NEA Partner Joins CODEPINK Campaign Targeting Schools
The summer workshops bring together CODEPINK, Rethinking Schools and union activists to train educators on challenging Zionism in schools.
QUICK TAKE-AWAY:
CODEPINK is openly targeting K-12 schools.
Its workshop series promises teachers, parents and students “actionable strategies,” lesson plans and tools to advocate for Palestinian liberation in schools.The speakers are connected to influential education networks.
Participants and upcoming presenters are tied to Rethinking Schools, NEA-related projects, CTA, UTLA, ethnic studies organizations and pro-Palestine caucuses inside teacher unions.The webinar accused the ADL of using Holocaust education to “justify state violence.”
CODEPINK’s own description promised to expose how groups like the ADL allegedly use Holocaust education “to justify state violence and silence Palestine.”
FULL STORY:
On June 15, CODEPINK held the first session in its summer workshop series, “On Challenging Zionism in Schools.”
Ready to challenge Zionist brainwashing in our schools?
CODEPINK promises
We’re pulling back the curtain on how organizations like the ADL use Holocaust education to justify state violence and silence Palestine.
…
Whether you’re a teacher building a new curriculum, a parent organizing against censorship, or a student finding your voice, you’ll leave with actionable strategies, adaptable lesson plans, and the confidence to advocate for Palestinian liberation and balanced education in your schools and beyond.
The introductory session featured Marcy Winograd, the leader of CODEPINK’s “Drop the ADL” project and head of the California Teachers Association Jewish and Allied Educators for Palestine caucus.
CODEPINK is currently under investigation by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) over its trip to Cuba this past March. Members of congress have also pushed the Department of Justice to investigate CODEPINK over its ties to the Chinese Communist Party and support for groups like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. So it is concerning indeed that this group has an outpost in the California Teachers Association and seeks to wield greater influence in K-12 classrooms.
Jenin Mahdi is CODEPINK’s “Palestine” campaigner.
The introductory session also featured three guests:
Adam Sanchez, the managing editor of Rethinking Schools. This isn’t the first time Rethinking Schools, a frequent collaborator with the National Education Association (NEA), has partnered with CODEPINK. Winograd even contributed a piece to Rethinking Schools’ magazine Don’t Stop Teaching About Gaza. Winograd’s piece was about the need to reform Holocaust education. CODEPINK’s workshop accuses the ADL of using Holocaust education “to justify state violence and silence Palestine.”
Rethinking Schools is a frequent presence at NEA conferences, Adam Sanchez even ran a workshop on “teaching Palestine” at the New Jersey Education Association’s recent annual conference. The NEA also partners with Rethinking Schools for its Teach Truth Day of Action, run by Rethinking Schools’ project Zinn Education Project.
Emmaia Gelman, the anti-Israel activist behind the Drop the ADL campaign and the founder of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. Gelman’s family foundation funds ICSZ as well as a host of anti-Israel activist organizations.
Rick Chertoff, a founding member of the LA chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace.
The Webinar
Adam Sanchez began by discussing Rethinking Schools’ “commitment to anti-Zionism.” While Rethinking Schools had published lessons on Palestine before, Sanchez said it was really “the wake of October 7 and watching the genocide unfold” that encouraged Rethinking Schools to put out a book on “Teaching Palestine.”
Sanchez said there have been between 60 and 70 study groups for teachers centered on Rethinking Schools’ Teaching Palestine.
Sanchez also discussed what he called the “massive Zionist campaign” to shut down workshops he held at the National Arab American Museum and at the New Jersey Education Association.
In the video, Sanchez appears to be referring to Ismael Jimenez, Director of Social Studies curriculum for the School District of Philadelphia and Keziah Ridgeway, a School District of Philadelphia teacher. Sanchez says they have been criticized for their “activism” around Palestine.
