Jewish Scholars Defy Flawed Antisemitism Definition

I’m here because I’m so outraged by the fact that claims for Jewish safety are used to assault the safety, freedom, and humanity of Palestinians and academic integrity and rigor. IHRA is anti-intellectual because it renders any evidence that points to the Israeli regime as Jewish supremacists and racist as anti-Semitic. This anti-intellectualism makes it impossible to teach and research about Palestine-Israel. According to IHRA, any reference to Israel as racist and racializing is considered anti-Semitic. It renders any criticism of Israeli policies as a form of anti-Semitism, making a mockery out of the actual real threat of anti-Semitism, which is only enhanced by conflating Israel with Jews. I declare today that there is no way to honestly participate in my academic field if the IHRA definition becomes university policies or U.S. law.

— Atalia Omer, Professor of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies, The University of Notre Dame

The IHRA definition essentially says it’santi-Semitic to criticize Israel, that it’s anti-Semitic to call for Palestinian rights,which of course is not true. This definition gives 11 examples of supposed anti-Semitism,but seven of these examples are actually criticism of Israeli policies. So they’re not examples of actual anti-Semitism. So the IHRA definition really is a mis-definition of anti-Semitism,and it’s intended to silence activism for Palestinian rights. Yet this definition has been adopted by over a thousand governments,corporations, and organizations worldwide. Again, what’s really important here is that focusing on the IHRA definition, it distracts people from actual anti-Semitism by white Christian nationalists.

— Penny Rosenwasser, founding board member of Jewish Voice for Peace

The IHRA definition argues that denying the Jewish people the right of self-determination by claiming that the existence of the state of Israel is a racist endeavor. However, UN Resolution 3379 determines that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination signed November 10, 1975. As a professor of the history of the Holocaust and genocide, genocide studies, I recognize in Israel the same racist inclination that IHRA denies. I will violate IHRA and I will teach it as a form of weaponization of anti-Semitism.

— Nitzan Lebovic, Professor of Holocaust Studies and Ethical Values, Lehigh University

The article goes on to maintain that the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism and the related legal measures adopted in several countries have been deployed mostly against left-wing and human rights groups, those supporting Palestinian rights and the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, sidelining the very real threat to Jews coming from right-wing white nationalist movements in Europe and the U.S. And I would add, Christian nationalists today. We must oppose anti-Semitism, absolutely. And we know what its forms are, especially when escalated by Christian nationalist groups who claim to be protecting the Jews, as they do in Project Ester.

— Judith Butler, co-founding director of the Critical Theory Program at UC Berkeley

This flawed definition tells us, for instance, that if we describe the killing of nearly 17,500 Palestinian children in Israel’s genocide in Gaza so far, 17,500 children, we are spreading an anti-Semitic blood libel. Rather than talking about a thoroughly documented truth. I grew up with four grandparents who had survived the Holocaust. I reject this shameful definition, this tool of state violence, this horrific distortion of Holocaust memory, and I am here today to violate the IHRA definition and to insist on speaking the truth about Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

— Raz Segal, Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University

Across the country, people are standing up at these different rallies and actions and purposefully violating the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition as part of this action, and that’s what I’m going to do right now. Trump is trying to force the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism onto universities and colleges. The future of my academic discipline of academic freedom depends on me violating IHRA. And so I declare that, among other things, Israel’s genocidal actions must be compared to other genocides, including the Nazi Holocaust.

— Jennifer Ruth, Professor of film, Portland State University

So for example, if we want to discuss in what ways Israel is a settler colonial state, if we want to discuss how it is an apartheid state, if we want to discuss how the term genocide describes Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza, we are violating the IHRA definition and I am violating it right now, right here. But not to do so, not to violate the IHRA, not to discuss how the Holocaust and the Nakba are intertwined, is to capitulate our intellectual integrity as scholars, our moral fiber as human beings, and our sense of justice as citizens.

— Marianne Hirsch, Professor, Columbia University

Based on my professional judgment, Israel has established an apartheid-like regime between the river and the sea, one rooted in racial discrimination. According to the IHRA definition, accusing Israel of racism is itself considered anti-Semitic. So let me be clear, I do believe the Israeli regime is racist and by the IHRA’s logic, that belief renders me an anti-Semite.

— Tamir Sorek, Professor of History, Penn State University

We face an unprecedented crisis where the very definitions that are meant to protect Jews instead silence our scholarship. Israel, like the United States, and all settler-colonial societies, is a racist endeavor.

— Barry Trachtenberg, Scholar of Jewish History and Holocaust Studies, Wake-Forest University

As an American Jew with no family connection in Israel, I have rights that Palestinians who have lived in the land for centuries do not. This fact illustrates that Israeli policy is racist and is based on Jewish supremacy. But under the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, everything I’ve just said makes me a Jewish faculty member anti-Semitic. But of course, the IHRA definition is not really meant to prevent anti-Semitism. Instead, it is meant to silence all criticism of Israeli policies in the past and in the present. The IHRA definition, if adopted, would betray academic freedom and betray humanity.

