Ep 63: Power-With With Gaza at Your Child's School with Nora Lester Murad

There are many ways to power-with and practice solidarity with our Palestinian and anti-Zionist Jewish co-conspirators, right? I know you might have already taken some direct actions like demanding a ceasefire or an arms embargo or boycotting and divesting from places that fund or benefit from genocide. Today’s episode invites you to take direct action and practice power-with at our children’s schools through a campaign called Drop the ADL from Schools. 

Why, you ask? Because social justice parenting is about practicing social justice actions like power-with in our homes. And in our community. The previous two episodes focused on your parenting in your home. Today let’s pivot and focus on one way we can practice power-with in the community, specifically at schools. 

Before we dive in, let’s root ourselves in our values. If you’re standing up for and with people who are oppressed by state violence whether from the police or the military or from violent ideologies like Islamophobia, antisemitism, or white supremacy… if you want to effect change in your children’s schools or school districts, let your direct action unfold from this place of value alignment…not from the place of canceling or demonizing the ADL or Anti-Defamation League. Drop the ADL campaign isn’t about demonizing this organization as you’ll hear it from our guest, Nora. Rather, it’s about using our power to dismantle white supremacy in our children’s classrooms and schools. 

Today I have the honor of speaking with a long-time writer, educator, and activist, Nora Lester Murad. Nora is from a Jewish family, and she raised three daughters in the West Bank with her Palestinian husband. 

[INTRODUCTION]

Sawadee ka, and welcome to the Come Back to Care podcast. A place where we’re re-imagining parenting to be deeply decolonized and intentionally intergenerational. If you’ve been looking for ways to practice social justice in your daily parenting and nurture your child’s development while re-parenting your inner child, I’m so glad you’re here. I am your host, Nat Nadha Vikitsreth, a decolonized and licensed clinical psychotherapist, somatic abolitionist, and founder of Come Back to Care. A dot connector, norm agitator and lover of liberation. In this podcast, we turn down the volume of oppressive social norms and outdated family patterns so that we can hear our inner voice and raise our children by our own values too. We come back home to our body and the goodness within. We come back to our lineages and communities. And we come back to care… together. So come curious and come as you are.

[EPISODE]

My dear co-conspirator, let’s gather around, get comfy before we move with the discomfort together. If that sounds generative to you, here’s my conversation with Nora…

[INTERVIEW]

Nat Vikitsreth (she/her): Welcome Nora. It's so good to be with you and meet you today.

Nora Lester Murad (she/her): Thank you, it's nice for me as well.

Nat Vikitsreth: Yes, and I would love to ask you to call yourself into the room and introduce yourself to our listeners.

Nora Lester Murad: That's my most hated question. Well, I am Nora Lester-Murad and I'm originally from California, but I live in Massachusetts now. And in between those, I lived in Palestine for many years, both before marrying a Palestinian and after marrying a Palestinian.

Nat Vikitsreth: Me too, me too.

Nora Lester Murad: I am Jewish. That's also an important part of my identity, as is being a lifelong anti-racist. I would say activist, but I just want to say like a person who really tries to live my life very proactively in an anti-racist way with social justice causes, you know, not part of my life. They are my life. It's... It's just really about how we can live in the world in a way that, for me, reflects my values and also reflects my aspirations for a better world.

Nat Vikitsreth: And it's so clear that anti-racism is one of the values that you live by. And in your earlier pieces that you wrote, you said that you just lead with love. And I wonder if there are other values that bring you to this campaign, Drop the ADL.

Nora Lester Murad: Yeah, certainly I feel a passion for the world we could live in, but I also feel a lot of anger about the world we do live in. And I know anger isn't a value, but I'm just naming that reality that while I'd like to be a person that leads with love, I'm not sure I always achieve that. There is a huge amount of overwhelm and anger and powerlessness right now when you are a part of the Palestinian community. For me, I'm a member of the Palestinian community by marriage, by motherhood. I raised three Palestinian daughters. They grew up in the West Bank under Israeli military occupation.

And I'm also a member of the Palestinian community by choice in the sense that over the decades, the movement for Palestinian liberation has been a lightning rod in the best of ways. I'm not sure what the word is for a good lightning rod, a lightning rod that's brought together people who are either taught or shocked into understanding that what the media tells us and sometimes what we learn in schools and often what we learn in our families and faith groups is not it's not fully true and it's also not constructive. So so I I'd like to think that that I lead with love but I do feel like I a lot of my energy right now is just coming from this sense of of.

How am I literally living through and watching a Holocaust and not able to stop it?