Jimenez is on record calling Israel a terrorist state, has made remarks that appeared to justify October 7, and is on the board of an organization whose leaders have been open in their defense of Hamas. Ridgeway co-leads Philadelphia Educators for Palestine, a group whose “commitments” includes the belief that “all resistance is righteous.” Ridgeway was previously placed on administrative leave while under investigation for allegedly threatening Jewish parents.
Congressman Josh Gottheimer had called on the NJEA to cancel its Teaching Palestine workshop with Sanchez because of concerns over the content of the book. Indeed, Sanchez’s contribution to Teaching Palestine, a “lesson” on US-Israel relations, helped students place October 7 “in context” so that they understand why Hamas carried out a massacre on that day.
Not included in Sanchez’s account of his time at the NJEA convention are the reports that a Jewish teacher had to be escorted out of the workshop for their own safety. The workshop included images from “Teaching Palestine.”
Emmaia Gelman was next to speak.
Gelman has written that the words “terrorist” and “hate” are “Zionist terms” coined to “make us think like the militarist state” and “hide how imperial violence actually works.” Terrorism, she says, is a word that has been used by “colonizers to describe the resistance of the colonized.” She argues that people need to “de-zionize” their language by not using the word “terrorist.”
Gelman argues that the legal category of “terrorist” “was created to make resistance to Zionism and imperialism look antisemitic.”
Gelman says the term “Holocaust” has become a “prop of Zionism” and is used to “exceptionalize that history at the expense of other genocides, particularly colonizers’ genocides of people outside of Europe.” Quite a bizarre argument that seems to suggest Jews have the “white privilege” of having been subject to a genocide in Europe?
Finally, when discussing October 7, Gelman said one must use the language of “resistance, not repression.” She said people should use “terms that foreground Palestinian agency and resistance,” such as the “Al-Aqsa Flood military/guerrilla operation.” Gelman is referring to the massacre, rape, and kidnapping of civilians as an example of “Palestinian agency and resistance.”
Gelman’s portion of the webinar focused on her book, The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State.
Gelman called the ADL, “from its inception,” a “right-wing organization” that is “identified with settler colonialism and the whiteness of early American citizenship.”
One of Gelman’s chief complaints against the ADL is its commitment to the core American value of “Liberalism”: individual rights, equal citizenship, pluralism and constitutional democracy. Gelman argues that those ideals mask colonialism and racism because they judge illiberal societies as less free.
Because Jews had “moved into whiteness,” Gelman argued, the ADL faced a crisis because “they were trying to lean on that claim that Jews were marginal and needed protection as a way to leverage support for Israel.”
The ADL, Gelman said, had to “produce the idea of black antisemitism as a way to reassert that Jews were marginal.”
Gelman claimed that the “antisemitism narrative and the anti-left narrative and the sort of white supremacist Western dominance narrative” are pushed by the ADL and other Zionist organizations in order to “serve as the basis for the militarization of civil society in the United States on the basis that criticizing Israel or criticizing the state is terror, and that the antisemitism claim is the basis of that.”
Gelman did not mention the deadly attacks in Washington, D.C., and Boulder, Colorado, or the recent terrorist attack at a synagogue in Michigan.
Gelman argues this because “Zionist” organizations have received funding from the Nonprofit Security Grant Program, a program that “provides funding support for target hardening and other physical security enhancements and activities to nonprofit organizations that are at high risk of terrorist attack.”
Gelman claims that around 98% of the funding for the NSGP has gone to “Zionist institutions.” Recipients of the grant have included synagogues, religious schools and a Holocaust education center. Churches and Mosques have also been awarded NSGP funds.
Winograd then discussed how she organized the pro-Palestine caucus within the CTA. Winograd shares a video of CODEPINK activists testifying at the Los Angeles Unified School District against the ADL.
Winograd says that “Zionists” are scared of “truth telling” and want only “one narrative in the schools.”
Next, Chertoff, seemingly as a counter to the “Zionists” afraid of “truth telling”, said he wanted to discuss “history” and not “propaganda.” He says that Israel was “colonized by the Zionist movement at the behest of the strongest power on earth at the time, which was the British Empire.”
