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Mike Offner
Writer and lifelong student.

MA Teachers Union’s Tyranny of the Majority Promotes Antisemitism

OPINION

On Saturday, Oct 19 — Shabbat, of course, precluding participation of observant Jewish members — the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) Board of Directors will vote on a “divestment from Israel” resolution that will have approximately zero economic impact on anything and will do nothing to advance peace, but will continue the MTA’s promotion of demonization of Jews and the State of Israel.

The “Israel divestment” resolution, following a pattern of promotion of antisemitism that caught viral momentum among MTA leaders after the Hamas rape and terror attacks of October 2023, is as follows:

MOVED: The Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) shall disclose and divest all MTA staff pension funds and other investments from businesses that provide arms or other forms of military assistance to the state of Israel. The MTA shall likewise demand that the Pension Reserves Investment Management (PRIM) Board disclose and divest all pension funds from those businesses that provide arms or other forms of military assistance to the state of Israel.

If passed, this resolution will have no impact on the regional war in the Middle East. It will not help any Palestinians living in Gaza or the West Bank. It will not help any Israelis — Jewish, Muslim, Druze, or any others. It will not advance peace. It will not promote tolerance and understanding. It will not challenge or reduce bigotry. The state pension board (“MA PRIM“) will ignore it.

The “divestment resolution” is strictly rhetorical — and the message is that Israel is evil.

It appears to be the last item on the MTA’s Board of Directors meeting, in which “NBI” stands for “New Business Initiative.” With unknown exact timing of discussion and vote, union members who want to speak on this topic will presumably have to wait through the entire meeting for their opportunity, based on the schedule provided to union members:

A number of courageous MTA members will speak against the resolution. They have many admirers and supporters outside the MTA, but members of the public — including media as well as parents with children in MA public schools, whose daily lives and education are affected greatly by MTA decisions, including dissemination of antisemitic content — are banned from the meetings, even in the capacity of silent observers.

In an apparent contradiction, the MTA simultaneously follows through on its resolution to create curriculum and then, separately, denies that it creates curriculum:

Despite the self-evident nature of that resolution, the MTA subsequently wrote in a letter to some members of the MA Legislature, on August 6, 2024:

The MTA’s latest form 990 reveals the organization’s massive war chest of $123 million.

In a letter to the University of Massachusetts (UMass) seeking to suppress any public release of content created by UMass professors in fulfillment of the “creation of curriculum” mandate, the MTA’s letterhead listed its staff of ten in-house attorneys:

Many of the top MTA officers earn salaries that are multiples of that of the average teacher in Massachusetts, such as the $215,000 salary for a Staff Counsel position and the $207,000 salary for a Director of Communications position.

Although the MTA has likely committed multiple violations of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which precludes labor unions from discriminating against their own members, the MTA apparently doesn’t care, knowing that with their internal army of lawyers and more than $100 million of assets, it would take extremely courageous and well-funded Jewish educators to decide that any legal fight is worthwhile, especially given the discomfort that would arise inevitably due to hostility from union leaders and some fellow rank-and-file union members.

Title VII is unambiguous, saying, in part: “It shall be an unlawful employment practice for a labor organization to exclude or to expel from its membership, or otherwise to discriminate against, any individual because of his race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”

The MTA’s mission statement includes, “The MTA is committed to human and civil rights,” but based on reports from many Jewish MTA members and publicly available documentation of the MTA’s activities, the union appears to violate some Jewish members’ civil rights with impunity.

But it is one thing to have the law and your own union’s mission statement on your side, and quite another to endure the psychological, emotional, and financial costs of taking on one’s own massively funded, legally hostile and aggressive leadership.

The MTA”s ongoing messaging and presentation of content nominally “about the Middle East” is a chilling reminder of the Nuremberg Laws of Weimar Germany — while not explicitly calling for violence against or death to Jews, they piece by piece attempt to prime the public’s mindset that Jews are undeserving of protections afforded to all other minorities, building a psychological pathway of priming toward worse and more hostile, more aggressive treatment of the Jewish community.

There has been no message recently from the MTA about any other state or organization, no matter how brutal, dictatorial, oppressive, homophobic, misogynistic, and racist — not Hamas, not Iran, not Hezbollah, not Qatar, not the Houthis in Yemen, not Syria.