Nat Vikitsreth: Leading with love while feeling rage and anger around the injustice, it's, I just want to say that you're not alone, Nora. The families in our community also feel that very deeply. And what we're trying to do right now is to get out of cynicism and despair and let that rage fuel our action, which is why our conversation today is so timely. For our parents in the community to channel their rage and anger and heartbreak and grief into doing something in their local community and do so strategically to be in solidarity with our Palestinian co-conspirators.

Nora Lester Murad: That's beautifully said and very inspirational.

Nat Vikitsreth: It's so hard to practice day to day. You know it. I often tell the parents in my community that my day is going back and forth between rage crying in the shower, if I have the energy to take a shower that day, and also mobilizing in the community.

Nora Lester Murad: Yeah.

Nat Vikitsreth: And before we get to the details of the campaign, I want to lift up this quote from the piece that you wrote back in 2022, if that's okay with you.

Nora Lester Murad: We'll see. I'm not sure what you're going to quote yet. Let's see if I'll live by it still or not.

Nat Vikitsreth: Yes, yes. Wow, and change is a part of our work, right? So if that's okay with you, I'm going to read what you wrote. You wrote, quote, I said that the very survival of Jews as a people with an ethical lineage is tied to Palestinian liberation. I said that the litmus test of our morality or aspiration to it is whether we stand up for Palestinians right now." End quote.

Nora Lester Murad: Mmm, I was smart.

Nat Vikitsreth: You were, and are. Yeah. And that was in 2022, Nora. And here we are in 2024. I wonder if there's anything you'd like to add to that.

Nora Lester Murad: Well, if I had a nickel for every time I said it couldn't possibly get worse, I would be very, very rich. Over the course of my involvement with Palestine, which is more than 40 years now, it has gotten worse and worse and worse and worse and worse. And something about this time feels like we can't ever go back in a way.

Nat Vikitsreth: Mm-hmm.

Nora Lester Murad: I feel personally and among all the people I know broken, broken in an irreparable way. I do think that for people who think of themselves as liberal or progressive and who will very sincerely and genuinely fight for equality for Black, Latino, Asian, queer, people with disabilities, elders, any number of marginalized groups or dehumanized groups, but who can't understand or find it within themselves to include Palestinians. Just include…

Nat Vikitsreth: You

Nora Lester Murad: Or to not exclude or not allow the exclusion of Palestinians as we talk about humanity. I think for those people, is a, it's a it's crossroads, you know, like people who are liberal or progressive who don't yet understand Palestine and don't support the liberation of Palestinians as integral to everyone's liberation are failing to take a turn, and will continue in a direction that I fear very much supports the status quo of militarism, of inequality, and of none of us really being our full best selves. And I know that sounds self-righteous, like I'm saying, I made the right turn and others aren't making the right turn.

I do mean that I think we're all called to something really difficult right now. And I do believe that we can all heed that call and step up to the challenge, but we have not done so yet. And that's frightening for me. It's frightening for me as a Jew, as a woman, as a human being, just to realize that the friends and neighbors that I love.

Nat Vikitsreth: Mm-hmm.

Nora Lester Murad: If they're not going to be there when Palestinians need them, are they going to be there when I need them?

Nat Vikitsreth: Yes. The carton.

Nora Lester Murad: It creates a whole sense of insecurity in life, you know, just to see this happening with impunity.

Nat Vikitsreth: Yes, yes, and there's specific type of pain when the oppression has been going on and it keeps getting excluded and erased by the mainstream media while these liberals who are well-intended are chanting our liberation is tied together and yet they keep excluding this group and right now The narrative has been about, well, if you're criticizing Israel, and then the other end of the binary is that then you're uplifting Palestinian. And then we're stuck in this binary instead of seeing that it's a spectrum of white supremacy dividing us again. I wonder if you have any, yeah.

Nora Lester Murad: Definitely. Definitely. I think it's even worse than that. You're talking about mainstream media, you know, for the last year, all we've heard is Israel Hamas war, Israel Hamas war, Israel Hamas war. That's a binary. But that binary is even worse than saying Israelis and Palestinians or Jews and Arabs or anything, because they're literally framing it so that if you are not with Israel, you are with Hamas.

Nat Vikitsreth: Thank you

Nora Lester Murad: That is so reductive and so... It's reductive in a way that contributes to that erasure that you're talking about. You have people like me and lots and lots of people that I know and that I work with every single day who are fighting for everybody's wellbeing. And we don't get seen or understood because too many people think that anything that's good for Palestinians comes at the expense of Jews. And one reason why I'm working on the campaign to drop the ADL from schools is they're one of the organizations that so powerfully perpetrates and perpetuates that false framing within which we will not win. It's just a matter of who's gonna lose.

