At the third of four hearings convened by a “Special Commission to Combat Anti-Semitism,” Max Page, current president of Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA), asserted the right of MTA members “to engage in debate [which] necessarily means engaging with people with entirely different views and ideas of the same issue … to debate, learn, teach and protest without fear … and care for our students outside the school and college walls.…” He emphasized that concern to prevent anti-Semitism should not command more importance than combatting other forms of hatred.
Seated alongside a second speaker, a Seton Hall University professor of history, Page addressed a hearing of the “Special Commission To Combat Anti-Semitism,” which convened at the Massachusetts Statehouse today. The MTA has joined with a network of other organizations constituting a newly formed group “Together for an Inclusive Massachusetts” (TIM) which seeks to counter ADL-spawned organizing to equate opposition to acts of genocide with anti-Semitism or label such as anti-Israel. The “Special Commission To Combat Anti-Semitism” advances school curricula which reserves the use of the term genocide solely for identifying the Nazi slaughter of Jews in World War II, bans the use of the word to characterize Israel’s actions against Palestinians in Gaza, and cloaks the discussion of Palestine in a blanket-narrative sanitized of the horrors suffered by Palestinians, which have been witnessed and chronicled by numerous medical professionals who have served in that theater.