In an amazing display of anti-Semitism, the National Education Association (NEA), the largest teachers’ union in America, just rewrote history in its 2025 handbook. The NEA is closely aligned with the Democratic Party, which relies heavily on Jewish donors and voters as a key part of its political coalition.
In its 2025 Handbook, the NEA says the Holocaust took the lives of “12 million victims from different faiths” and completely fails to mention Jews despite the fact that at least half of those victims were Jewish.
The NEA claims Israel was founded through “forced, violent displacement” despite the fact that any accurate historical review would completely repudiate that claim.
The NEA handbook makes no mention of 850,000 Jews expelled from Arab lands. In fact, the NEA doesn’t just ignore Jewish suffering tied to the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel; they rewrite the Jewish people as the villains.
The handbook is a 427-page document that focuses on NEA’s organizational structure, policies, resolutions, and business items, with limited historical context. But those references with respect to the Holocaust and the Jewish people are grossly and intentionally inaccurate.
In New Business Item 83 (page 355 in the NEA 2025 handbook), the NEA promotes International Holocaust Remembrance Day and states: “NEA shall promote the celebration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27 annually on its website and through other appropriate media to 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.”
The NEA reference to “more than 12 million victims” emphasizes diversity (including “different faiths”) without explicitly mentioning Jews or the attempted extermination of the Jewish people as the central aspect of the Holocaust. Does the NEA seriously believe the Nazi’s Final Solution was really focused on Southern Baptists and perhaps the Amish rather than Jews
Historically, the Holocaust resulted in about 6 million Jewish deaths (the primary target of Nazi genocide) out of an estimated 11-17 million total victims, including Roma, disabled people, political dissidents, and others. The handbook’s “more than 12 million” figure roughly fits within broader victim estimates, but the omission of Jews in the main descriptive item (NBI 83) underlines the NEA’s attempt to erase the fact that Jews were clearly the primary target of the Nazi Holocaust.
The NEA handbook explicitly describes the establishment of Israel using terms of “forced violent displacement” in the context of educating about the Palestinian perspective towards Israel. In New Business Item 6 (page 356), the handbook states: “NEA will use existing digital communication tools to educate members and the general public about the history of the Palestinian Nakba. 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. Educating about the Nakba is essential for understanding the Palestinian diaspora narrative and experience, including the ongoing trauma of our Palestinian American students today.”
This directly attributes “forced, violent displacement” to Israel’s founding in 1948, focusing on the displacement of at least 750,000 Palestinians (a figure consistent with historical estimates of the Nakba).
The NEA frames this as an educational initiative to foster empathy and critical thinking, without broader discussion of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War or other factors (e.g., Arab states’ invasions or voluntary evacuations cited in some accounts). No counterbalancing perspectives on Israel’s founding are mentioned in the handbook.
The handbook contains no references to the expulsion or flight of approximately 850,000 Jews from Arab in the time period around 1948. The NEA does not address this historical event at all, which involved approximately 800,000-900,000 Jews leaving or being forced out of countries like Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, and Syria between 1948 and the 1970s, often amid pogroms and property confiscations.
This omission, combined with the explicit mention of Palestinian displacement in NBI 6, is clearly a one-sided presentation that highlights Palestinian suffering without acknowledging parallel Jewish experiences in the region.
The NEA handbook would be bad enough if the only teachers who were members of the union with those teaching chemistry, mathematics and maybe physical education. The fact that their membership includes those teaching history to American students makes it even worse.
The antisemitism displayed on college campuses clearly has its roots in the K-12 classrooms producing both the students and faculty of those universities. The liberalism of the NEA is troublesome, but their antisemitism is absolutely disgusting and should not be tolerated by any parent or school system in the United States.
Steve Gill is a national and international political commentator and analyst. He is the publisher of TriStar Daily.
The full text of the NEA 2025 Handbook is available here: https://www.nea.org/sites/default/files/2025-05/nea_handbook_online_2025.pdf