Nat Vikitsreth: Yes. And there's so many misunderstandings there. What would you like the listeners to know if you could pick one to two things about the campaign or the Anti-Defamation League, the ADL?

Nora Lester Murad: Well, the ADL is an organization founded in 1913 that's got decades and decades of reputation that's been built as a kind of self-described civil rights organization. Or what they say on their website is they're the largest anti-hate organization in the world.

The ADL works in an ecosystem with other what we call legacy Zionist organizations. Of course, there are Christian Zionists and Jewish Zionists. We have to keep that in mind. There are far more many Christian, far more Christian Zionists in the United States and in the world than there are Jewish Zionists. And they are very much represented in the Republican Party, but they're also represented, for example, Joe Biden, says he's a Zionist. Zionism is a political ideology that has been normalized as kind of as a default, a default. And these legacy Jewish organizations like the ADL and the others in the ecosystem, like the Jewish Community Relations Council, JCRC, the American Jewish Committee, AJC, in some places.

You know, you have Israeli American Council or ICANN or Zionist Organization of America. They're different ones in different parts of the country that kind of work together towards a common narrative that if you support Jews, if you are not anti-Semitic, if you want to be an anti-racist, you will support Israel. They have conflated Israel, which is a state that's 76 years old, a nation state. It's not just a nation state like, you know, like the United States or Canada. It's an ethno-national nation state. It's a nation state that privileges a particular group of people that are Jews. I call that Jewish supremacy. Maybe some people would find that offensive. It is offensive. Supremacy is offensive. So… so this ethno-national state of Israel, which is 76 years old, was founded on the expulsion and dispossession of Palestinians. It just was. I wish it wasn't that way, but it was.

It's very similar in some ways to how many white people feel about the United States. A lot of white people feel you know, it's really a good country, but we went off a little bit, you know, with the genocide of indigenous people and we went off a little bit with the slavery and we went off a little bit with the internment of Japanese. I mean, the idea that we're essentially good, but we make mistakes is a very nice idea that in some ways hides the reality, the truth of history, which is this country was fundamentally, fundamentally, and in every way was established on genocide and dispossession of indigenous people and of black people and of Chinese people. You talk about the railroad, you talk about Japanese in term. I mean, you can just go on and on. at, look at Puerto Rico today, which is essentially a colony and how folks in the public talk about Puerto Rico. Israel is the same thing. Israel was founded as a Jewish supremacist state on land that people lived on already and those people were Palestinian. Whether some people today think of Israel as a Jewish well-being or Jewish safety or Jewish self-determination is not engaging with the honest truth of history.

So I guess what I want people to know is that those legacy organizations like the ADL do not speak for all Jews, although they claim to. They claim to speak for all Jews. They do not. They speak for those Jews for whom Israel as an ethno-national state is part of their identity. I say that's not part of Jewish identity, that's part of their regular old white right wing, you know, kind of global north colonial militarized aspirations.

Nat Vikitsreth: That's right. Yeah. Thank you for that.

Nora Lester Murad: I think it's very hard for people who are not Jews. It's very hard for people who are not Jews to say, well, I don't want to take a position. You know, it's up to Jews to decide what Jews believe or who Jews are. I just want them to know we do not all agree. They can take their own position. They should take their own position based on their own analysis of actual facts.

Nat Vikitsreth: Yes. And thank you for that earlier breath.

I cannot imagine for you to have to talk about this over and over again to support many of us and bring us along up to speed on this journey. So the ADL is an organization that's not doing what it's claiming to do. And yet it has all the power and resources to be in lots of schools and school districts and providing quote unquote anti-racist, anti-hate support in curriculum. Would that be a fair summary?

Nora Lester Murad: Yeah, I mean, the ADL does lots of problematic things outside of schools and they have gotten some criticism for it. In 2020, a campaign was started called Drop the ADL and that campaign began with an open letter to progressives. The ADL is not an ally. And the folks that pulled that together spread that open letter far and wide.

There's now more than 300 organizational signatories. And part of that campaign was making sure that the public and progressive organizations and activists understand that even while the ADL is using this anti-bias or civil rights language, that they are very actively silencing and attacking communities of color and not only Palestinians, especially Palestinians, Muslims, African Americans and other communities of color who they perceive as threatening or who knows why.

But the ADL is very active in surveillance. They're very, very closely working with the police. And we know that we have reason to be skeptical and suspicious and cautious about the police because of their long history of undermining and harming communities of color. But over these last years, since that campaign was started, educators have come forward and said, but wait a minute, you're saying the ADL is doing bad things in schools, they're spying on communities of color. You know, they supported the apartheid regime in South Africa. They're supporting Israel even, you know, when Palestinians are fighting for liberation, but they do good things in schools. That's what a lot of educators say and parents.

