(Oct. 21, 2026 / JNS)
Jew-hatred and “radical activism” have penetrated K-12 classes at the School District of Philadelphia and the Berkeley Unified School District, which collectively have about 205,000 students in 350 schools, and at the National Education Association, the largest teachers union, according to a new report from the House Committee on Education and Workforce.
“Parents send their children to school to learn reading, writing and math, not to be taught to hate Israel or embrace radical political causes,” stated Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.), chair of the committee. “Yet that’s exactly the kind of material our investigation uncovered.”
“Jewish students deserve to feel safe in their classrooms, and parents deserve to know what their children are being taught,” the congressman said. “Schools that receive taxpayer dollars must be held accountable when they fail to protect students from antisemitism.”
According to the report, which JNS viewed, schools in Philadelphia taught students to label the United States and Israel as “terrorists” and to see Hamas as a resistance movement to be honored, and Israel was erased from the map, and identified as “Palestine,” in an ethnic studies course at Berkeley schools which also praised antisemites. Berkeley teachers also didn’t share a lesson plan on Israel with parents.
Since Oct. 7, 2023, the NEA, the largest U.S. labor union with three million members, has pledged “thousands of dollars” to the groups Rethinking Schools and the Zinn Education Project, which the House panel says are “sources of antisemitic K-12 materials.”
The House committee said that it decided to probe Jew-hatred on campuses after a “drastic uptick” in antisemitic incidents of 135% “exploded” in 2023, the year in which the Oct. 7 attacks occurred.
It said that its investigation of Fairfax County Public Schools, in Virginia, is ongoing.
In Philadelphia public schools, the country’s ninth largest school district, “curricula promote ideology justifying violent resistance and legitimize radical groups that incite antisemitism,” according to the report. “Curricula train students, as early as second grade, to be far-left activists.”
A lesson plan in the district “appears to whitewash the Nation of Islam, describing the radical antisemitic group as merely ‘controversial,’” according to the report. “Similarly, the district lionizes Code Pink as an organization that ‘engages in creative nonviolent actions.’ After Oct. 7, Code Pink blamed Israel and justified Hamas terrorism.”
The House panel said that it was told in September 2026 that the School District of Philadelphia was standardizing its social studies curriculum, instead of letting teachers and administrators write it, and that “its social studies curriculum director is undergoing a termination proceeding.”
“To the committee’s knowledge, no other employees have been adequately disciplined for spreading antisemitism,” the report states.
The House panel released a transcript of its Sept. 18, 2026, interview with Tony Watlington, superintendent of the School District of Philadelphia.
Asked if it is antisemitic to call for or justify killing Jews or to deny Jewish right to self-determination, Watlington said that both were antisemitic.
When the committee asked if it is Jew-hatred to say that Israel is a racist endeavor, he said that “certainly a teacher has no business taking a point of view in a classroom, but I also think that that might depend on circumstances and context relative to First Amendment freedoms of speech.”
Of comparing Israeli policy to that of the Nazis, the Philadelphia superintendent said “I think it is inherently problematic. I certainly don’t agree with it, would not condone. Not sure if someone said it in a context outside of their workplace if it might be protected.”
“So unsure if it’s antisemitic or not?” he was asked. “I don’t know,” he said.
The committee asked the superintendent “is it antisemitic to apply double standards to Israel not expected of any other democratic nation?” A lawyer cut in and said that he didn’t understand the question. The superintendent said that he didn’t understand it either.
Watlington was asked later on in the interview, whose transcript runs about 160 pages, about whether a teacher in the district, who had posted on social media that “Zionists are no different from the swarms of white supremacist spectators cheering on the public lynchings of over 3,000 black people,” should have been allowed to write social science curricula.
“I don’t know. I can tell you that, you know, Lyndon Johnson, former President Lyndon Johnson espoused some pretty racist views as a young man and former teacher out in Texas,” the superintendent said. “He spent a lot of years in this building doing some awful good work getting a civil rights bill passed. So, I don’t know.”
At Berkeley schools, “ethnic studies lessons are littered with antisemitic resources along with the activist ideology that fuels contemporary antisemitism,” according to the House committee’s report. “The district itself has circulated resources that incite antisemitism.”
And even before the NEA severed its relationship with the Anti-Defamation League, “NEA internal documents showed that NEA was not working with the ADL because of the ADL’s recent efforts to combat contemporary antisemitism,” the House panel said.
“The union has repeatedly framed antisemitism only in the context of white nationalism or from an anti-Zionist perspective, ignoring and alienating the many Jews who view Israel as a core part of their Jewish identity,” the report states.