A leading Jewish legal group has filed a bias complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against the National Education Association, alleging the country’s largest teachers’ union violated civil rights law by discriminating against its Jewish members, Jewish Insider has learned. 

The complaint, filed Monday by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, highlights several incidents in which the NEA — which represents over 3 million educators — allegedly breached Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which protects employees, resulting in the spread of antisemitism in K-12 public schools. 

“Students are arriving to college much of the time already having antisemitic views,” Marci Miller, Brandeis Center’s director of legal investigations, told JI. “We needed to look at the K-12 space to see where this was originating, and we saw that a lot of the false narratives and antisemitic tropes were originating from local teachers’ unions — and in a lot of cases it came from the top, the NEA, which is the umbrella union.” 

Last summer, the NEA’s Representative Assembly passed a resolution to boycott the Anti-Defamation League’s Holocaust education materials after union delegates complained the ADL’s definition of antisemitism was too strong. While NEA’s board of directors unanimously voted to reject the measure that would’ve ceased relations with the ADL, Jewish educators and parents continue to remain uneasy about rising antisemitism within the union. 

The 297-page complaint highlights several concerns in the NEA’s 2025 handbook, a 434-page report outlining the organization’s “visionary goals” and “strategic objectives.”   

Among these examples is official handbook language for International Holocaust Remembrance Day that removed Jews as the primary targeted victims of the Holocaust, reframing the genocide as a generalized tragedy, the Brandeis Center said. 

The handbook stated that the “NEA shall promote the celebration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27 annually on its website and through other appropriate media to recognize the more than 12 million victims of the Holocaust from different faiths, ethnicities, races, political beliefs, genders, and gender identification, abilities/disabilities, and other targeted characteristics.”

Although the language was later revised following public backlash, the NEA did not issue an apology for the erasure of Jewish history from its handbook materials and provided no corrective guidance to members or affiliates.

On Oct. 8, 2025, one day after the two-year anniversary of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks, the NEA sent a mass email to its membership celebrating Indigenous lands and distributing a “Native Land Digital” map that erased Israel entirely, labeling the territory solely as Palestine and linking to materials associated with organizations that have expressed support for Hamas’ attacks. 

After public backlash, the NEA removed the resource and issued a statement that the external resource did not meet its standards, but it did not advise members to stop using the materials or issue an apology to Jewish members. 

According to the complaint, Jewish members reported facing harassment at the NEA’s 2025 Representative Assembly, a convening of the organization’s top leaders from around the country — the same group that voted to censure the ADL. 

Allegations included Jewish delegates being physically surrounded and shouted at by anti-Israel advocates; delegates laughing after a Jewish delegate referred to the murder of an 82-year-old Holocaust survivor in the Boulder, Colo., antisemitic firebombing attack; and delegates physically intimidating and disrupting the Jewish Affairs Caucus when the executive chair tried to speak. 

The complaint also alleges that the NEA engages in systematic discrimination by utilizing discriminatory racial quotas and preferences, a practice that harms Jewish members who are excluded from preferred racial groups, denying them equal access to opportunities and full participation in union governance.

“NEA is not taking enough steps to make Jewish teachers, Jewish members feel comfortable in the NEA,” said Miller. “They may have taken some minimal steps but haven’t really responded to complaints from members.” 

The complaint comes as NEA is under investigation by the House Committee on Education and Workforce, as well as the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, following allegations that its policies and materials have fostered an environment conducive to antisemitism in K-12 schools.