Abstract
In May 2016, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) adopted a Working Definition of Antisemitism. The definition has, on the one hand, been widely adopted by national governments, public agencies, local authorities, political parties, and other civil society organizations. It has, on the other hand, been hotly disputed in academic circles and in the public square. In this essay, I evaluate both the text in itself and the uses to which predominantly it is put. I conclude, first, that it does not pass muster as a definition: it is neither clear nor coherent nor sound. Second, not only does it fail to set limits to legitimate speech about Zionism and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, but it lends itself to partisan use by one side in the public debate. I conclude by briefly introducing an alternative document, the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, which sets out to reclaim the word ‘antisemitism’ and to depoliticize it by lifting it above the fray of the public debate.
Of making many definitions there is no end
—after Ecclesiastes, 12:12
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Notes
- 1.
See Annex I and the IHRA website: https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definitions-charters/working-definition-antisemitism. The IHRA is an intergovernmental organization with 34 member states. The committee in question is the Committee on Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial.
- 2.
See Annex II. There is a web page for the JDA, which includes the text of the Declaration, a list of signatories, FAQ, and other materials: https://jerusalemdeclaration.org/.
- 3.
“U.S. State Dept. Doubles Down on Embrace of IHRA Antisemitism Definition,” Haaretz, June 25, 2021, https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-u-s-state-dept-doubles-down-on-embrace-of-ihra-antisemitism-definition-1.9940759.
- 4.
“Definition of Antisemitism,” website of the European Commission, https://ec.europa.eu/info/policies/justice-and-fundamental-rights/combatting-discrimination/racism-and-xenophobia/combating-antisemitism/definition-antisemitism_en. Likewise, the European Parliament has called upon member states and EU institutions “to adopt and apply” the IHRA definition: “Procedure 2017/2692 (RSP),” https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/B-8-2017-0383_EN.html?redirect. The Council of the European Union also backs it: “Council Declaration on the fight against antisemitism and the development of a common security approach to better protect Jewish communities and institutions in Europe – Council conclusion,” December 6, 2018, https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-15213-2018-INIT/en/pdf.
- 5.
“Anti-Semitism Rising Even in Countries with No Jews at All, Secretary-General Tells Event on Power of Education to Counter Racism, discrimination” (UN press release), September 26, 2018, www.un.org/press/en/2018/sgsm19252.doc.htm.
- 6.
“UN Releases ‘Unprecedented’ Report on Anti-Semitism,” Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, October 2, 2019, https://jewishchronicle.timesofisrael.com/un-releases-unprecedented-report-on-anti-semitism/. The title of the report is “Combating Antisemitism to Eliminate Discrimination and Intolerance Based on Religion or Belief.”
- 7.
“Switzerland Adopts IHRA Definition of Antisemitism,” The Jerusalem Post, June 5, 2021, https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/switzerland-adopts-ihra-definition-of-antisemitism-670164.
- 8.
“Williamson Accuses Universities of Ignoring Antisemitism,” The Guardian, October 9, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/oct/09/williamson-accuses-english-universities-of-ignoring-antisemitism.
- 9.
The full text of the letter is here: https://static.timesofisrael.com/jewishndev/uploads/2020/10/SoS-letter-IHRA.pdf.
- 10.
“Blinken: US ‘Enthusiastically Embraces’ IHRA Definition of Antisemitism,” The Jerusalem Post, March 3, 202, https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/blinken-us-enthusiastically-embraces-ihra-definition-of-antisemitism-660768. The report refers to a letter from Antony J Blinken, Secretary of State, to Richard D Heideman, President of the American Zionist Movement, February 23, 2021. Full text available here: https://jewishinsider.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Secretary-of-State-Blinken-Letter-to-AZM.pdf.
- 11.
This is not an exhaustive list. See ‘Working Definition of Antisemitism,’ Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Definition_of_Antisemitism.
- 12.
“FA Adopts International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s Definition of Antisemitism,” January 27, 2021, website of the FA: https://www.thefa.com/news/2021/jan/27/fa-adopts-ihra-definition-of-antisemitism-20210127; “Premier League and Almost All of Its Clubs Adopt IHRA,” The Jewish Chronicle, December 3, 2020, https://www.thejc.com/news/uk/premier-league-and-almost-all-of-its-clubs-adopt-ihra-definition-1.509272.
- 13.
