTA has been communicating to its members well before these resources became publicly known. They are ideas that made it possible for the MTA’s leadership to condemn Israel but made it impossible for them to acknowledge that Hamas, a recognized terrorist group, massacred more than 1,200 civilians in Israel. They are ideas that allow the MTA to mobilize its members to fight racial injustice but then promote uninformed conspiracy theories about a simple educational tool designed to help people recognize what may be antisemitic. Finally, they are ideas that made it impossible for the President of the MTA, Max Page, to admit what was obvious to everyone else. A Jewish Star made out of dollar bills is an antisemitic trope similar to those that have been used to inspire hatred of Jews for centuries. 

Only sustained public pressure brought the MTA to say that they would review their curriculum resources. The question now is whether the leaders of the MTA will introduce merely cosmetic changes that allow festering ideological extremism to go unexamined, or whether the MTA will engage in open and honest self-reflection to determine how the MTA became a haven for antisemitic ideas and ideologies.

For more than a year, AJC New England has worked with MEAA and other Jewish organizations to expose the MTA’s efforts to demonize Israel and its supporters. The concerns raised have gone largely unheeded by MTA leaders, even after: repeated efforts by MEAA members to share them after AJC New England issued its comprehensive report exposing the MTA’s excesses; after nearly 2,000 Massachusetts residents wrote a letter to the MTA President urging the removal of their disturbing, deceptive, and overwhelmingly one-sided curriculum resources;47 and even after MEAA teachers appeared before the MTA Board and showed them some of the blatantly antisemitic images that were later presented at the State House hearing on February 10. The question now is whether the MTA will continue its dissembling, or whether it will engage in a sincere effort to educate, rather than indoctrinate.