The Free Press ‘Bombshell Investigation’ That Wasn’t: In Defense of UTLA

In what Free Press founder Bari Weiss calls “an absolutely bombshell investigation”, contributing editor Abigail Shrier claims to have uncovered a “well-coordinated, national effort between teachers, activist organizations, and administrators to indoctrinate American children against Israel.” Shrier places my union, United Teachers Los Angeles, at the center of it. 

Why are Weiss and Shrier outraged? A surreptitious recording of an optional workshop from UTLA’s August conference shows three Los Angeles Unified School District teachers who, agreeing with Israeli and international human rights groups, the United Nations, and countless others, believe Israel is brutalizing Palestinians in Gaza. They are active in protesting against it and are encouraging interested students to get involved in the movement to stop it.

Largely via social media as well as through Spanish-language media, LAUSD students are aware, even if Shrier is not, that the vast majority of the world is appalled by the killing and destruction in Gaza. Students wanting to demonstrate against Israeli Gaza policy is not something that teachers have hoodwinked them and or twisted their arms into doing–secondary school students are often anxious to have an impact on “the real world.” They see an injustice in Gaza, and they want to do something about it.

In recent years, secondary school students have staged walkouts and protests over immigration, school shootings, and other political issues. After Dobbs in 2022, high school and college students in 29 states demonstrated over reproductive rights.

During the 2019 UTLA strike, thousands of students joined our picket lines and rallies. Several dozen of the high school seniors I was teaching at the time, recognizing the strike as a righteous fight, helped man the picket lines, and many went to the huge rallies downtown. A handful came to school at 5:45 each morning to help me set up for our picket lines. I never coordinated any of this nor offered any incentives. When I saw a group of the class of 2019 at a party last summer, several of them told me they valued the experience and were proud to have been a part of a successful strike.

What the UTLA teachers now being condemned are doing is actually very much in the tradition of Jewish-American educators–imparting to their students a passion to fight injustice.

In past years, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, far from being teachers’ favorite topic as critics imagine it to be, has often been avoided because it is so controversial and complicated. For years I was one of these teachers, giving students a brief outline of the discord then ending by explaining that “this conflict goes on and on because both sides are right.” In light of the events of the past year, such a brief summation hardly seems sufficient. 

To be fair to Shrier, the UTLA workshop she attacks has been the subject of greater exaggerations than hers. For example, in a September press release, Dillon Hosier, CEO of the Israeli-American Civic Action Network, who Shrier approvingly cites in another context, actually says, “What we are witnessing in this leaked footage is UTLA’s version of Wannsee.” As I teach my students, at the 1942 Wannsee Conference, the leaders of Nazi Germany's government, economy, military, and transportation calmly discussed and planned in great detail how to murder millions of European Jews. 

One pro-Israel UTLA conference attendee told me how angry he was about a handful of teachers with shirts or buttons with the Palestinian flag on it. “That flag is just as bad as the swastika,” he explained.

We should also recognize that if it were Algebra or woodshop teachers talking extensively about the Gaza war in class, critics would have a better point. But most of the UTLA teachers being criticized by the Free Press and others over the conference workshop are social studies teachers–we are supposed to be teaching about current events, and all sides can agree that the Gaza war is a major current event. Themes in other classes, such as English, including composition and literature, and the Sciences, are also often reflected in current headlines.

Free Press Live host Michael Moynihan castigates one of the teachers recorded discussing pro-Palestinian activism as being "sneaky,” but what’s really “sneaky" is what is being done to these educators. Shrier dismissively quotes them speaking about the hazards they face, yet her article unwittingly provides much evidence to validate these teachers’ concerns. 

A conference attendee recorded them secretly, and now that recording is posted all over the internet, probably for the rest of these teachers' lives. One teacher had his personal files searched by school personnel opposed to his activism. These behaviors by presumably Jewish UTLA members play into pernicious stereotypes of Jews as disloyal, deceptive, and self-interested. 

Shrier is also unhappy over motions passed by UTLA, explaining that instead of a “focus on how to educate kids, teachers are coming up with ever more ways to attack the existence of Israel.” 

In March, the UTLA House of Representatives passed a resolution in which we joined labor unions nationwide to call for an immediate ceasefire and an end to the siege in Gaza. The resolution also demands “The Israeli hostages taken by Hamas must be immediately released” and calls on Israel and Hamas to “adhere to standards of international law.”

Another Shrier criticism of UTLA is that in October our HoR passed a resolution supporting Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’ effort to block the sale of over $20 billion in offensive U.S. weapons to Israel. Sanders’ statement on the Joint Resolutions of Disapproval specifically refers to “Hamas’ horrific terrorist attack on October 7th” and states that “Israel clearly had the right to respond” to it–not exactly radical sentiments.

UTLA’s resolution explains that “the arms named have been used in violations of U.S. and international law, indiscriminately killing large numbers of civilians, many of them children” and that “Israel has decimated the education system…destroying every university in Gaza.”

Both the March and the October resolutions were voted on in an open, democratic process in which supporters of Israeli policies fully participated. These supporters also have the right to introduce resolutions backing Israel.

The HoR debate about the October resolution has been misrepresented and misunderstood. The Los Angeles Jewish Antisemitism Roundtable, composed of the Jewish Federation Los Angeles and numerous other regional Jewish groups, recently wrote UTLA President Cecily Myart-Cruz and other UTLA leaders to express their opposition to UTLA’s passage of the resolution. To JFLA’s credit, their letter includes an invitation to a dialogue. Nonetheless, the letter does voice misconceptions about UTLA’s actions. For example, it states:

"[W]e are deeply disturbed by reports that, during the October 23 Zoom meeting, a member of the House of Representatives allegedly responded to concerns about Jewish members potentially quitting the union by saying, ‘Let them leave. We don’t want them around anyway.’ If this statement was made and went unchallenged by leadership, it is profoundly disheartening."

A UTLA HoR member did say something along these lines, and the leadership did challenge it, and demanded that the offender apologize. But the situation is a lot more balanced than this quote alone would lead one to believe.

In recent years, and particularly after the October 7 attack, Zionist UTLA members have repeatedly threatened to leave UTLA. Leaving would be a profoundly selfish act, whereby those leaving would retain the benefits that UTLA’s advocacy has fought to win and will be fighting to defend, while shifting the burden of paying for this work onto the rest of UTLA’s membership.

Any human being in any type of relationship, upon being repeatedly threatened in such a manner, inevitably will one day respond—"Fine, then leave. I don't want you anyway." The UTLA member’s statement to that effect was unfortunate, but it had also been provoked.

Pro-Israel UTLA members have had their voices and spurious claims against UTLA greatly amplified by sensationalistic coverage in conservative media, but there's no malignant conspiracy here–UTLA’s resolutions have condemned Israel’s policies because most UTLA chapter representatives and HoR members, all of whom are democratically elected and many of whom are Jewish, oppose these policies. 

Underlying all of this is the repeated assertion from Shrier, Weiss, Moynihan, and the Free Press as a whole that teachers in general, and these three UTLA teachers in particular, are "indoctrinating students.” This is a standard right-wing line of attack–when students are taught what conservatives think they should be taught, it’s “education.” When we teach what we think best, it’s "indoctrination." 

Had UTLA ignored the horrors in Gaza and instead passed out “We stand with Israel” buttons to teachers, can any of these critics honestly say they would have denounced it as “indoctrination”?