So we founded this next iteration of the campaign, which is Drop the ADL from Schools to help people understand that the ADL is bad even in schools. And there are so many examples and ways to explain that, some of which I did in an article in Rethinking Schools earlier in October. And that article started out with kind of four areas of concern, the problem, the pedagogy, the policy and the protection. And it got edited down. So there's a lot in that article, but there are many other articles we also have to write to go a little bit deeper into each of those. If it's useful, I can try to give a a short explanation of each of those four areas.

Nat Vikitsreth: Thank you, Nora. And for our listeners, we have educators, we have therapists working with young children, therapists and care providers working in school, as well as parents. So before we go deeper into the campaign, Nora, and I will link all of your resources in the episode show notes, because they are rich. I want to bring in a moment of compassion because... I was one of those educators when I was working in school to use the ADL's resource without the critical consciousness. It was available, it was free, it was convenient to use. And I was citing their statistics and I was thinking, I'm using the resource from a Jewish organization. How bad could it be? And now, knowing better, doing better. So what might you say to those of us who have used their resources in the past without knowing better?

Nora Lester Murad: I feel that compassion too. I feel angry on your behalf. You know, the ADL and some of these and these other groups that they work with are disingenuous. They're deceptive. And it infuriates me very much the same way I feel angry at some of the ways the right wing weaponizes anti-racist language and concepts.

I'll give you an example. The anti-CRT right-wingers and book banners, they have managed to make a case that is compelling to some policymakers that exposure to information about racism, slavery, systemic inequality is harmful for white children because it makes them feel bad about themselves. So what they've done is they kind of have have weaponized some of the SEL, social emotional learning language, and turned it against the very values and intentions of those proponents. And what we need to do both in the case of the right-wing anti-CRT people and in the case of the Zionists is we need to unpack that a little bit. I feel a lot of compassion for how difficult it is to do that on our own when every part of society is pushing the same narrative.

And then we have to on our own say, wait a second, I know everyone's telling me this, but I'm going to look deeper and analyze it with my own values and my own experience. Yeah. So I'm sure that it is true that white students, some white students, not all white students, but some white students may in fact feel uncomfortable learning about the history of systemic racism. I know that I as a white person, as I continue because it's a never ending journey to realize the extent of systemic racism, I feel bad. I feel terrible. But that is a good terrible. That's right. That's the feeling of like I see something I didn't see before and I'm upset about it. And I'm also grateful now to see it so that I can act on it effectively.

Nat Vikitsreth: Yes, and that's what we practice or try to practice or are practicing in our community too, is that discomfort is a part of growth and development. It's in fact developmental stress that our children need to raise their consciousness. And thank you for that compassion to Nora. We're practicing this piece in our community that changing our minds to align with our values is a part of advocacy. And now that we have more information, we can act on it, like you said. So the crossroad that you mentioned earlier is calling us to interrogate very deeply about the things that the mainstream narratives are telling us what's right and wrong.

Nora Lester Murad: Absolutely, absolutely. And another thing I feel a lot of compassion for is that if folks do that, if they dig deeper and they realize that despite the way the ADL presents itself, it is not an organization that does good education or does honest education or is actually supportive of schools or learning, and then they speak out. They will be attacked. feel a lot, a lot of compassion knowing that people who go on this journey will face pushback and it can be a wide range of things. It can be a neighbor who gets mad at you, who stops speaking to you because you, you know, said something about including Palestinian kids in a school event or something.

It could be, I say that as if that's a small thing, but that's not a small thing. When your neighbor or your friend starts treating you differently or excluding you or feels judgmental towards you, that is not a nice feeling. And yet the spectrum of pushback can go all the way over to losing your job, having your reputation slandered, being sued in what I would consider a false lawsuit, certainly with a false accusation of anti-Semitism, because the ADL and others have created a, what do you call it?

One way to support Jews, only one. There's one way. You support Israel. That's the only way to support Jews. So if you're not going to do that, then you are anti-Semitic. It's become very black and white and somewhat dangerous.

Nat Vikitsreth: There's a real material consequence to taking action. And to your point earlier, it feels like we're pushing uphill. Having to interrogate the mainstream narrative as being incorrect is one. And doing so, we could lose something, neighbors, friends, support, jobs, promotions, whatever that is. So the challenge is there in going uphill.

Nora Lester Murad: Yes.

Nat Vikitsreth: And yet... If we really sit with our values and really understanding that, wait a second. If they're teaching us that there's one way to do things, that's a supremacy of one group at the expense of the other. So that's already not aligning with our values. So what do we do? I think in our community, we try to A, interrogate and then B, take action together.