The panel then discussed the “3 Ds” definition of antisemitism.
The three Ds, it basically says, if you demonize Israel, if you hold it to a double standard, and what’s the other one? Double standard, delegitimize Israel, this is it. If you say Israel, the people of Israel, have no right to erect a Jewish ethnostate that is supremacist in nature and deny the right of return to 750,000-plus Palestinians and their descendants, exiled in Nakba, then you’re antisemitic. And this is what they want us to give our students.
They ignored the ideas of double standards and demonization entirely.
Sanchez said:
We’re going to teach Palestine regardless. We think it is important to teach about genocide. We think it is important to teach about apartheid, about settler colonialism.
Upcoming Workshops
On June 16, Merrie Najimy, former president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association and co-founder of NEA Educators for Palestine and founder of MTA Rank and File for Palestine will host a workshop on “Strategies for Change in Your School,” including how to set up Students for Justice in Palestine clubs.
Najimy will be co-running the workshop with Laura Pinho, a teacher in Los Angeles Unified School District. Pinho supervises an SJP club at her school.
Students for Justice in Palestine was created by Hatem Bazian, the co-founder of American Muslims for Palestine. American Muslims for Palestine is under investigation by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee for its role in the campus protests following October 7. The Senate committee’s announcement cited alleged past or present Hamas ties among individuals connected to AMP and its partner organization, Americans for Justice in Palestine Educational Foundation. The House Ways and Means Committee has also referred AMP/AJP to the IRS for investigation over alleged ties to designated terrorist organizations and possible violations of tax-exempt rules. AMP has also been investigated in Virginia over charitable-solicitation compliance and allegations involving fundraising links to terrorist organizations.
Chapters of SJP have expressed support for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Hamas. The Boulder, Colorado chapter of SJP released a statement in support of Mohamed Soliman, who killed 82-year-old Karen Diamond at a march in support of hostages held captive by Hamas.
On June 17, Winograd will be joined by Lupe Carrasco Cardona for a workshop on Literature and Art as Tools for Resistance.
Carrasco Cardona is a founding member and president of the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium, the group responsible for California’s model Ethnic Studies curriculum, which had to be heavily revised due to concerns about antisemitism.
At UTLA’s annual leadership conference in 2024, Carrasco Cardona was filmed suggesting that Israel intentionally placed the Star of David on its flag so that it could deflect any criticism as antisemitism.
Carrasco Cardona is co-head of the Association of Raza Educators, which describes itself as a “group of public school educators, university professors, students, and community allies committed to using education as a tool for the liberation of our community.” Dissatisfied with existing professional development opportunities for teachers, the group developed its own model that focuses on activism:
[An] Ethnic Studies/Social Justice professional development model that combines theory and practice… Led and developed for social justice educators by social justice educators who teach culturally relevant curriculum and are actively involved in organizing campaigns outside their classrooms and in their communities.
She lost her bid to be United Teachers of Los Angeles Vice President as American Federation of Teachers representative by a whisker - gaining 49.24% of the vote.
The final workshop, on June 18, will be a discussion around the slogan “from the river to the sea.”
CODEPINK’s “Challenging Zionism in Schools” series should not be dismissed as fringe activism. The worrying part is that CODEPINK already appears to have channels inside the teacher-union ecosystem.
Marcy Winograd leads CODEPINK’s Drop the ADL campaign and chairs a pro-Palestine caucus inside the California Teachers Association. Adam Sanchez is managing editor of Rethinking Schools, an organization praised by the National Education Association and regularly present in NEA spaces. Upcoming presenters are tied to UTLA, CTA and other pro-Palestine teacher-union networks.
CODEPINK is not merely trying to influence schools from the outside. Its campaign is moving through the activists, caucuses and curriculum organizations already embedded inside public education.
That should worry every parent, teacher and policymaker. The webinar did not just expose an anti-Israel agenda for K-12. It exposed an illiberal worldview. And now that worldview is being packaged into materials and organizing strategies for K-12 schools.