Cassidy goes after anti-Semitism at the NEA

In giving the National Education Association a Jan. 29 deadline to answer pointed questions about “allegations of antisemitism” he calls “deeply troubling,” Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana is showing that his watchdog role extends beyond health policy.

Cassidy also is showing that the NEA is acting far more as a left-wing power group than a bargaining agent for school workers, much less a group whose first priority is helping students excel in reading, writing and arithmetic.

Cassidy is chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. It is the “education” and “labor” parts of the committee’s purview that precipitated his lengthy Dec. 18 letter to NEA President Rebecca Pringle. Therein, he cited four major categories of alleged NEA antisemitism.

Several involved resolutions approved by vote at the 2025 NEA Representative Assembly or by the NEA board. One pushed a boycott of the Anti-Defamation League, which for decades has provided widely admired Holocaust education materials. Another approved something called “Palestinian Nakba Education,” which teaches students about the so-called “forced, violent displacement and dispossession of at least 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland in 1948 during the establishment of the State of Israel,” thus adopting an extreme anti-Israel viewpoint devoid of the context that Israel was created by the United Nations and that it offered almost all those 750,000 the option of remaining in place.

One example involved an Oct. 8 email to some 3 million members that celebrated “indigenous lands” which — get this — literally erased Israel from the map and replaced it with a territory it called “Palestine.”

“Even worse,” Cassidy wrote, the emailed material “recommended resources linked to terror-supporting organizations, who have expressed support of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israeli civilians.”