In July 2025, the Massachusetts legislature’s Judiciary Committee heard testimony on a bill to make it the 38th state to follow the federal government, 45 other countries (almost all of them in the global North), and more than 50 U.S. local governments in adopting a strange definition of antisemitism.
In 2016, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), a group of 35 mostly European countries, drafted what it called a working definition of antisemitism. The Alliance had been founded in 1998 to promote Holocaust education and, in its own words, to “strengthen governmental cooperation to work towards a world without genocide.” All too sadly, right now, its definition is being used to do the opposite: it’s helping to criminalize opposition to genocide.
Is It Really About Antisemitism?
Most anti-racist organizations, like the NAACP, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the League of United Latin American Citizens, and Stop Anti-Asian and Pacific Islander Hate, do not, in fact, offer a specific definition of racism. Instead, they simply work to combat discrimination and fight for equal opportunity and basic human and civil rights.
Jews in the United States don’t, in fact, face the same kinds of systemic racism the people that formed the above organizations face. Unlike them, Jews tend to be disproportionately high income, highly educated professionals.
So, in the IHRA’s list of examples of antisemitism, not one refers to inequality or structural discrimination. Instead, they focus mostly on ideas and speech — and in particular things said about Israel. And what those examples, in fact, tend to do is turn the definition of antisemitism into a thinly veiled tool for use in prohibiting criticism of any sort of Israel.
The IHRA’s definition itself appears relatively straightforward, even if it focuses on thought and speech rather than structures of racism: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”
What follows, however, is a confusing and contradictory amalgam of 11 “examples of antisemitism in public life,” six of which focus on political debate that raises questions about Zionism, Israel as an ethnostate, or Israel’s actions.
Creating legal avenues to suppress what would otherwise be protected political speech about Israel is a major reason that the IHRA and its allies have felt the need to turn their definition into law. And advocates for the legal adoption of that definition claim that it’s necessary because antisemitism is on the rise in this country. But the expansive and confusing examples of antisemitism that the definition relies on actually make it impossible to know whether such a statement is, in fact, accurate. The organizations that use the IHRA definition to track antisemitism won’t tell us whether what is on the rise is actually antisemitism or simply opposition to Israel and its increasingly unnerving actions in the Middle East.
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