I mean the geometrical shape; the word ‘square’ has, of course, other meanings. The example happens to be from the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, but any English dictionary will contain something similar.
- 14.
Plato, Apology, 22d, 30a.
- 15.
You could define philosophy as enquiry into the meaning of words that overflow their banks.
- 16.
The word ‘antisemitism’ might not be as commonly used as a word like ‘justice’ or ‘dignity,’ but it is still an item of ordinary language: the general language we use for everyday purposes. In this sense, it is an ‘everyday word.’
- 17.
To give just one illustration: For the purposes of developing equality law, what counts is discrimination against Jews, with or without a racialized discourse. When drafting a hate speech code, it is roughly the other way around.
- 18.
See Annex I and footnote 1.
- 19.
“Statement by the Experts of the UK Delegation to the IHRA on the Working Definition of Antisemitism,” 2018, on the IHRA website: https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/news-archive/statement-experts-uk-delegation-ihra-working-definition-antisemitism.
- 20.
Jamie Stern-Weiner, a doctoral student at the University of Oxford, meticulously examines the conflicting evidence in his unpublished manuscript “The Politics of a Definition: How the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism Is Being Misrepresented,” April 2021, available on the website of academia.edu, https://www.academia.edu/47712219/THE_POLITICS_OF_A_DEFINITION_How_the_IHRA_Working_Definition_of_Antisemitism_Is_Being_Misrepresented.
- 21.
I discuss this case in “The Left and the Jews: Labour’s Summer of Discontent,” Jewish Quarterly, no. 242 (Autumn 2018), reprinted (in German translation) in Neuer Antisemitismus? ed. Christian Heilbronn, Doron Rabinovici and Natan Sznaider (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2019), 349–365.
- 22.
Bernard Harrison and Lesley Klaff, “In Defence of the IHRA Definition,” Fathom, January 2020, https://fathomjournal.org/in-defence-of-the-ihra-definition/?highlight=benard%20harrison%20.
- 23.
In a joint opinion piece in The Jerusalem Post (March 6, 2021), Robert Williams and Mark Weitzman, the current and past chairs of the IHRA’s Committee on Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial, say that “the IHRA definition includes 11 examples,” while referring to the text inside the box as its “core”: “The First Step to Fighting Antisemitism: Why the IHRA Definition Matters,” https://www.jpost.com/opinion/the-first-step-to-fighting-antisemitism-why-the-ihra-definition-matters-661162.
- 24.
David Feldman, “Will Britain’s New Definition of Antisemitism Help Jewish People? I’m Sceptical,” The Guardian, December 28, 2016.
- 25.
For a thumbnail sketch, see Community Security Trust (CST), Antisemitic Discourse in Britain 2017 (London: 2018), 10, taken from “The Concept of Antisemitism,” my talk to the Chabad Society at the University of Oxford, June 7, 2009, reprinted as “Interrogating ‘New Anti-Semitism,’” in Racialization and Religion: Race, Culture and Difference in the Study of Antisemitism and Islamophobia, ed. Nasar Meer (London: Routledge, 2014), 90. The CST is a UK charity, closely associated with the Board of Deputies of British Jews. It works to combat antisemitism and other threats to Jews in Britain.
- 26.
The quoted phrase is from Ben Gidley, Brendan McGeever and David Feldman, “Labour and Antisemitism: a Crisis Misunderstood,” The Political Quarterly 91, no. 2 (April-June 2020): 4.
- 27.
As in this (fictional) scenario: the ultra-Orthodox Rabbi Cohen is thrown off the no. 73 bus by a bigoted conductor, Lucy, who thinks he is a mullah and calls him Abdul. “As Rabbi Cohen picks himself up off Stoke Newington High Street he reflects philosophically that he is the victim of Islamophobia” (Klug, “Interrogating ‘New Anti-Semitism,’” 88). It could happen. But is Islamophobia defined by the possibility that Rabbi Cohen could be a victim?
- 28.
The rest of the text also includes a short preamble and three sentences tagged on at the end, which are just that: tagged on. These parts are not (as it were) load-bearing.
- 29.
“Labour Party Must Listen to the Jewish Community on Defining Antisemitism,” The Guardian, July 16, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/jul/16/labour-party-must-listen-to-the-jewish-community-on-defining-antisemitism. See footnote 27. Some of the signatories are people I know and respect—which makes the letter even more vexing.
