Local educators and the ADL are pushing for an apology from MassCUE after the group’s recent “jarring” conference when speakers reportedly spewed “hateful” anti-Israel and Holocaust rhetoric.

MassCUE’s fall education tech conference — held in partnership with the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents at Gillette Stadium — apparently went off the rails during a panel on equity in education. That’s when the discussion reportedly delved into the current Middle East conflict in Israel and Gaza.

“Speakers leaned very heavily into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a very one-sided, dangerous rhetoric,” Uxbridge High School Principal Michael Rubin told the Herald.

That included references to “Israeli genocide” and “Israeli apartheid.”

A panelist also suggested that the teaching of the Holocaust has been one-sided, and “two perspectives needed to be taught,” recalled Rubin, whose grandparents survived the Holocaust, during which the Nazis killed 6 million Jews.

“It was jarring, unexpected, and unprofessional,” added Rubin, who’s also the president of his synagogue.

Following complaints from several shocked conference attendees, the Anti-Defamation League’s New England chapter recently wrote a letter to MassCUE, as the ADL pushes for a public apology.

“It is difficult to understand why an organization dedicated to education and technology would allow a panel discussion ostensibly focused on school equity to instead veer into a complex and controversial foreign conflict,” ADL New England’s deputy director Sara Colb wrote to MassCUE’s leaders.

“It is all the more concerning that once the conversation veered in that direction it was not stopped or redirected to the advertised topic,” Colb added. “Allowing a presentation purporting to be about equity and inclusion in the classroom to include a one-sided narrative of a foreign conflict, replete with hateful, biased rhetoric, does a disservice to attendees by leaving them with a biased and misinformed account of the conflict.”

MassCUE (Massachusetts Computer Using Educators) is the Bay State affiliate of the International Society for Technology in Education.

More than two months after the fall conference, the organization has not addressed the Israeli-Palestinian discussion.

“At MassCUE we take feedback very seriously and work hard to ensure we take any and all necessary steps to address concerns that are brought to our attention,” said MassCUE Board President Casey Daigle. “This process takes time. Please know we are working through our procedures internally.”

The silence from MassCUE’s leaders has been “really concerning,” Rubin emphasized.

“How comments like these about the Holocaust don’t warrant an immediate response is really, really, really confusing to me,” added Rubin, who was given the 2024 MassCUE Administrator Award two days before this panel.

“If a student was targeted by a racial slur in our buildings, we would be involving local authorities, contacting families, sending a letter to the community, but MassCUE is working through their internal procedures. It doesn’t add up,” he said.

The executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents said M.A.S.S. was “troubled to hear that any of the speakers at the conference may have made statements that are inconsistent with the anti-racist values of our organization.”

“We are working with MassCUE to learn more about the content in question,” added Executive Director Mary Bourque.

Other than ADL’s push for a public apology from MassCUE, the ADL is calling for the organization to:

• Review its policies and vetting protocols for presentations at programs and make all necessary improvements to ensure that presenters stay on topic, and that “participants will not be subjected to this sort of inflammatory propaganda again.”
• Listen to the concerns of impacted members and participants, and elicit their thoughts on how to “counter the harm this presentation caused.”
• Issue a public statement acknowledging the problems with this program and reinforcing MassCUE’s values of inclusivity for everyone.

“At a time when incidents of antisemitic hate, including in our K-12 schools, are at record highs, it is deeply wrong and dangerous to provide a platform for such hateful rhetoric or to allow a platform to be hijacked for such purposes,” the ADL deputy director wrote. “It is surprising to have to make this point to educators who purport to be concerned with equitable and inclusive classrooms for all students.”