Kindergarten Intifada: Are Unions Antisemitic?

Abigail Shrier thinks the UTLA conference recording is a key piece of evidence. But it actually rebuts her charges of union antisemitism.

So onto the reason that I actually started to write about Kindergarten Intifada¹ and Abigail Shrier’s accusation that “[a]nti-Israel activism spreads through online curricula that are password protected, eluding parental oversight…pushed by teachers unions, furnished by activist organizations, and communicated to children through deception.”

I’m trying to envision the secret meeting of the pro-Palestine organizations with activist progressive teachers:

CAIR et al: “Look, we have this great curriculum that builds sympathy for the Palestinian subjugation by Jewish leaders. Three weeks of this and American children will hate Israel.”

Progressive leftist teachers: “What do we care? We want American children to hate America and we still have a long way to go. Israel will just have to wait its turn.”

CAIR et al: “How about this: Israel is just a proxy for American imperial power and working for Palestinian freedom is just one more way we can weaken the evil American hegemony and restore a socialist country.”

Progressive leftist teachers: “Oh yeah, that works. Sure, give us whatever curriculum you have, we’ll put it on our website. That’s what we do with the Holocaust curriculum on the St. Louis. ”

As I said in my earlier article, teachers, districts, counties, LEAs, states, we all get a boatload of curriculum free from every organization imaginable. Police at your pleasure. Let me know how it goes.

Shrier presents a recording made at a union conference as conclusive evidence of perfidy, the leadoff that justifies all the wild hearsay that follows. She didn’t make the recording personally, and I don’t see The Free Press giving ICAN credit, but maybe I missed it.

…[T]he second-largest teachers union chapter in the country—there are more than 35,000 members of United Teachers Los Angeles—met at the Bonaventure Hotel in L.A. to discuss, among other things, how to turn their K-12 students against Israel.—Shrier

Ok, so for starters, UTLA proudly claims it has more than 35,000 members, but LAUSD employs just over 24,000 teachers. I could spend more time researching where the other 11,000² come from, but hell, Shrier didn’t bother doing any research at all, so I’m way ahead.

But leave that little technicality aside, because neither 24,000 nor 35,000 union members met at the Bonaventure Hotel to discuss a damn thing.

This is Shrier’s second attempt to present union conferences as obviously related to teachers themselves. This is moronic. It’d be news if more than 1% of teachers attended a union conference. Shrier doesn’t understand this, of course. I wished that mattered more, but since her audience doesn’t understand it either, they probably accept the recording at face value, too. Districts can’t get a quorum to bring all their members in for free beer and pizza, much less give them marching orders on pro-Palestinian indoctrination. The best they can do is offer paid conferences for teachers needing education credits and those are usually in fun places that feel like a vacation for the money they’re handing over.

No, this meeting was for the diehards—otherwise known as the leadership. The recording was made during the UTLA Human Rights committee session at the UTLA 2024 Leadership Conference. The Conference is primarily a training vehicle for UTLA Chapter Chairs and, possibly, their vice chairs. LAUSD has 1,543 schools, so at most maybe 3,600 people attended in that capacity.

I can’t confirm this, but my guess is that committees have information panels and sessions at the leadership conference. UTLA has 33 committees, which seems excessive. My union only has 11.

The Human Rights Committee claims to be “the voice of the most progressive elements of United Teachers Los Angeles”, having first been formed to protest US involvement in El Salvador. Apparently, that’s too progressive for the rest of the teachers, because there are, by my count, 38 people in the audience that Shrier calls a “crowd”.

So start there: the recording is from a lightly-attended session of one UTLA committee at a yearly conference for the most committed members, who bear just a passing resemblance politically to the union body at large. All of this Shrier fails to mention.

Then move onto the really interesting news: neither Shrier nor The Free Press have listened to the entire recording. Or maybe they just hoped their readers wouldn’t. Because a common theme running through most of the presentations is the fact that the UTLA leadership doesn’t like or want the Human Rights Committee.

First up is David Feldman, committee chair, with a history of the committee’s efforts to get Palestinian support vocalized by the greater union, something they have failed to achieve for nearly 20 years. He first describes the 2006 attempt to hold an anti-Israel rally that the UTLA president killed and the 15 year hiatus that followed.

"A long time what I've heard when I first became active in the union....was that you don't talk about Palestine. You just don't. They're gonna work and they're gonna keep it off the floor off the house of reps and they're gonna do what they can, this is not an issue you bring up." (5:07)

Feldman continues the history lesson: the silence was broken in 2021 when five of the eight chapter chairs voted a resolution to support BDS and condemn Israel, thus setting it up for a vote by the UTLA House of Representatives later in the year. The UTLA leadership strenuously disavowed the resolution and the resolution was tabled and ultimately quashed by the UTLA House of Representatives. Further efforts were similarly frustrated until finally in March 2024, the board and the representative body passed a ceasefire motion, a far cry from the more overt Palestinian support that the Human Rights committee had been pushing for. Feldman sees this as a significant win, which further suggests that the UTLA is doing much more to thwart pro-Palestine activism than support it.

“..to even call for a cease fire….It’s really a mild demand in such an extreme situation…and it took a lot of struggle even to make that happen.” 11:45.

Poor little radical committee! Fighting for its life against a larger union management that wants the Human Rights Committee gone.

Will Shattuck (white dude with the bizarro neck wrap) makes the explicit point that his organization of educators is not union-affiliated and then gives way to Ron Gochez, whose advice on avoiding conflict while still teaching “issues” is a key focal point for Shrier.