Nora Lester Murad: Yeah, and keep in mind that not everyone gets to make this choice. Palestinians don't get to decide if they will remain silent and therefore not get pushback. Also, visibly Muslim people and anyone who can be perceived as being Palestinian or Palestinian adjacent, including Jews, face quite a…

Nat Vikitsreth: I'm sorry.

Nora Lester Murad: …constant kind of threatening environment. So for those people who are deciding to speak up, I'd just like to say that I hope you do because the more of us who do, the safer all of us will be. And it's just doubly not right to leave people who are already vulnerable out to advocate for themselves. It's just doubly not right.

Nat Vikitsreth: Yes, when we take action, we share the risk and we hold the risk together. And we're not leaving anyone hanging. And our children are watching how we show up to these moments, messy and imperfectly. Yes, thank you for that boost of courage, Nora.

Nora Lester Murad: Exactly. Thank you.

Nat Vikitsreth: I wonder if it feels right for you, instead of going into the four components in the original article, if we could go into, so what is this campaign asking us to do and why parents and educators are really powerful change agents?

Nora Lester Murad: Mm-hmm. What is the campaign asking folks to do is wherever they are in relation to the issue, a student, a parent, a parent activist, an educator, a retired educator, a union educator, an administrator, a community member, to learn how the school is managing these issues. These issues right now, the main issue that needs to be managed is what's happening in Gaza and the West Bank. The main issue is do teachers have the freedom to teach and the freedom to do their jobs, to allow and encourage students to engage with a range of perspectives and resources and to uncover facts and develop their own opinions about current issues. That's what teachers' jobs are. But are the teachers allowed to do that job right now? The answer is no. And if parents or students or community members have any relationship with schools, finding out how the school is managing this moment is absolutely key.

Now, there are a lot of parents who are engaging with the schools in a very, I would say negative and bullying way. We should not do that. We don't want to yell louder or, you know, or make bigger demands. That is not the point here. The point is we want the schools to be strong and to stand up against bullying. So we come to schools and to educators as allies, but as allies with high expectations. schools, we love you. We know you can do great. And we believe we're gonna help you do great. We're gonna help you do much greater than what you're doing right now. And that includes giving teachers, respecting teachers, freedom to teach, respecting students' right to learn and respecting students' and teachers' rights to express themselves. When students walk out on an anti-war walkout, which they are doing all over the country now and have been for the last year, and then they are disciplined for it, what are we communicating to students? What are we communicating?

Nat Vikitsreth: Yes.

Nora Lester Murad: We're communicating that, yeah, we tell you to think for yourself, but don't. We're gonna tell you what to think. We're gonna tell you how to act. That's dangerous. That's dangerous.

Nat Vikitsreth: We're gonna punish you and discipline you. Yeah. And I wanna name that.

This topic is hard on my heart, yet in talking to you and when you said ally with high expectations, it just brought a smile to my face. And it speaks to, think, our capacity to hold both the heartbreak and grief that's intergenerational and whatever that brings us joy and fill our cup to keep going and mobilizing with our co-conspirators. Like we have the capacity to hold both and just keep staying in the struggle.

Nora Lester Murad: Well, I think you're bringing that out. That's a wonderful spirit that you bring out. I don't always have access to that spirit, to be honest with you. And so it's really lovely to have this slightly different kind of the conversation, less political, less analytical, and a little bit more grounded, like you said, in the values and in our potential to be our better selves. It's not easy, though. It's really not easy.

Nat Vikitsreth: Mm… It's not, Nora. And as a trans woman, when I see my community members getting unalived, that's the word now these days, almost every month, and I have to advocate differently and I have to fight for liberation differently. Hence the spirit that I'm coming into this conversation with. Yeah, it's not easy at all. Right? We know that. Yeah.

And the theme in our podcast in this season is power with. We're trying to unlearn power over dominance in our home with our children so that we can power with them. And the effect is twofold. So we can strengthen our power with muscles and use it in our community, advocating for the causes that we believe in. And I hope that this conversation can really mobilize parents to power with, with one another in their schools, supporting their educators who are tired and exhausted and want to do good as well. And then power with, with the principals, perhaps with the superintendents, and then drop the ADL.

Nora Lester Murad: I love that. And to do it as quick as we can because while these issues have always been important right now, the magnitude and the depth of the brutality, there aren't even words for what is happening right now all over Gaza and in the West Bank. And because I have so many friends there and loved ones with whom I've been in community over decades and decades, I do feel an urgency that can come out as anger, and it is anger, but it's definitely urgency. And I'd like to try to put a different face on my anger, but I don't want to take away that urgency.