— Alex Lubin, Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies, Penn State University

As a Jew myself, deeply committed to Jewish values, I feel it is incumbent on me to criticize the policies and actions of the Israeli state when they are blatantly unjust, as are the racist policies in Israel against Palestinians. It is incumbent on me to violate the IHRA examples and to point out how grieved and angry I am that the state founded in large part because of and for the benefit of those Jews who suffered from the racist genocide of the Nazis is now committing genocide against the people it forcefully displaced in the founding of the state.

— Penny Gold, Emerita Professor of History, Knox College

Such a definition of anti-Semitism serves to justify the Trump administration’s chilling assaults on higher education, on academic freedom, not to mention the criminalization of protest itself marked by the arrests, the shadowy detentions, and the imminent deportations of advocates of justice for Palestinians.

— Dan Letwin, U.S. Social Historian, Penn State University

And so in the same way that some of the Trump administrative orders are designed to prevent scholars and students from having honest conversations about racism here, the IHRA, through definitions, through examples like this, are often deployed to prevent scholars from being able to have honest conversations about the way similar racist dynamics happen in Israel.

— Jonathan Feingold, Associate Professor, Boston University School of Law

As a scholar of contemporary and historical public policy, there is no way I can honestly participate in my academic field while abiding by the IHRA definition. I can only speak the truth by violating the definition. According to the examples cited in the IHRA definition declaring Israel is a racist endeavor constitutes anti-Semitism even if you don’t mention anything about Jewish people or Judaism.

— Ranya Rusenko, Former ERC Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Polytechnic of Turin

The meretricious use of the IHRA-fabricated charge of anti-Semitism against critics of Israel, adopted now by so many federal, state, and local governments, is now threatening the democratic, constitutionally guaranteed rights of all citizens, legal residents, and visa holders to free thought and assembly, our right to protest injustice, racism, and violence, and to assert, as I do, as a Jew, not in our name.

— Joan Landis, Scholar of European History, Penn State University

I am one of more than 40 academics around the country who are engaging in this act of civil disobedience right now in order to show the absurdity of this definition. In this definition, it makes it illegal or ipso facto anti-Semitism to say that Israel is committing genocide and acting like the Nazis. They’re deporting people, they’re using starvation as a weapon. They are committing a genocide to say that by this definition is anti-Semitic. I’ve just said that, so therefore I, a Jewish man, bar mitzvahed, Orthodox, from a long line of Jewish people, I’m somehow now anti-Semitic because I said that, because I said the truth. I know that solidarity is the key to fighting this, that I stand here in solidarity with all of you, with the immigrant and foreign students here, with the Palestinian students, with the Muslim students, with everyone who is facing this desperate, difficult time. Together, all of us, we will win, we will beat this and we will do it by standing together.

— Victor Silverman, Professor Emeritus, Pomona College

IHRA is not a coherent definition of anti-Semitism. It is propaganda that falsely equates Jewish identity and interests with the nation-state of Israel.

— Aaron Shakov, Professor of History, Harvard University

It also requires us to ignore the voices of Holocaust survivors themselves, survivors like Stephen Kapos who declares what distinguishes the Jewish Holocaust is its industrial scale and industrial methods. And what has been happening in Gaza is similar in that the scale of the bombing and the indiscriminate nature of the complete lack of care about children and women being the majority of victims amounts to an industrial scale of genocide.

— Rebeccat T. Alpert, Professor of Religion Emerita, Temple University

The IHRA definition says that drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to the Nazis is anti-Semitic. And this is really absurd. Why would critics of the bombing of Hiroshima, for example, could compare it, at the time, Americans and British at the time could compare it to Nazi tactics, but comparing the bombing of Gaza to Nazi tactics, or the blitz or otherwise, or to Hiroshima for that matter, is racist being the way.

— Ran Zwigenberg, Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies, Penn State University

But Israel since its founding has awarded rights and privileges to Jews and denied them to non-Jews. Israel is a racist state. There you heard it. I have now violated the executive order. When we, as scholars of genocide, the Holocaust, Jewish history and racism in all its forms are silent on IHRA, we are participating in the active destruction of a society that values education and the construction of new knowledge.

— Daniel Segal, Professor Emeritus of History and Anthropology, Pitzer College

Even the definition’s author, Kenneth Stern, has warned that Trump is using this definition to attack freedom, academic freedom and free speech. The IHRA definition of anti-Semitism is a thinly veiled attempt to censor any discussion of systematic racism, genocide, apartheid and settler colonialism by the Israeli state.

— Jonah Rubin, Associate Professor of Anthropology-Sociology, Knox College

What presents itself as a well-intentioned measure now risks irreparably damaging academic freedom and stifling legitimate political discourse by deliberately conflating criticism of Israel with hatred of Jews.

— Barry Trachtenberg, Scholar of Jewish History and Holocaust Studies, Wake Forest University