The Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) is still including antisemitic teaching materials in its resource list, the ADL announced.
The updated site still features sources such as a poster of a masked combatant shooting an arrow with a Palestinian flag and the caption “Free the Land: By Any Means Necessary, Boycott! Divest” and a children’s book that claims Palestinian children “are having their homes taken by Zionist bullies.”
This comes after the union promised to revise its website after a heated legislative hearing in February.
“We are outraged that after promising to ‘not promote materials that direct hate at any group,’ the revised resource list – maintaining 98% of the original resources – published ‘for MTA members to use with each other and their students’ remains extremely one-sided and biased and still includes inflammatory, harmful, and factually inaccurate content,” the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) tweeted in late February.
“We had hoped that the MTA’s decision to address some of the troubling resources would lead them to reflect on whether the intention behind these curriculum resources was truly in the best interest of its members and the students it serves,” the Massachusetts Educators Against Antisemitism teachers' group told the Boston Herald.
“Clearly, this did not happen.”
The Massachusetts Teachers Association teaches children to hate Jews.The MTA generated a document titled “Resources on Israel and Occupied Palestine” and made it available to MTA members in late 2024. The union represents 117,000 teachers, faculty, professional staff, and… pic.twitter.com/2syrGKlAGV
–Will Sussman (@realWillSussman) February 11, 2025
Antisemitism committee questions teachers association
In a three-hour hearing in early February, lawmakers on the Special Legislative Committee on Combating Antisemitism questioned MTA President Max Page about resources provided by the union, walking him through dozens of pages of perceived antisemitic teaching materials.
At the legislative hearing, House Chair of the special commission Rep. Simon Cataldo called the resource page “virulently antisemitic” and added that the MTA “only just now beginning to ‘review’ the resources would be laughable if the subject matter weren’t so gravely serious.”
The resources included illustrations depicting Israelis as snakes, posters calling for violence against Zionists, and a dollar bill folded into a Star of David, the Boston Herald reported.
According to the State House News Service, the commission called the hearing after both Jewish and non-Jewish members of the MTA contacted lawmakers about “outrageously one-sided and offensive materials.”
“Only after over a week of intense public pressure following the February 10 public hearing is the MTA conceding that a ‘review’ is necessary and questioning its own actions. Apparently, the advocacy of the MTA’s own Jewish and non-Jewish members proved insufficient to dislodge the MTA from its position,” Cataldo said.
The MTA responds
MTA leadership said that it did not promote hatred towards any group and that it would remove any materials that did not spread a message of acceptance.
“As trusted educators, MTA members would never want to have antisemitic materials on the MTA website, and the MTA does not promote materials that direct hate at any group,” Massachusetts Teachers Association President Max Page said in a statement. “We will remove any materials that do not further the cause of promoting understanding.”
Page also added that the MTA “remains deeply disappointed” that “the co-chair used this hearing as an opportunity to engage in political grandstanding that was disturbing to many.”
“The way that these resources were manipulated in such a fashion so as to label the state’s largest union of educators as promoters of antisemitism remains one of the most deplorable displays witnessed by the State House,” Page added.