The MTA, whose leadership and membership inevitably purchase countless goods from China, the world’s largest violator of human rights, has never put forth any kind of resolution suggesting advocacy for oppressed Chinese minorities, e.g., the Tibetans (mostly Buddhists) and Uyghurs (mostly Sunni Muslims).

The MTA says nothing about the sovereignty of Taiwan.

In explaining the rationale for support of the “Israel divestment” resolution, members of the Board of Directors might point to the large number of emails or other communications they’ve received in favor.

But of course emails in favor outweigh emails opposed, because Jewish MTA members and their allies outspoken against antisemitism are a tiny minority of MTA members. Jews are 0.2% of the world, 2% of the United States, and perhaps 4% of Massachusetts.

While there are no clear data on the % of MTA members who are Jewish and courageous enough to be outspoken against antisemitism, it cannot realistically be more than about 1% at an absolute maximum, based on information from outspoken Jewish members and due simply to the demographics of the union and the culture of intimidation, fear, and hopelessness that some Jewish union members report.

But the MTA governs, rules, dictates, retaliates, intimidates, and gaslights based on tyranny of the majority.

Many deeply concerned and upset Jewish MTA members privately express concern about speaking up against the massive majority that overwhelms them, the MTA leadership that elevates antisemitism, and the vast majority of local MTA-affiliate educators’ unions that remain silent on or affirmatively support the MTA leadership’s promotion of antisemitic curriculum and rhetoric.

In the MTA and its local affiliates, Jewish educators report facing retaliation, ostracism, and gaslighting every day.

The Board of Directors’ vote this Shabbat, like all MTA promotion of antisemitism, is the epitome of bigoted hypocrisy.

The essence of supposed “progressive” values that MTA claims to hold is to not let the majority tyrannize minorities.

But when it comes to Jews, everything gets inverted.

Jewish MTA members are treated like some kind of dominant majority against whom the downtrodden minority is fighting back.

It’s counterfactual and preposterous, but this is Antisemitism 101 — invert the entire history of antisemitism into a reverse, false framework of lies in which Jews are an oppressive, genocidal, occupying, apartheid majority; and deny the reality of Jews being a microscopic minority — 0.2% of the world — who have faced expulsion and/or execution for thousands of years in country after country.

And the MTA’s “rhetoric of inversion” works, because people who like to signal to others that they are “progressive” know that fake self-righteousness generally requires demonizing someone or some group — but it’s too politically untenable to demonize any of the world’s largest violators of human rights, such as China, or to point out the horrendous civil rights violations and war crimes of any Arab, Muslim, or Middle Eastern country (other than Israel).

This “divestment” vote — which has nothing to do with divestment, peace, or social justice — has only the rhetorical purpose of demonizing Jews and the Jewish state, a continuation of the embrace of antisemitic propaganda that MTA leadership has embraced fully since Hamas terrorists raped, murdered, mutilated, tortured, and abducted more than 1,000 Israelis and others on October 7, 2023, in the largest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.

MTA leadership counts the votes and gauges sentiment to maintain and increase political and financial power for self-aggrandizement — and when counting the votes and calculating political sentiment, Jewish MTA members, Jewish parents, and Jewish students in Massachusetts public schools, being a minuscule minority, come out on the losing end every time.

It seems as though the MTA runs by the motto, “When the majority rules, the Jews will lose.”

None of this promotion of bigotry by MTA leadership has anything to do with what unions are supposed to advocate for, such as better wages and better working conditions for their members.

If the MTA actually had progressive values, they would stop the absolute insistence on the “last-hired, first-fired” layoff policies in collective bargaining agreements that work against Black, Muslim and other minority MTA members, who, statistically speaking, are less tenured than their white, Christian peers.

But the MTA would never give up the job security afforded to the white, mostly Christian, longest-tenured network of union members, because that is who has a large portion of the power within the union, and it will take decades of evolution of the demographics of MA public school teachers for that to change.

The union’s virtue-signaling is a selective political calculus, lacking ethics or genuine moral conviction, living merely by the proposition that “when the majority rules, it’s the Jews who lose.”

About the Author
Mike Offner was born and raised in Newton, MA, and is a graduate of the Newton Public Schools, Yale University, and Harvard Law School.
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