Did the Massachusetts Teachers Association Really Repent For Its Antisemitism?

The MTA "disavowed" the antisemitic material on its website and promised to take it down. Spoiler alert: They didn't.

Images that appeared on the MTA resource guide. Some of them were removed, but there’s still plenty to go around.

The story about the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) being investigated by the state’s Special Commission on Combating Antisemitism due to their vile antisemitic “educational” material made national headlines.

After being caught red-handed, the MTA “disavowed” the same materials they had spent years curating when they thought no one was paying attention. They even promised to remove the offensive images.

But did they?

Yes and no. Yes, they took down the links to the offensive posters (don’t worry, we have copies in safe places in case they try to gaslight us again), they changed the section’s name from “Resources on Israel and Occupied Palestine” to “Resources on the conflict in the Middle East”, but no, they didn’t take down anything else. The resource list still overwhelmingly favors the Palestinian narrative and includes many of the incriminating exhibits presented at the hearing.

Remember the fictional Jewish girl Hannah and the supposedly great treatment she and her family would receive in Gaza? Still there under “Visuals and Arts”. but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The book list still recommends five anti-Israel titles against a single pro-Israel book, because what’s a little imbalance when you're shaping young minds?

And then there’s “Handala’s return” (Exhibits 12-18, 38:30 in the hearing), which is meant for elementary school kids, and is still listed on the MTA website as of writing this post. It says that "a group of bullies called Zionists wanted our land so they stole it by force”. No mention of the UN partition plan for Palestine, the fact that the Jews accepted the plan but the surrounding Arab countries rejected it and unsuccessfully tried to steal Israel by force. No mention of the fact that Jordan captured the West Bank in 1948 but never gave it to the Palestinians. The MTA won’t let history ruin a perfectly good fairy tale.

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Exhibit 24 is still proudly on MTA display too: a link to the article titled “The Balfour Declaration: Enduring Colonial Criminality”. The piece warns that:

In the same way that powerful Zionists personalities today conduct dark deals to shore up official support in contravention of international law, UN resolutions, and international public opinion, so they did a century ago.

Several personalities stand out, including Chaim Weizmann, Nahum Sokolow, Louis Brandeis and Samuel Untermyer. These men collaborated across continents in the halls of power to influence policies and place Zionists in important posts, particularly in France, England and the United States.

Weizmann recruited the Rothchilds, used his charm, the promise of Jewish war-time loans, and prevailing anti-Semitic beliefs in Jewish power to seduce European statesmen to the Zionist cause.

Who needs a poster of the dollar bills shaped like a Star of David when you have powerful Jews, sorry, Zionists, who have been controlling the world’s largest superpowers for over a century?

This poster is no longer linked from the MTA website. Almost everything else still is.

The author of this absolutely not antisemitic article is none other than Susan Abulhawa, whose Oxford Union speech boiled down to: “Go back to Poland, you colonizers”. Her ironclad proof? The fact that many Jews have European last names, because as everyone knows, Jewish surnames are the ultimate measure of national origin (never mind that surnames have only been a thing for about 400 years). She adds: Let us bring Palestine to its former multicultural glory”.

Oh wait, what do you mean by “former multicultural glory”?! And for that matter, what do you mean by “Palestine”?

MTA’s “Visuals and Arts” section, left intact despite their promise to remove antisemitic links, gives you the answer. It features links to the Palestinian Nakba Curriculum, Palestine 101 and the Museum of the Palestinian People. The museum’s prized historical artifacts include a Roman-era inspired water jug, an Ottoman era (1914) National Geographic article about the Holy Land that mentions Palestine not the Palestinian national identity (because it had not existed yet), and a British Mandate passport carried by Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike. Because nothing screams ancient, authentic and indigenous Palestinian heritage like Roman colonialism, Ottoman rule or 20th-century British mandate bureaucracy.

British Mandate of Palestine passport, carried by Jews, Muslims and Christians alike. Source:

So, did the MTA learn its lesson? Not quite. They slapped a coat of PR paint over the problem, hoping no one would look too closely. But the bias is still there: alive, well, and waiting to worm its way into classrooms. Their apology sounds more like “We apologize for getting caught. We’ll disguise ourselves better from now on”.

At this point, the real question is: why are we still funding all this with our dues?