On the one hand, I believe in and I value the kinds of conversations that are slow and thoughtful and supportive. I do believe people can learn and people can change. I know I can learn and change and I continue to, but I also feel very impatient with the and also often unwilling to be honest with you to take a slow time with people who aren't doing their own work. Like I don't want to tell people what's happening in Gaza. They can go watch Al Jazeera. They can listen to Democracy Now and then we can come back and have a much better conversation. But in fact, people are not doing that homework. A lot of people are not doing that homework and they're coming out and they're saying, Nora, what you're saying is not true. And I'm like, hmm.

Nat Vikitsreth: Yeah. Yeah.

Nora Lester Murad: Yeah, like you're not only going to not do your homework, but then you're going to turn around and say that I haven't done my homework and, and you want to take my time.

Nat Vikitsreth: That's right. Yeah. And that's not our people in this community. We've been unpacking and doing the homework and we're looking for a concrete campaign that we can really exercise our rights. And please, Nora, hold on to your rage. And that urgency, that's so real. I feel that too. And her action needs to match the urgency of the moment. I truly believe that. Yeah. So I wonder if we can get specific. We have listeners who are new to using their power and listeners who are activists and veterans in this world. So if I can ask you examples for both, like people who have done the homework and they want to take action with Drop the ADL campaign, where would they start?

Nora Lester Murad: Well, they'd start by finding out how is the ADL present in their school or district because it can look very different depending on the school or district. Some schools are what they call no place for hate schools. They've signed up to an ADL program, which is an all school program with this wonderful name, No Place for Hate. It has a very pre-programmed, pre-packaged curricula, problematic coercive elements in it where the school is required to get 70 % of their teachers and students to sign a pledge, which I think is very coercive. But I think even more problematic than that is that schools are using this program as their diversity checkoff box. We're a no place for hate school. So we don't have hate here. Or, you want to do anti-Islamophobia training. no, we already do no place for hate. Like it is, it's not just taking a lot of real estate within schools, it's displacing anti-racist education with something the ADL itself calls anti-bias education. And that's important, I think, for us to know the difference.

Anti-bias looks at how individual students may have prejudice or or discriminatory actions or words usually towards another student and that you can help those students see that although there may be differences between them, whether it's color, language, whatever, that they have in fact a lot in common and they should be friends and it sounds lovely and yet anti-bias education excludes and invisibilizes any kind of systemic or historic analysis or context. the fact that a student may be discriminated against and bullied over the course of their time in school, let's say for their racialized identity, and then gets into some kind of a negative interaction with another student, all of that history and context becomes irrelevant. It's just two students. Two students, they have no identities or backgrounds that are relevant. There's no history that's relevant. There's no systemic analysis looking at are there teachers from this, you know, the students identity group or are they kind of out there on their own? How their parents are treated in the community of the school, whether their family is.

You know, there are just so, so many issues that come into play in a school that we need to address. An anti-bias approach explicitly does not address them and prevents them from being addressed by, you know, kind of infusing this anti-bias approach. Anti-bias is not the same as anti-racism. It's not the same as social justice. It's not the same as ethnic studies. It is a status quo approach. It's saying everything is fine here, let's just be happy. And if you're not happy, then we'll try to make you happy because everything is fine.

Nat Vikitsreth: It's not enough, right? And not enough at all. And I'm gonna try to be a parent who's wanting to talk to the teachers in the school about this. So I'm gonna put that ally with high expectations hat on. So I might go to the teachers and ask, hey, where do you get the curriculum? Or where did you get trained on these subjects? Would that be a good entry point? O r do you have other more strategic things that I can ask the school?

Nora Lester Murad: Talking about some potentially low-hanging fruit, potentially, potentially. Many states have resources on the state website for educators, resources for how to talk about current events in schools or how to address racism or how to address discrimination. Look at those resources. If they are ADL resources, try to get them removed. That can sometimes some people have had found that to be relatively easy to do. And how to frame that ask is something that's on the website at droptheadlfromschools.org. We have created some sample letters that you can just edit. You download them, edit them, depending on whether you're students or parents or educators, and provide them sometimes to the principal.

Nat Vikitsreth: Mmmm

Nora Lester Murad: Sometimes it's the state Department of Education. Sometimes it's at the district or school level. It really is important to think locally and act locally. How is the ADL in your school? If it's not a no place for hate school, you may not know the ADL is there at all. But is the ADL providing professional development to teachers? And if so, as you said, what's the substance of it? What's the content of it?