- 30.
Nor was it endorsed by the Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA), which had a wider remit and which replaced the EUMC in 2007. The EUMC did post the text on its website, but the FRA did not.
- 31.
Kenneth Stern, The Conflict Over the Conflict: The Israel/Palestine Campus Debate (Toronto: New Jewish Press, 2020), 151. This tallies with the reply I received from the EUMC in an email correspondence in February 2011: the text was developed “for data collection purposes” (email from Ioannis Dimitrakopoulos, February 16, 2011). Stern, who had been the “antisemitism expert” of the American Jewish Committee since 1989 (The Conflict Over the Conflict, 7, 10), gives an inside account of the back story on pages 149–55 of his book. Antony Lerman, former Director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (UK), fills out the (highly political) picture in “Labour Should Ditch the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism Altogether,” OpenDemocracy, September 4, 2018, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/labour-should-ditch-ihra-working-definition-of-antisemitism-altogether/.
- 32.
Williams and Weitzman, “The First Step to Fighting Antisemitism.”
- 33.
Kenneth Stern, “I Drafted the Definition of Antisemitism. Rightwing Jews are Weaponizing It,” The Guardian, December 13, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/13/antisemitism-executive-order-trump-chilling-effect.
- 34.
Kenneth Stern, “Biden’s Pick for Antisemitism Envoy Will Need to Answer These Tough Questions,” Forward, July 27, 2021, https://forward.com/opinion/473580/i-was-the-lead-drafter-of-the-definition-of-antisemitism-heres-what-id-ask/. The Forward is a Jewish American news magazine. Founded in 1897, it is now available only online.
- 35.
Rebecca Ruth Gould, “Legal Form and Legal Legitimacy: The IHRA Definition of Antisemitism as a Case Study in Censored Speech,” Law, Culture and the Humanities, August 18, 2018, 1. She describes the “chilling effect” of a complaint made against her in which the IHRA definition was invoked (15–16). See also her chapter in this volume.
- 36.
‘Working Definition of Antisemitism,’ July 19, 2018, https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/news-archive/working-definition-antisemitism.
- 37.
This debacle begs a question about (what could be called) the politics of consultation. Which experts on antisemitism—with what political orientation—were consulted in the drafting of the IHRA definition and who were not? What institutional factors determined the choice? Might a broader cross section of expert opinion have produced a better, more coherent text? Are there lessons to be learned from this experience? All these are pertinent questions, but they lie outside the scope of this essay.
- 38.
This, of course, was the premise for Newspeak, an entire language designed for the purpose of limiting the ability of the inhabitants of Oceania to form illicit political thoughts, in George Orwell’s 1984, perhaps the ultimate fictional work that deals with “the politics of definition.”
- 39.
At around the same time as the JDA was launched, the Nexus Task Force, formed two years earlier by a group of Jewish scholars, published “The Nexus Document,” which contains yet another definition of antisemitism, available here: https://israelandantisemitism.com/the-nexus-document/. The Nexus Document and the JDA have much in common by way of critical response to the IHRA definition. David Schraub, one of the Nexus scholars, has created a useful chart comparing the three texts. It is available on the website of The Third Narrative here: https://thirdnarrative.org/anti-zionism-antisemitism/three-definitions-of-antisemitism-a-comparison/.
- 40.
Aleida Assmann, Alon Confino, David Feldman, “A New Antisemitism Definition to Ease IHRA Confusion,” EUobserver, March 26, 2021, https://euobserver.com/opinion/151343.
- 41.
The JDA has three components: a lengthy Preamble, a succinct Definition, and a set of 15 guidelines. See footnote 2. Several pieces have been published that help explain the document. This piece by a non-signatory is clear and comprehensive: Julia Bard, “Against the IHRA: Why it’s Time to Adopt the Jerusalem Declaration,” Tribune, August 9, 2021, https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/08/against-the-ihra-why-its-time-to-adopt-the-jerusalem-declaration.
- 42.
I cannot speak for all of my colleagues who were involved in drafting the Declaration (let alone for all the signatories). I think, however, that what I say here will resonate with most of them.
- 43.
Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Shabbat, 31a.
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Klug, B. (2023). Defining Antisemitism: What Is the Point?. In: Feldman, D., Volovici, M. (eds) Antisemitism, Islamophobia and the Politics of Definition. Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16266-4_9
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