Above photo: A mural that was painted as part of the “No Place for Hate” program in Boyertown, Pennsylvania. MTSOfan/Flickr.
Examining The ADL’s ‘No Place For Hate’ Program.
Although the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has long portrayed itself as a champion of civil rights, this has been undermined by its unconditional support for Israel and its efforts to weaponize antisemitism against Israel’s critics. As those fighting racism increasingly embrace the cause for Palestinian human rights, the ADL has moved further away from its commitment to racial justice.
As a former ADL education director Danielle Bryant wrote in the New York Daily News:
I watched from the inside as the ADL erased racial justice from its civil rights priorities, caved to pressure from conservative media for being “too woke,” and quietly abandoned core education programs. The shift began with an internal pause on its use of the word “racism”. . . . Then, it removed “racial justice” from its portfolio altogether. . . . Then, it removed more than 100 lesson plans that helped educators address bias against LGBTQ, Muslim, and immigrant students.
With this in mind, it’s worth examining the ADL’s major education programs and what they offer — and don’t offer — schools. Starting with its flagship program – No Place for Hate.
Problems with ‘No Place for Hate’
The No Place for Hate (NPFH) program is one of the largest ways the ADL partners with K-12 educational institutions, reaching 2,000 schools, 190,000 educators and 1.8 million students — according to the ADL website. The program caters to both elementary and secondary schools, with a stated mission to empower students, teachers, and parents to “stand against bias and bullying” with school-wide pledges, projects, and games aimed at celebrating diversity and stamping out hate in the halls, in the cafeteria, and in the classroom — anywhere that hate may manifest.
The ADL claims to help administrators, teachers, and parents build “inclusive and safe communities in which respect and equity are the goals and where all students can thrive.” It’s hard to resist such a pitch, particularly when it comes with banners, buttons, balloons and bracelets as part of a polished package that outlines a step-by-step approach to creating community through “I Am” poems, peer-to-peer interviews, school surveys and collages of diverse smiling students.
A school that wants to become a designated NPFH school first must register with the ADL and form a steering committee of faculty and students to guide the work of building community and challenging bias at every turn. Perhaps because it focuses on bias instead of racial inequality, the ADL, unfortunately, does not suggest centering students victimized by bullying and racism to spearhead the committee. Nadia, a Washington D.C. area educator at an NPFH high school, told us that this created a situation where the predominantly white committee leading the school’s NPFH work was not working with students of color organizations doing similar work at the school. “If their true intention was to implement anti-hate or anti-bias work. Then wouldn’t the ADL manual say to make sure you go out of your way to build relationships with students of color?” she asked.
The first activity the NPFH committee is charged with is encouraging students, staff, and guardians to sign a schoolwide pledge individually committing to treating people with kindness and taking action to stop bullying and hate. While the words of the pledge are innocuous enough, it prominently features the ADL logo. The normalizing of an organization with a history of prioritizing unconditional support for Israel over fighting antisemitism and racism is concerning. As Casey, a San Diego parent whose daughter was on her elementary school’s NPFH committee told us, “A lot of what they’ve done through the ADL program has been basic love everybody, kindness, show respect type of activities but at the organizational national level the ADL is just so problematic I don’t think our school district should be associating with them.”
There’s another issue, too. For a school to be designated as a NPFH school a large portion of its student body is expected to sign the pledge. This can create a coercive environment particularly for those who disagree with outsourcing anti-bias education to a political advocacy organization, that according to the website Open Secrets, spent over a million dollars in 2024 to lobby lawmakers to vote for a pro-Israel agenda. As Anna, a high school teacher in Southern California, told us, “Some of our Arab and Muslim students felt alienated that our school was working with the ADL. They said, ‘as soon as we clicked on their website it said we stand with Israel.’ And they pointed out that their antisemitism tracker labeled anti-war protests as antisemitic incidents. That bothered them because a lot of them had been at those protests and they felt like they were being wrongly labeled antisemitic.”
ADL’s agenda comes through
But the most problematic aspects of the NPFH program come after students and staff sign the ADL pledge. Each school must then implement three of the ADL’s approved activities, such as discussions around identity, listening journals, and walks against hate.
