Why my LA teachers union kicked me out of a meeting over antisemitism

On a recent evening, the House of Representatives of the United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), the public school teachers union in LA, used the last official meeting of the school year to conduct a public denunciation of me and had me removed from a union meeting.My offense: I had attended as a known Zionist and as someone who has spent years building the infrastructure to hold UTLA and Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) accountable for anti-Jewish harassment of students, staff and families.I wasn’t there to disrupt; I was there to observe, and maybe that made me even more dangerous.Imagine the absurdity of sitting silently while being called out for my “racist Zionist ways,” and as a “threat to free speech in the classroom” and an “enemy of unionism,” for 40 minutes straight.The incident told me everything I needed to know about how far we have come with Jewish and Israeli advocacy, not only because it was evidence of how far we have left to go, but because of the fact that they were terrified of one quiet woman with a notebook.We may be winning a slow war against hate. I have worked in Los Angeles public education for over 25 years.

For most of that time, Jewish students could be harassed in classrooms; Jewish teachers could be pressured by their unions to adopt positions hostile to Israel and to Jewish identity; and Jewish families could be made to feel that their concerns were inconvenient to district administration.The machinery was opaque and impossible to navigate, because no one had mapped it.So we’ve spent five years mapping it.Jewish Teachers of Los Angeles (or JewTLA, a name that infuriates the union), which I lead, has spent that time doing the slow, unsexy work of organizing: building membership, filing complaints, documenting patterns, training educators on Title VI and Title VII, on fair employment, on the Uniform Complaint Process, on what the law actually requires of school districts and unions.We’ve filed Public Records ...