We are not trying to demonize the ADL. What we're trying to do is to say to schools that no organization that believes that some students matter more should be in our schools. No organization, no organization that attacks educators with false slanderous accusations or that sues educators and schools as a strategic as a tactic of their their mandate. Those are not educational partners. Don't bring them into your school and definitely do not outsource educational policy to the ADL. And here is one that probably every single parent listening can relate to. If there is an anti-Semitic event in a school and it's most likely going to be swastika in the bathroom. That's a very, very common anti-semitic incident in schools.

Many schools have the policy of notifying the ADL. The ADL notifies the police. Sometimes the school notifies the ADL and the police and your city human rights commission or human relations commission, etc. Find out what their procedure is for dealing with these events because over time they have been almost criminalized. You know, to bring the police in on a swastika in the fifth grade bathroom is completely to deflate the possibility of a learning moment. When these things happen, we need to slow time down and say to one another, do we know what this this symbol means? Do we know the history of it? Do we understand how it impacts different groups? By the way, not only Jews, but others who are targeted by Nazis historically and contemporarily. How as a community should we try to address these things when they happen? If we go about it that way, which is both a learning approach and hopefully a restorative justice approach. What you end up with is not only fewer swastikas on the bathroom, but you'll end up with fewer N words on the bathroom. And you'll end up with fewer all kinds of horrible things on the bathroom walls.

But what the ADL does is both a punitive approach where no tolerance. Send an email to the whole school. Tell them zero tolerance for antisemitism. It becomes very alarmist. Everyone gets triggered like my God, my God, you'll find that there's an article in the local newspaper about rampant anti-Semitism. It's alarmist. It is out of whack, both with the reality of the danger Jews actually face. So it makes Jews scared. It points people at Palestinians because there's an assumption that, if somebody's doing something anti-Jewish, it's probably an Arab or a Muslim, because you know they hate Jews, which is absolutely a false racist stereotype, but one that is still commonly held. And it exceptionalizes anti-Semitism as if it is worse and worse than other kinds of hate and harm. And how can we build solidarity when we say, know, a swastika in the bathroom is worse than the N-word in the bathroom? No. All students and all communities are hurt by all of these symbols and speeches and it's everyone's interest to address all of them and not to separate one out as being worse or different.

Nat Vikitsreth: And it's the white supremacy's playbook that we are so familiar with, that urgency, that punishment, perfectionism, either or. And we get to see that played out right here. And I believe that parents and educators have so much power in disrupting that. And I so appreciate your example and talking points that are so clear. And that punishment, that reactivity just squashes any learning opportunity for all students to unpack this and understand.

Nora Lester Murad: And it's what's happening for adults as well. I mean, if you recall a couple of years ago, Whoopi Goldberg made a comment on The View about a book, a Holocaust book, and she made a comment. She got disciplined. She was put on leave for two weeks. She couldn't come to work. The ADL was on every single major channel for at least a week, network, had to make a contribution to the ADL, they had to do training because nobody and you know what at the end of all of that nobody ever said what was antisemitic about that comment and I personally who am Jewish I do not know what was antisemitic about it. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't, I don't know. We never got to talk about it because you're not supposed to say anything or ask anything or learn anything. They just want to have complete control over this so that what they say, everyone says, okay, it's almost like the emperor has no clothes.

Nat Vikitsreth: That's right. They use the same control, coercion, domination and punishment, all those tactics again. So I hear you that we're not just here to demonize and cancel the ADL, but we're offering the school and becoming their ally by offering other alternatives that are more nuanced and more aligned with our values in terms of training curriculum and materials and resources.

And I wonder if there are other go-to resources that you would like the parents to bring to the school when they have this conversation with the teachers or the principals.

Nora Lester Murad: It's the most commonly asked question. What's the alternative to the ADL? And I think we worked on it for maybe eight months before we realized the question is not going to lead us. That framing of the question is part of the problem because there is like an ADL shaped space in schools. And if we remove the ADL and put someone else in that same space, we will not have achieved anyone, anything.

Nat Vikitsreth: Like reforming versus abolition.

Nora Lester Murad: It is, it is a lot like that. It's a lot like that. So I won't say, kick out the ADL and bring in the blah, blah, blah. What we ended up deciding to do, and you can find these resources on our website. There's an advocacy toolkit. We decided to say to schools, please develop your own internal policy and capacity, trust your teachers, pay your teachers both to develop this capacity and to implement it and to become strong as schools in your own anti-racist social justice journey. And if, and there's a part B, and if you do need to bring in assistance for some issue that you don't have internal capacity for, then vet them according to certain criteria and these criteria you'll find on our website. It's a vetting criteria and it says, as I said before, if they attack students and teachers, they shouldn't be educational partners. If they promote an ideology that says one group has rights to comfort at the expense of the rights to life of another group, they shouldn't be brought in.

