A growing number of Jewish teachers are leaving the San Francisco teachers union over their disagreement with its strident pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel activism.
Six of them confirmed with J. that they have either resigned from or are in the process of withdrawing from United Educators of San Francisco (UESF). They told J. they are fed up with what they describe as hateful, divisive rhetoric spread by union leaders who appear more concerned with global politics than the working conditions of members.
The number is even higher than that, according to Lowell High School math teacher Elizabeth Statmore. She told J. that she knows of 14 Jewish educators besides herself who have left UESF in protest since the union passed a cease-fire resolution in November 2023. Even more have asked her for information about withdrawing.
“Why am I paying dues to subsidize these people’s political hobbies, which include calling for the death of my people?” Statmore said.
The union has passed three resolutions condemning Israel since 2021.
In May 2021, during fighting between Israel and Hamas, UESF passed a resolution “in solidarity with the Palestinian people” that endorsed the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.
In November 2023, the UESF passed a resolution calling for a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war and for the U.S. to cut aid to Israel, describing a litany of alleged human rights violations committed by Israel. The measure did not mention the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack that instigated the war or call for the release of hostages taken into Gaza. “Our commitment to public education extends beyond our local community, and we acknowledge the deep connections between the global community and the well-being of our students and educators,” the resolution stated.
Most recently, on Feb. 19, the union voted to establish a Palestine Solidarity Committee, which according to the resolution’s text will “defend the right to speak out against the ongoing Israeli war on Palestine.”
The union rarely comments on other international conflicts, though it did adopt a resolution in support of Ukraine in March 2022 after Russia’s invasion started the current war.
Statmore has been a member of UESF since 2014. For the last five years, she was also a member of the union’s assembly, a body giving her voting power on the resolutions that any member can introduce.
Statmore told J. that she decided to initiate the process of leaving UESF following the Feb. 19 assembly meeting when members voted to establish the Palestine Solidarity Committee.
Roughly 50 to 60 assembly members attended that meeting, Statmore estimated, and around 40 voted in favor of the resolution. J. could not obtain the exact vote count.
In response to the resolution, Statmore wrote a Feb. 27 opinion piece in the Voice of San Francisco, an online publication, that criticized the union for using its resources to make political statements instead of improving the working conditions of the city’s public school teachers.
“We are quitting en masse,” she wrote, describing “escalating hate and intimidation we Jewish members continue to experience in UESF.”
Statmore told J. that the Feb. 19 resolution “just felt like such an ethical betrayal and dereliction of their duty of fair representation.”
Since late February, Statmore said, she has received more than 20 requests from teachers, some of whom are not Jewish, for help in withdrawing their UESF membership. To address their requests, she created a document that lays out what steps members need to take to submit their resignation from the union.
“We’re now thinking about what is the best path forward,” Statmore said. “I should not have to abandon my identity in order to be a union member.”
Other Jewish union members, such as visual arts teacher Susie Kameny, have decided to stay in UESF, despite their disapproval of the union’s activism.
Kameny said she has tried to join the newly formed Palestine Solidarity Committee but has been unsuccessful so far.
Having spent a month as a high schooler on Kibbutz Erez — located less than a mile north of the Gaza border — Kameny told J. that she wants to join the committee out of a genuine desire to share her perspective on the conflict. Kibbutz Erez was among the targets of Oct. 7. Unlike other nearby kibbutzim that lost scores of members, just one member of Erez’s security team was killed.
Kameny told J. that soon after she learned about the union’s new committee, she reached out to UESF leaders to ask about how to join. The resolution text does not specify what steps union members should take to join the new committee. So far, despite follow-up calls and emails, Kameny has not yet heard back from union president Cassondra Curiel or any other member of UESF’s leadership team.
“When you create a controversial committee, you should be able to articulate when and where and how to join,” Kameny told J. “Someone should have called me back by now, as a member. We pay union dues so that when we call and need assistance, we should be getting the help we need.”
The UESF does not disclose the number of dues-paying members, but it technically represents all 6,500 educators within the San Francisco Unified School District.
UESF leaders did not respond to J.’s requests for comment. SFUSD provided a statement to J. in response to the union’s latest resolution.
“The District recognizes that employees have the right to engage in political activity on their own time, and at their own expense,” read an emailed statement from SFUSD communications director Laura Dudnick. “In the classroom, the District has a responsibility to regulate classroom activities and discussion to ensure that information is related to academic curriculum and that staff do not create undue pressure on students to agree with a staff member’s political views.”
The union has also used its voice to address antisemitism. After facing pushback for its BDS resolution in May 2021, UESF passed a resolution the next month about anti-Jewish hatred.
In the resolution, UESF condemned “anti-Semitic acts and statements as hateful expressions of intolerance that are contradictory to the values that we hold as educators of children.” However, nearly half of the three-page document also lambasted Israel.
For some Jewish educators, the condemnation of antisemitism wasn’t enough to make up for the ongoing anti-Israel activism.
Balboa High School special education teacher Stacy Trager-Carls had been a member of the union since 2018, but left UESF in June. Her decision did not come easily and was something she had contemplated since January 2024, she told J.
Despite having been raised in a pro-union family who taught her the value of staying in a union “fighting from within” even when she disagreed with leadership, the internal strife experienced by some of UESF’s Jewish members became too much for her to handle.
The decision to leave was “one that I felt was necessary,” she said. “With all the deaths and unacknowledged rapes and families being murdered and the one-sidedness, I didn’t want to further contribute to an organization that did not represent me.”
Since the outbreak of the war, Statmore said, she has witnessed firsthand how anti-Israel sentiments of union members bled into how they conduct lessons in the classroom.
She also pointed to an October 2024 article in the Free Press, an online publication, that listed multiple examples of anti-Israel bias in Bay Area classrooms. The article included a slide about “settler colonialism” from a presentation shown to Lowell High School students in an ethnic studies class. The slide stated that in Israel –– just as in the Americas, Australia and the Caribbean islands –– “colonial invasion decimated Indigenous populations through foreign disease and military domination.”
Statmore said that as “representatives of the state,” teachers don’t have unlimited free speech in the classroom and that injecting personal politics into the classroom hurts students.
“They can’t just do whatever they want in their classroom,” she said. “There are rules. There are laws. And if you violate those, there are disciplinary offenses. If you really need to do this in your work, you need to find a different line of work, because that’s not what this job is.”
Echoing the sentiments of other teachers who spoke with J., Trager-Carls expressed her hope that the union will reorient its efforts to focus on the local community.
“Let’s do the things that are important for our students, for the teachers. It’s just sad, I feel like it’s very misguided,” Trager-Carls said. “I get that people think they’re doing good, but they don’t understand the situation in the Middle East at all.”