As longtime educators and advocates for educational excellence, we embrace the importance of supporting schools to tackle urgent questions of racism, injustice, and all forms of bigotry. We believe all our students have the right to be safe, to belong, and to develop as critical thinkers and constructive advocates in our diverse world. 

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has long marketed itself as an expert advisor to school communities on antisemitism and other forms of bias. However, despite its reputation as a civil rights organization, the ADL is not the social justice educational partner it claims to be. 

The ADL is a divisive political interest group that:

• sidelines historical, contextual, and systemic analyses of bias and racism in their curricula, focusing instead on individual feelings and actions; 
• restricts genuine inquiry in classrooms with pedagogy and content that leave little room for truly questioning assumptions and debating diverse perspectives on a wide range of topics;
• distorts the definition of “antisemitism” in ways that stoke fear among many Jews and pit Jewish comfort against Palestinian rights;
• pushes local, state, and federal educational policy that defends Israel at the expense of the rights of Palestinians, other people of color, and Jews who reject ethnonationalism;
• attacks schools, educators, and students with bad-faith accusations of antisemitism in order to silence and punish constitutionally-protected criticism of Israel and the political ideology of Zionism.

Like policymakers and major media outlets, schools mistakenly rely on the ADL as a credible source of information about what constitutes antisemitism and its extent in the United States today. But analysis by scholars and journalists makes it clear that the ADL systematically distorts people’s understanding of antisemitism by including criticism of Israel as an indicator of hatred toward Jews. They distort the prevalence of antisemitism by including legal, nonviolent Palestinian solidarity actions as “bias incidents” in their statistics. By the ADL’s own count, some two-thirds of the bias incidents since October 7 have related to Israel. 

For all of these reasons, we ask you to reconsider your partnership with the ADL.

We further urge you to join in nationwide efforts to drop the ADL from schools by taking the following actions:  

1. Cut all ties with the ADL, including use or endorsement of their curricular materials, participation in their programs, and engagement in their professional development offerings;
2. End contracts with the ADL as consultants on diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ) policy, programming, or bias incident response – even when services are offered free of  charge;
3. Stop referencing the ADL’s discredited statistics, and stop sending data or information of any kind to the ADL;
4. Ensure that all your institutional relationships and contracts truly uphold and promote principles of equality and dignity for all students who may be the targets of racism or bigotry of any kind.

This article, “The ADL is Not a Social Justice Partner for Schools,” in Rethinking Schools describes in more detail some of the ADL’s problematic practices in schools. We hope it will serve as the basis of further conversations.

Signatories: