By JNS Staff

(December 26, 2024 / JNS) The Zionist Organization of America said efforts by the National Association of Independent Schools didn’t go far enough in responding to criticism about antisemitic speech at its recent “People of Color Conference.”

Morton Klein, national president of the ZOA, and Susan Tuchman, director of the group’s Center for Law and Justice, wrote to NAIS leadership on Dec. 18 that the association “must take additional steps to send an unequivocal and more powerful message to its members and to the public that NAIS will not tolerate antisemitism in any form.”

The conference in Denver earlier this month “felt hostile, unwelcoming and even unsafe for many Jewish participants, compelling some of them to leave early and some to hide their Stars of David out of sheer fear,” the ZOA leaders wrote to Debra Wilson, the president of the National Association of Independent Schools.

On Dec. 5, Suzanne Barakat, former executive director of and current adviser to the University of California, San Francisco’s initiative on health and human rights, “abused the platform that NAIS gave her to demonize Israel” in her keynote speech to the approximately 8,000 educators and students in attendance, the letter stated.

The ZOA leaders noted that no one from NAIS intervened during her speech or anti-Israel remarks by closing speaker Ruha Benjamin, or publicly condemned their statements following the conference.

The NAIS posted a note on its website regarding the “divisive and hurtful comments” and apologized privately to the Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee, Jewish Federations of North America and Prizmah: Center for Jewish Day Schools. The four Jewish groups had expressed “deep concern” about the antisemitic activities at the conference in a Dec. 11 letter to Wilson.

The ZOA letter stated that a “truly meaningful response requires NAIS to issue a public statement” to its more than 2,000 member schools that would condemn the speakers by name; condemn their speech as antisemitic and explain why it is so; denounce Jew-hatred in all forms, including when “camouflaged as criticism of Zionism or Israel”; and encourage member schools and associations to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism.

Klein and Tuchman concluded that “NAIS should make it clear in its statement that schools cannot effectively address antisemitism if they do not understand what antisemitism is and how it can manifest.”

This article was originally published by JNS and can be viewed here.