(JTA) — The Trump administration is launching an antisemitism investigation into the National Education Association, the influential public school teachers union, over purported employment discrimination.

The probe is based on allegations that Jewish members of the NEA were harassed and “physically intimidated” during the organization’s 2025 annual convention, including a reported case of NEA members appearing to cheer at mention of the 2005 attack on a march for Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colorado.

The complaint, based on the accounts of several Jewish NEA members, also spotlighted recent controversies, such as materials from the union that labeled a map of the state of Israel as “Palestine” for Indigenous People’s Day and a handbook that failed to identify Jews as the primary victims of the Holocaust. They further alleged that the union’s diversity hiring guidelines harmed its Jewish members.

The Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, a legal group that has brought several other such antisemitism cases to the Trump administration, filed the complaint that triggered the NEA investigation. The case is being handled through the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, whose authority to investigate employment discrimination also extends to union membership.

“We really appreciate the EEOC’s decision to open this investigation,” Marci Miller, director of legal investigations at the Brandeis Center, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

In a statement to JTA, the NEA said, “We take concerns like this seriously and are reviewing the matter through our established processes.” The union added that it “does not tolerate antisemitism in any form and is committed to ensuring that all members and students, including Jewish members and students, can work and learn in a safe and welcoming environment.”

The NEA has previously said its map labeled “Palestine” “does not meet our standards,” and updated its Holocaust handbook in response to the pushback.

Jews in public school education have expressed concern about tensions over the last few years. In 2021, many Jewish groups rallied against NEA proposals to oppose Israel; the measures did not pass. At its 2025 convention, the NEA had voted to boycott the Anti-Defamation League, though its executive committee rejected the vote following pushback from Jewish groups.

The GOP-led House Committee on Education and the Workforce is also investigating the union over antisemitism, citing several of the same instances later outlined in the Brandeis Center complaint.

The EEOC’s NEA case is part of an expansion of the Trump administration’s antisemitism investigations beyond college and K-12 campuses. Last week the U.S. Health and Human Services Department opened its own probe into the American Psychological Association, also based on a Brandeis Center complaint.

In addition to alleged harassment of Jewish members at the convention, Miller said the center’s NEA complaint also involved diversity-based hiring practices at the union: “Jewish members in particular have been harmed by this policy because they have not been recognized as a racial or ethnic group worth counting for purposes of this policy.”

The EEOC has tackled antisemitism cases against other institutions, but its role in such investigations is controversial. The agency’s chair, Andrea Lucas, is currently demanding that the University of Pennsylvania turn over a list of Jews affiliated with the university as part of the commission’s antisemitism investigation into the Ivy League school. Several Jewish groups, as well as the university itself, have argued that such a demand will make Jews less safe.

Some Jewish groups have alleged that the administration has used antisemitism allegations as a pretext to undermine institutions it considers ideologically unfriendly.

One of Lucas’s defenders in the Jewish community is Kenneth Marcus, the Brandeis Center’s founder. Lucas herself is not Jewish but recently defended her legal strategy to Jewish leaders at a campus antisemitism conference.

Asked about this, Miller said the Brandeis Center was providing “dozens” of Jewish witnesses to the EEOC for consensual interviews.

“There’s no demand for anybody else,” she said. “We have plenty of information.”

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post Feds open antisemitism investigation into National Education Association appeared first on The Forward.

New York City Democratic voters are going to the polls today in congressional primaries that are doubling as a referendum on U.S.-Israel relations, as candidates allied with Mayor Zohran Mamdani test whether his brand of democratic socialism and criticism of hardline pro-Israel money in politics will translate into broader electoral success.

Mamdani has endorsed Columbia Gaza war encampment leader Darializa Avila-Chevalier and former City Comptroller Brad Lander in challenging sitting members of Congress, and Assemblymember Claire Valdez for an open seat.

All have campaigned using the terms “genocide” and “apartheid” to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank, and Mamdani himself has singled out Israel and its champions as adversaries.

At a Brooklyn campaign rally last week, Mamdani compared the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to “monsters” who “move millions in dark money to accomplish a single goal — to preserve their power, so that they can turn us against one another.”

The statement drew widespread condemnation from Jewish leaders, including some of Mamdani’s supporters. And it comes as Democratic infighting over Israel nationally has intensified, with candidates across the political spectrum increasingly treating support from AIPAC as politically toxic.

All three of the Mamdani-endorsed congressional candidates have made Israel or AIPAC a central part of their campaigns, though each in different ways. AIPAC backs candidates aligned with continued U.S. support for Israel military aid and has spent upwards of $38 million nationally this election cycle, a Politico analysis found — though exact AIPAC contributions are difficult to track due to its use of shell PACs and tactic of funneling money directly to campaigns.