For middle and high school, one of the recommended activities is a lesson plan entitled, “Antisemitic Incidents: Being an Ally, Advocate and Activist.” The lesson begins by asking teachers to “engage students in a discussion about antisemitism” by asking “What is antisemitism?” and then “elicit/explain” a troubling definition that includes the marginalization of Jewish people based on “stereotypes and myths about Jewish people, Judaism, and Israel.” (emphasis added)
After students and the teacher share examples of antisemitic incidents they have faced, seen, or heard about, the lesson then encourages engagement with the ADL’s “Audit of Antisemitic Incidents.” The teacher is instructed to “share a few points” from the audit’s summary “or alternatively have students read it.” This audit has been widely criticized, most systematically in Jewish Currents and Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, and has led to Wikipedia declaring the ADL an “unreliable source on antisemitism.” One reason is because the audit conflates speech and actions protesting Israel or Zionism — including those led by Jews — as antisemitic. Indeed, the 2022 audit used in the lesson includes a section on “Anti-Zionism/Israel-Related” incidents in which the ADL smears the organization Students for Justice in Palestine as responsible for many of these incidents (the 2023 audit expands this to include American Muslims for Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace, Palestinian Youth Movement, Students for a Democratic Society, and others).
Antisemitism, along with other forms of oppression, is on the rise — but defining antisemitism to include criticism of Israel intentionally uses antisemitism as a weapon against those advocating for Palestinian humanity and censors learning.
But of course, the lesson explores none of this as crucial information to anyone hoping to be an “ally, advocate, or activist.” Instead, the audit’s numbers are supposed to be accepted on face value followed by a student conversation that includes discussion questions such as “Why do you think there’s been an increase in [antisemitic] incidents over the past several years?” and “What impact do these incidents have on people who are Jewish and the Jewish community?”
Studying the rise of antisemitism in isolation from other forms of hate — such as Islamophobia, as well as anti-Palestinian, anti-immigrant, and anti-Black racism which are also on the rise — distorts its source and shifts blame from the right to the left, shielding the white supremacists the ADL claims to challenge. Furthermore, the conflation of Judaism with support for Israel ignores the hundreds of thousands of Jews marching in cities, conducting sit-ins in the Capitol and occupying train stations with t-shirts that read, “Stop Arming Israel” or “Not in Our Name.” The ADL does not count these activists as part of the Jewish community — but part of those perpetuating antisemitism. But Jews and Jewish organizations that have been leading protests around Israel’s war on Gaza have much to teach students about allyship, advocacy, and activism.
If a school wants to implement its own activity for challenging bias and bullying, it must first appeal to the ADL for approval. Absent ADL approval, the activity cannot count toward achieving official NPFH status. Anna told us that an ADL trainer who was assigned to work with her high school’s NPFH committee shut down multiple ideas students generated during committee discussions and as a result they decided to implement already approved activities. “We did these lessons schoolwide in our classes and they felt very surface level,” she said. “To be honest, I don’t think they’ve made any impact on the actual racism on our campus.”
For Nadia, the impact of the ADL on her school was damaging. “The ADL was invited to our school to do a presentation on antisemitism and it was so horrible and racist,” she said. “Hundreds of kids piled into our auditorium to listen to an ADL trainer who equated antisemitism with critiquing Israel and only gave examples of Black celebrities who were antisemitic. A couple of kids were brave and asked great questions, some were upset and walked out, some students and staff were upset to the point of tears. It was really bad.”
In another approved activity, titled “How Does Hate Escalate? An Examination of the Past and Present” students learn about the Holocaust, and then are introduced to the “Pyramid of Hate,” a tool that portrays how bias and hate can lead to systemic discrimination, violence, and genocide. In this lesson, students use the example of the Holocaust to identify aspects of bias and hate at different levels of the pyramid. But last December, when renowned physician and human rights advocate Dr. Suzanne Barakat, spoke to a group of 7,000 educators of color and dared to apply the Pyramid of Hate to the plight of Palestinians, several pro-Israel organizations, including the ADL, condemned Barakat for “extremely biased anti-Israel and antisemitic remarks” and demanded an apology.
The ADL continues to defend Israel’s bombardment and starvation of more than 2 million imprisoned Gazans, and ignores the multitude of experts around the world — including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and a growing number of Holocaust and Genocide studies scholars — who have labeled Israel’s actions genocide. In a statement published in late October 2023, the ADL wrote, “accusing Israel of genocide has the collateral effect [of] diminishing real acts of genocide — such as those that occurred in the Holocaust.”