Gochez does explain how he supports kids who want to get political, which is not at all the same thing as radicalizing them, but Shrier neglects to mention his many complaints about the lack of union support:

"Nothing that's happened within our union when it comes to this issue or any other issue, it didn't come from the leadership saying hey, let's do something about Palestine. n fact it was the exact opposite. ....our progressive leadership...our leadership that claims to be very progressive, they cower on this issue. If it wasn't for the rank and file teachers who have brought up this issue and forced it on the agenda it wouldn't be talked about. In fact they voted it down several times.”—37:38

Gochez has been a vehemently pro-Palestine radical teacher who has incurred the wrath of Jewish American groups for a long time. His continued employment suggests he is coloring well within the lines or he’d have been canned a decade ago. While his views are incendiary, his teaching decisions don’t strike me as that far out there. I suspect, for example, that Gochez is tolerant of dissenting views.

The most inadvertently hilarious display of Shrier ignorance: the vivid image of “busloads of students” that Gochez gets to demonstrations by persuading “friends” to bring the students instead of school buses gave me the biggest laugh of the article. As if unwitting parents allow their kids to go to school, get picked up by strangers and carted to a rally the students themselves didn’t know about so that Gochez can subvert them into radicalism. And not just a couple kids, but busloads of them!

But as any teacher can tell you, buses cost $1000 or more a pop—probably more in LA. Field trips are fucking expensive. Gochez is not talking about transporting “busloads of students” for indoctrination. Gochez is helping passionate kids who share his views get to demonstrations. He’s not doing it to fool the parents, to get around field trip notifications so he can hide activities from parents. He’s not indoctrinating kids who otherwise wouldn’t give a shit. He’s doing it to give interested kids—and by kids, I mean high school students—access to opportunities to participate without putting his school at risk for sponsoring a controversial topic.

This is actually a fairly sensible and even sensitive act, revealing a teacher who has some understanding of political realities for public school.

If you are a rabid Shrier fanatic, odds are you are sympathetic to, for example, Trump voters. To put Gochez’s actions in perspective (which Shrier should have done but did not), imagine a Trump-supporting teacher in a deep blue city or region who makes his or her sympathies clear. Word gets out, and Trump-supporting students show up at lunchtime or after school to talk politics. Trump holds a rally nearby. Does the teacher initiate a field trip? No, there’s no educational reason. Does the teacher drive the students to the rally? No. Absent a school purpose and a lot of paperwork, teachers don’t drive students anywhere. Car pools would be a logical answer. Maybe one of the parents is up for driving. Or maybe one of the kids themselves has a license. Teacher facilitates, doesn’t arrange, doesn’t own the trip and oh, by the way, tell the kids by all means they better make sure their parents know where they are.

This is often how it works in high school ecosystems.

Back to the video. The rest of the teachers don’t say anything Shrier thought was memorable, meaning it didn’t involve Israel. It was still progressive nonsense, though.

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The Human Rights Committee teachers are activists. I don’t agree with either their opinions or their methods, much less their insistence on having union dues fund their efforts. In my view they should have some fricking humility about the righteousness of their causes.

But are they antisemitic? Are they part of a well-coordinated, national effort between teachers, activist organizations, and administrators to indoctrinate American children against Israel”, as the article’s subheading charges? Look, these are paid up dues members of the extreme progressive left. Their goal is to indoctrinate American children against America. Israel can get in line.

Consider: One and all, these teachers work at high poverty, majority Hispanic schools. What they see as the injustices at America’s border is going to be five hundred times more important to them than whatever notions they have about what’s occurring at Israel’s.

The recording is the lynchpin of Shrier’s case about the supposed conspiracy between unions and Palestinian advocacy groups to enact anti-semitic curriculum. It’s weak gruel as a case against the Human Rights Committee, a tiny little union interest group. As evidence against the union itself, the recording achieves precisely the opposite of Shrier’s claim. UTLA has actively resisted the efforts of a tiny fringe group to state political approval of Palestine. Given her really shoddy reporting, I suspect she isn’t even aware of UTLA’s disdain for the Human Rights Committee—she probably just listened to a few clips. As for a larger national effort? Absurd.

Readers, please try to grasp reality about teachers and their unions.

Reality is a bit hard to communicate in a world when the entire conservative ecosystem thinks that teachers are wildly radical progressives eager to flip the gender of every public school student in the country. Most of the right ignored Andy Smarick’s explanation that schools heeded parent wishes on pandemic education options, not to mention the Heritage Foundation’s teacher survey that found the average teacher was barely left of center. If Andy Smarick can go on Jonah Goldberg’s podcast to discuss his article and they spent maybe three seconds on [the fact that parents are the reason schools are in remote] then return to bitching about [failing public schools and teachers unions], nothing this little ol’ blogger can say is going to have more impact than AEI and Heritage Foundation.

Still, I try. And reality says this: Unions’ first customers, all public noise to the contrary, are the teachers. Teachers demand three things from unions: negotiate our pay, keep tenure, maintain the seniority system. After that, union leaders and the fringe can say all sorts of stupid shit because regardless of teachers’ political views, they (and by they I mean we) don’t care. Whatever, man. Most of us don’t even vote in the union elections. All the public bullshit that drives pundits crazy is white noise to most teachers. — (me)

Shrier wrote of this tiny meeting, "It’s tempting to dismiss this as one more bull session among radical teachers leading a far-left public-sector union."

And even that’s an overstatement of reality. So go right ahead and give into temptation.

1. Yeah, yeah, it was three months ago. Look, I have a day job. Plus, I’ve been horrendously blocked for a couple years. Hoping I’m tentatively seeing the light at the end of the tunnel but like they say, I’m worried it might be a truck.

2. UTLA, like most AFT chapters, allows retired teachers to join.