All you read the whole vetting criteria, the ADL is never mentioned. And it's not mentioned because these are our universal criteria. We shouldn't be bringing in any organization, whether they are, you know, Jewish, Israeli, Muslim, Arab, Black, white, whatever. Disability orgs, LGBTQ orgs, if they are offering certain communities more value than others, they're not appropriate to bring into schools.

Nat Vikitsreth: That's right. That's right. And when I read those two Google Docs, the toolkits, Nora, that was the part that struck me the most where it's not another resource to put in place of ADL, but developing your own community-based wisdom and practice. Kind of grow your own. And these criteria in the toolkits develop the decision-making process. So we can begin to trust our own judgment and discernment with the people that we mobilize with. And I think it's so aligned with what we do at Come Back to Care, where don't let me tell you how to raise your child, but here's the framework, and you can go practice and discern and adapt it to be your own method.

I so appreciate your work, your voice, your anger, Nora. So, so appreciate you. I will link everything in the episode show notes so people can plug in where they are and organize locally. I wonder as we're coming to a close, my final question is, is there anything else in your spirit that you want to share and leave it here before we end our call.

Nora Lester Murad: I appreciate the question. Well, assuming that some of your listeners are themselves Jewish. I guess I want to say as a Jew who has been privileged to see and experience a lot of things that other Jews haven't. You know, I've lived under occupation. I've been to Gaza many times. I founded organizations in Palestine. I've been a Jew in Palestine. A lot of Jews haven't had that privilege to be a Jew in Palestine. I guess I just want to call out how harmful fear is and the real difference between fear and danger. When I'm speaking with some people about Israel or Zionism or genocide and they say, I can't stay in this conversation, I'm unsafe. I say, hmm, you know, there's a difference between fear and danger. I get you feel fearful, but this is not a dangerous conversation and we're not in danger here. So then the question is, where's that fear coming from? And I think it's coming from the ADL.

The ADL tells us many times a day, anti-Semitism is rising. Everybody hates Jews. It's, you know, five minutes away from the next Holocaust. They're so alarmist that it creates fear in Jews. And I just would like Jews and non-Jews to, yes, take anti-Semitism seriously. It's a real thing. It is 100 % a real thing. And we should take it seriously. And we should also not distort it. Because two things happen. One is it creates this fear which becomes, you know, it closes down our thinking skills when you're scared, right? That's the whole, the biology of fear. It does that and it harms our quality of life as Jews to live our lives in fear all the time. And I think it distorts our ability to really be in solidarity with other people for whom the material risk is far greater. For example, you me, I'm Jewish and I'm a woman. I'm much more likely to be attacked and harmed as a woman than I am as a Jew. But if I look at my friends who are African-American mothers like me, they are much more likely to die in childbirth than I am, or to be denied a job, or to be denied a home.

And so I think that the alarmist, the fear mongering is very harmful to Jews themselves, even if you don't care about Israel and you don't care about Palestinians. I think our quality of life as Jews and our ability to really be in true honest relationship with other people and to hear their experiences with inequality and oppression would be better if we could just remind ourselves, especially those of us like I live in Massachusetts, if you there are certain parts of the country where you might actually be in, you know, in much greater risk. But that's why it has to be assessed. Don't listen to the headline telling you to be scared all the time, look around and say, do I need to be scared all the time or am I looking out my window in my garden and I'm okay? Palestinians and Gaza are not okay, but I am okay.

Nat Vikitsreth: Yes, in our community we often ask, am I unsafe or am I uncomfortable? And then let that response guide our next steps. So thank you for bringing us to the crossroads that call us to interrogate the things that have taught us that this is the only right way to advocate. And to bring us back into alignment with what we believe in and use Drop the ADL as one concrete action for us to shape change where we are. And I think parents and educators are so powerful in school for us to take this action together.

Nora Lester Murad: I hope so and I hope they'll stay with us in community and let us know what they're doing and what they need. It's a movement. You're not out there on your own. Be connected. Say what's working, what doesn't work, and we'll figure it out together.

Nat Vikitsreth: Yes. Thank you so much, Nora, for your time and wisdom. I'm with you in solidarity. Yes. Thank you.

Nora Lester Murad: Thank you. Thank you and thanks to your community.

[EPISODE END]

Alright, my dear co-conspirator, I’m so grateful that you’re here taking risks, taking action with us, and staying in this struggle towards liberation together. I’ll link all incredible resources made by Nora in the episode show notes for you. They truly are incredible, concrete, actionable, and real. As always, in solidarity and sass. Until next time, please take care.