A 2024 study by the Community Training Centre for Crisis Management in Gaza found “96 percent of children surveyed feel their death is imminent, while 49 percent have expressed a desire to die.” Yet No Place for Hate makes no attempt to build solidarity between children in the United States and children in Gaza — who make up almost half of Gaza’s population — and labels those that do antisemites worthy of condemnation.
Reinforcing the School-to-Prison pipeline
The ADL’s NPFH program rightly encourages students and teachers to “move on from kindness” and embrace a “social justice” approach to change. In their “No Place for Hate Coordinator Handbook and Resource Guide,” they further assert that, “in order to affect systemic change, students need to analyze and challenge” systemic problems such as “the school-to-prison pipeline.”
Yet the NPFH program does not encourage the removal of police from schools or using restorative justice as an alternative to punitive discipline — two demands that students and educators organizing against the school-to-prison pipeline have long called for. Under the subheading, “Best Practices for School Administrators,” the handbook advises principals to “clarify what the role and duties of school resource officers (SROs) and police should and should not be in the process. Contact law enforcement as necessary.” There is no mention of forming a student-faculty council on restorative justice that emphasizes making amends, performing school service, or developing empathy through role-plays. Indeed, as documented in the “Partnering with Law Enforcement” section of their website, the ADL has long had a close working relationship with police.
When antisemitism, bias, or discrimination occurs the ADL encourages students and teachers to report them to the ADL by completing an incident report form and in an emergency, call the police. The ADL then uses the incidents reported as evidence in their multiple civil rights complaints against universities and school districts. These complaints typically advocate punitive discipline for students and teachers. For example, the ADL’s Title VI complaint against the School District of Philadelphia advocates for the “suspension and expulsion” of students and the “suspension and termination” of teachers, who the ADL deems to have engaged in “discriminatory conduct.” In practice this has meant the targeting of students and teachers who have advocated for Palestinians. Given this, it is worth considering whether involving the ADL creates something akin to the school-to-prison pipeline that the ADL encourages students to critique.
Furthermore, every educator we interviewed acknowledged that the No Place for Hate program played no significant role in how their schools responded to actual incidents of hate or bullying. As one Maryland middle school teacher told us, “At the very beginning of the program, I really liked the excitement students had. But after two years, it fell off. There were many times at the school where there was bullying and discrimination and the program didn’t prevent or play a role in how we responded to those incidents — teachers would simply say ‘We’re supposed to be a No Place for Hate school, so why is this happening?’”
The bottom line
Antisemitism is real — white supremacy at Charlottesville, murders at the Tree of Life Synagogue, Nazi symbols at January 6 — but to redefine antisemitism to include criticism of Israel only undermines freedom of speech and critical inquiry while allowing a nation state to act with impunity.
This is one reason why, in its open letter to educators, the Drop the ADL from Schools campaign — endorsed by more than 90 organizations — writes the ADL “attacks schools, educators, and students with bad-faith accusations of antisemitism in order to silence and punish constitutionally protected criticism of Israel and the political ideology of Zionism.” The organization asks educators to cut ties with the ADL, including the use of its NPFH program.
For all its sensitivity in some areas, at the end of the school day, NPFH personifies the mythical character of the shapeshifter as it lures school districts into checking off the anti-bias box while surrendering authority to the highly partisan ADL. Sure, the program offers banners draped across hallways, pledges and to-do lists, and even some sage advice, but the pretty package turns ugly once fully opened and scrutinized. Although it’s tempting for administrators to subscribe to a free, pre-packaged curriculum, creating a positive school climate must be done bottom up, by creating a community of critical thinkers, principled actors, and life-long learners.
Rather than ceding control to the ADL, schools can build community through schoolwide public service projects, murals, and clubs that reflect students’ ethnic diversity, and cultural events that celebrate resistance to oppression and colonization. Schools and districts should draw on the work of antiracist educators and their own communities’ knowledge to develop programs to address racism, bias, and bullying. Studying best practices in implementing restorative justice can help school communities respond to incidents in a way that heals harm rather than reinforces a cycle of punishment.
Administrators and educators must consider the actual cost of a free program like No Place for Hate The answer to creating a positive school climate is not “out there” — in the hands of an organization with a political agenda — but in here, in the capable hands of trusted educators and in the school-to-community relationship.