As an observant Jewish professor and department chair at the City University of New York (CUNY-Kingsborough), I have lived the reality of antisemitic discrimination inside a powerful teachers’ union. That is why I stand shoulder to shoulder with the Louis D. Brandeis Center Coalition to Combat Antisemitism’s groundbreaking EEOC charge against the National Education Association (NEA).
The charge alleges that the NEA violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act by allowing antisemitism to spread in K-12 schools throughout the country. According to the complaint, the nation’s largest union has subjected Jewish members to discrimination, including limiting and denying them opportunities for leadership, mentoring, and training. The NEA is accused of creating a hostile work environment for Jews, permitting and promoting antisemitism in the public school system, and harming Jewish teachers and students.
The Brandeis Center’s filing exposes exactly the same toxic pattern my colleagues and I fought against our own union, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC-CUNY), and its New Caucus/Progressive Faculty Caucus (PFC) faction: deliberate exclusion of Jewish educators, tolerance of harassment and intimidation, and policies that erase Jewish identity while spreading anti-Zionist and antisemitic tropes.
When unions do this, they don’t just harm their Jewish members – they arm teachers (often the very same NEA discriminators) with prejudice that flows straight into America’s K-12 classrooms.
In our own case, the EEOC issued a determination of reasonable cause, finding that the PSC and its Progressive Faculty Caucus members had discriminated and retaliated against me and similarly situated observant and Zionist Jewish faculty on the basis of religion.
They denied us membership in the PFC. They scheduled critical union events – including an “anti-discrimination” forum – on Friday evening during Shabbat in order to purposefully exclude observant Jews. Union officials and delegates engaged in overt antisemitic harassment. The union went so far as to demand cessation of internal CUNY investigations into antisemitism against union-member faculty and pressured diversity officers to ignore religious discrimination complaints.
Our EEOC victory validated every one of those claims. The New York Supreme Court later denied the union defendants’ motion to dismiss our hostile work environment and retaliation claims under the relevant New York statutes. The court held that our complaint sufficiently alleged a pervasive pattern of religious discrimination that the union knew about, assisted, and failed to correct.
In denying the union’s motion to dismiss, the court referenced allegations that union leaders – many of them also full-time professors on our campus – had created and sustained this hostile environment.
Those same union delegates and officers walk into our classrooms every day. Their attitudes don’t stay behind in the (largely Marxist) union halls – they shape how they teach, what they tolerate from students, and the messages they send about who belongs in American society.
This is the precise danger the Brandeis Center is highlighting at the national level with the NEA. The EEOC charge details how the NEA’s own policies classify Jews as “White” and therefore ineligible for the racial and ethnic preferences, leadership slots, governance roles, mentorships, and training opportunities it reserves for “preferred minorities.” Jewish members are locked out of full participation in their own union.
At the 2025 Representative Assembly, Jewish delegates were physically surrounded and shouted down by anti-Israel activists. When one Jewish delegate spoke about the murder of an 82-year-old Holocaust survivor in Boulder, other delegates clapped and laughed. The Jewish Affairs Caucus was disrupted and intimidated while trying to commemorate its 50th anniversary. The NEA even removed metal detectors and cut security despite clear warnings of violence. Its handbook erased Jews as the primary victims of the Holocaust. It distributed maps to members labeling the entire territory of Israel as “Palestine.” And despite repeated complaints, the NEA did nothing.
These are not abstract union disputes. NEA members are the teachers standing in front of America’s children. When a union normalizes antisemitism, erases Jewish history, removes Israel from world maps, and punishes Jewish educators for objecting, it licenses the same behavior in schools. Jewish students learn they are outsiders. Non-Jewish students absorb the message that antisemitic harassment is acceptable political speech. The entire educational enterprise is corrupted by an exclusionary ideology dressed up as “progressive” union policy.
I know this firsthand. After the PSC-CUNY passed a viciously one-sided anti-Israel resolution endorsing BDS and labeling Israel an “apartheid state,” I resigned my membership along with hundreds of other mostly Jewish faculty. Today, thousands have joined me in leaving our union, and the PSC-CUNY is now virtually Judenrein. But that constructive ouster is despicable and not a long-term solution. I have repeatedly and publicly demanded that the union and CUNY adopt a clear definition of Zionism and antisemitism and stop forcing Jewish educators to subsidize their own discrimination.
The union’s response? More of the same hostility.
The Brandeis Center has a proven track record of forcing real change – securing settlements with Harvard, Microsoft, legal aid unions, and others that required institutions to confront antisemitism and protect Jewish identity. Its EEOC charge against the NEA is a bold and necessary next step. Unions exist to protect workers, not to become vehicles for bigotry. The NEA and its affiliates must be held accountable under Title VII just as the PSC was forced to confront its conduct in our case.
Jewish educators deserve the same rights, dignity, and opportunities as every other member. Perhaps even more importantly, America’s schoolchildren deserve classrooms free of the poisonous message that one ethnic or religious group is fair game for exclusion and demonization. The Brandeis Center’s fight against the NEA is a fight for every student and every teacher. It is long past time for teachers’ unions to stop perpetuating antisemitism and start living up to their professed ideals of equality and justice. Until they do, the classroom will remain another front in the war against the Jewish people.