In the 10th Congressional District in lower Manhattan and western Brooklyn, Lander is challenging incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman, zeroing in on Goldman’s support for U.S. military aid to Israel and his past ties to AIPAC. Lander opted not to take part in New York City’s annual Israel Parade, while Goldman used his participation to appeal to Jewish voters.

Earlier this month, Israel and Gaza consumed roughly 15 minutes of a one-hour debate between the candidates. Goldman expressed a desire to move on, arguing that “Israel is not the most important issue in this district,” while Lander countered that Gaza represents “one of the significant moral and humanity challenges of our time.”

Goldman has defended his support for Israel as consistent with his values. He told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in February that there is “an undercurrent of antisemitism in the degree to which AIPAC seems to be vilified.”

The heat boiled over on Sunday when a Brooklyn coffee bar chain, Poetica Coffee, declared on social media after Goldman and his young daughter stopped by that it would have turned Goldman away from the cafe had staff known who he was, posting to Instagram that they don’t serve “genocide enablers.”

Next to a picture of Goldman taken outside the shop after he had ordered a coffee, and another image showing $9.82 refunded, the post added: “Do you see how it doesn’t taste like genocide juice? Or are you still having a hard time telling the difference?” (The account has since been disabled.)

Lander, who identifies as a liberal Zionist, had acknowledged the potential for anti-Israel passions in the race to get out of hand — telling an interviewer that criticizing AIPAC makes him “queasy” given “the antisemitic tropes at play,” but that he feels an obligation to call out its funding nonetheless as he promises to curtail U.S. military aid to Israel.

Goldman has not commented on the incident, other than to reply on Instagram: “The barista could not have been nicer to my 7-yr-old daughter and me.” Lander criticized the coffee shop’s response, telling the Forward, “There are plenty of ways to lobby elected officials and express outrage at the votes they’ve taken without turning coffee shops into places people don’t feel welcome.”

On the other end of the spectrum, Avila Chevalier attended a rally held in Times Square on Oct. 8, 2023 widely condemned for condoning Hamas’ violence. She has said she attended in anticipation of an Israeli military response, citing “a pattern in which whenever there is an incident, the state of Israel engages in a response that is often disproportionate and creates a greater loss of life.”

And she told the New York Editorial Board last week that Zionism “is an ideology that is looking to create a political system where one group of people has more standing before the law than another group of people.”

She faces AIPAC-backed incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat in NY-13, which covers Upper Manhattan and portions of the Bronx.

“To know that my opponent takes AIPAC money is something that, for a lot of people, is just disqualifying. It is [about] Palestine at the heart of it, but it’s also what it says about someone’s inability to stand up against something that is so blatantly horrific, someone who refuses to name a genocide,” Avila Chevalier told the Nation. “Can you trust someone who won’t even say that word to fight for you on the most basic of issues?”

Addressing AIPAC’s support for him in a primary debate, Espaillat said “no one dictates or tells me how to vote, my constituents do that.”

Meanwhile, in NY-7, which includes parts of Brooklyn and Queens, Valdez has sought to make Israel and AIPAC a campaign issue in a race where AIPAC is not involved and the candidates have broad agreement on Gaza.

Valdez faces Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, whom she has critiqued for not using the word “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions until after he announced his candidacy. She also accused Reynoso of benefiting from secretive pro-Israel money, despite no evidence that AIPAC has supported his campaign.

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Diana Kurz is on a roll. Last April, the 89-year-old, Viennese-born New York artist had a solo show of her abstract paintings, “Diana Kurz: A Journey of Discovery,” at the Lincoln Glenn Gallery in Chelsea. Motorists on the New York State Thruway can now see “The Hudson River Downtown, Triptych,” her large landscape reproduced as a permanent installation at the Ardsley Service Plaza, the first stop outside Manhattan. The US State Department recently chose two of Kurz’s still-life paintings for the US Embassy in Paraguay. And a series of Instagram reels featuring Kurz explaining aspects of her practice have earned her more than 24,000 followers. Kurz’s work will also be included in Lincoln Glenn’s “American Women Artists and the Century of Change,” opening later this summer.

“This is a time in New York to celebrate women artists of a certain age,” Kurz told me, mentioning that painters Joan Semel, Martha Edelheit, Lois Dodd and Judith Bernstein, all in their eighties and nineties, have been receiving renewed attention. “If you live long enough. But then, the work itself is what keeps you going.”

“Diana has been part of New York’s art culture since the early 1960s,” said Douglas Gold, co-founder of Lincoln Glenn, which focuses on artists who worked in New York between 1940 and 1980. “The women of this era continued painting despite an incredibly misogynistic culture. Dealers wouldn’t handle them or if they did, wouldn’t raise their prices, and the men of the period drank together and networked in downtown bars where women didn’t feel welcome. Historians, museums, people motivated to research this period, have taken note. It’s a moment to recognize the women who kept moving forward no matter what.”

