Max Page, the president of the Massachusetts Teachers’ Association, was the star witness at the fourth meeting of the Massachusetts Commission on Combating Antisemitism, held last week. He was testifying about “Countering Antisemitism in K-12 Education,” according to the meeting agenda. Shortly after October 7, the union he leads, the MTA, decided to support an “immediate and permanent ceasefire” and would urge the NEA to pressure the government to stop supporting Israel’s “genocidal war on the Palestinian people.” At the same time, the MTA decided to “develop a framework for discussing and set of curriculum resources for learning about the history and current events in Israel and Occupied Palestine, for MTA members to use with each other and their students.”

About a year later, the MTA, after “much reflection,” provided its members with “a variety of materials that introduce multiple perspectives and voices.” Those materials included a display of pro-Palestinian posters with “perspectives and voices” like Kevin Yuen Kit Lo Zola’s, whose poster is titled “Zionists Fuck Off,” a “a replica of the Star of David made out of folded dollar bills,” and a storybook for very young students bout a young girl whose family had to flee because “a group of bullies called Zionists wanted our land so they stole it by force,” and encouraged the young students to engage in letter-writing campaigns and chanting at protests.

You can and should watch the testimony at the Commission’s website, because as Justice Brandeis said, “sunshine is the best disinfectant.” The co-chairs of the Commission, Representative Cataldo and Senator Velis, questioned Page at length about whether the materials were antisemitic and about why they were so one-sided. Page didn’t want to answer the questions and eventually stopped answering them because there is no real answer. It’s shocking that a public employees’ union would distribute materials like these to its members, more shocking that it seemed to want its members to use them with students.

Here is my takeaway. If you say, “I don’t actually agree with all the ideas in the documents that we are providing to teachers,” and you’re asked whether a particular document that you’ve provided is antisemitic, you can’t really say, “I don’t want to answer that” without giving everyone reason to think that you do agree with it, or at least that your honest answer would be something like, “I don’t agree with it, but the author has a point.” If you say, “We don’t think our teachers are going to accept all of this without using their own critical judgment to evaluate the documents,” then you have to have an answer for why the materials you have provided them are so one-sided and unbalanced.

Page had no answer to these questions. The hearing was therefore exceptionally helpful as a way to show that the emperor has no clothes. Page’s protestations that he and the MTA understand that antisemitism is on the rise and that they are eager to fight it are empty. He was left complaining that the hearing was an “inquisition” that was “beneath the dignity of the Legislature.” And while he called the presentation of materials at the hearing “selective,” he didn’t point to any fairer, more honest, or less antisemitic materials, and as a recent report shows, the MTA’s materials really are as one-sided and unfair as the hearing suggested.

Page likes to emphasize the democratic nature of the MTA. In fact, the MTA does elect its leaders democratically, though as I understand it, elections are typically low-turnout affairs driven by activists. Let’s hope that the majority of teachers have had enough and are ready to elect better leaders at the next opportunity.