‘One painting leads to another and another’

I first met Kurz in 1995 when I profiled her for the New York Jewish Week. Back then, the loft where she lives and works, a former doll factory in SoHo, had been taken over by a project both personal and enormous: larger-than-life paintings based on photos of men, women and children lost in the Holocaust, many of them her family members. She’d never intended to explore this material, had spent much of her artistic life avoiding the pain of her family’s narrow escape from the Nazis in 1940, when she and her parents boarded the last boat out of Southampton. Her father’s eyewear business had franchises beyond Austria, critical outposts that helped them flee.

When Kurz was growing up in Kew Gardens, Queens, in the 1940s and ‘50s, she was aware of family  who’d perished in the concentration camps, but she also wanted to be an ordinary American and fit in. For many years, she denied her European background. Then, in 1989, on a trip to California, an aunt showed her a tiny photo of her uncle holding his baby daughter, both of whom died in the Holocaust (the family never learned the details of their fate) and she decided to make a painting based on the photo. “I never start out saying I’m going to do a big project, but sometimes one painting leads to another and another,” she told me.

A painter with roots in abstract expressionism, Diana is known for her dynamic use of color. “All that I learned painting abstractly, about composition, color, form and space, that’s in my figurative work too. It’s just as important to me as the image itself,” she said.

The luminous vitality of her palette and the depth it creates is what stays with me most in these works. In “Three,” which is nine-feet high, a father stands on crutches. He’s missing a leg, and on the lapel of his suit, he’s wearing the medal he earned in World War I. He holds the hands of his two small children, a little girl and boy each wearing the yellow star. The portrait is based on a photo of Eastern European Jewish war veteran Victor Fanjnzylber, whose heroic status exempted him from wearing the star but didn’t exempt his children. In the end, all three were still deported.

The little girl’s dress is a deep blue that almost glows, the boy’s shirt is apple green with yellow undertones (rhyming disturbingly with bits of the yellow star peeking out from under the suspenders of his short pants). The grey-violet of the father’s suit, with its folds and pleats, is deepened by its proximity to the  daughter’s dress.

“Because of all the black-and-white photos we tend to associate with the Holocaust, people don’t realize how often the horrors took place on beautiful days, under clear skies,” said Kurz, “When reading people’s recollections, I was often struck by the irony of the fact that terrible, unspeaking things occurred while the sky was blue, with birds singing.”

‘I had no choice. I had to do that work.’

Kurz told me that she always knew she was an artist. “I remember my father saying to my mother that they’d better start frequenting museums because ‘if she’s going to be an artist we’d better know about it,’” she said. While working towards her MFA at Columbia in the late 1950s, she painted large, classically abstract expressionist paintings, and says she often learned more from her fellow students than from her teachers, who didn’t always take women seriously. Yet she persisted, and in 1966 won a Fulbright to Paris, where she was mentored by painter and art theorist Jean Hélion.

Hélion, a survivor of a German prison camp, encouraged her to try incorporating figures into her abstract work; he was the one who first gave her the photo that would become the painting “Three” two decades later. During residencies at Yaddo in 1968 and ‘69, she met Philip Guston, an important influence, who was remaking himself in those years, moving from the abstract to the tangible. Back in lower Manhattan, she became part of a group that included Mercedes Matter, Philip Pearlstein and Lois Dodd, all of whom were exploring figurative art and drew and painted from live models.

Solo shows followed, including three at the Green Mountain Gallery in the 1970s, and three at the Alex Rosenberg Gallery in the 1980s, highlighting her still life and portraiture. “Then I took on the Holocaust paintings and had no major shows for many years,” she said. “But I had no choice. I had to do that work.”

Kurz said she knew these paintings would be difficult to sell. “These are not portraits to hang over the couch or whatever,” she told me. Thus far, there have been 13 solo shows featuring the work, mostly in college and university galleries. “It’s allowed me to tell the history to newer generations, many of whom don’t know it.”

In 1998, the Bezirksmuseum Josefstadt in Vienna showed the “Remembrance” series in total as it existed then. Wien Museum (formerly known as the Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien) purchased two of the paintings. Another small canvas is at Yad Vashem. A major American museum has never done a comprehensive exhibit of all 18 portraits. This would seem the time for it.

Meanwhile Kurz continues to paint. “For me, inspiration comes through working,” she said. “You can’t sit there and wait for it.” Since 2005, she’s been painting a series of “small portrait heads,” mostly of actors, musicians, and dancers, young people from every possible background and ethnicity who are now filling up the same walls where “Remembrance” once dominated. The sitters are mostly under 30, and “I can look at them and see all this potential.” There are 43 so far, though she hopes one day to reach a hundred, and perhaps do an installation.

“I tell the models just to sit and look at me, and everyone puts such different energy into it. I find it fascinating,” said Kurz. “I love painting from life.”

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