The Problem With The IHRA Antisemitism Definition Is It Doesn’t Accommodate Antisemites

by Rabbi Jill Jacobs, T’ruah – the Rabbinic Call for Human Rights

New York, May 3 – Numerous thinkers and organizations have attempted over the years to provide a precise, useful definition of the term “antisemitism.” The two most recent efforts making headlines include that of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and the Jerusalem Declaration, the latter of which, I am proud to admit, emerged as part of an initiative that included my input. Its most important contribution to the discourse sets it apart from the IHRA formula, a problematic definition that silences critics of Israel who, for whatever reason, must express their criticism in terms of Nazis, genocide, war crimes, and the stuff of blood libels. I helped draft the Jerusalem Declaration precisely because we need the participation in our progressive activities of those personalities and institutions unable to divorce their Jew-hate from our shared goals, while one side-effect that the IHRA definition, along with previous formulations, produces is the exclusion of those valuable antisemitic voices from progressive political discourse.

Despite my personal attachment to the Jerusalem Declaration, I still welcome other efforts to define antisemitism but leave room for antisemitic criticism of Israel. The more noise progressives make about this issue, the more we can obfuscate it, and the more definitions we have in play, the more effective the obfuscation. With multiple highly-touted “scholarly” definitions competing for media attention, we can overcome the IHRA’s insistence that “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.” We must maintain the straw man that the IHRA definition stifles criticism of Israel.

In essence we must return to the roots of antisemitism – not the phenomenon, which goes back to ancient times, but the term itself. “Antisemitism” as a word originated in nineteenth-century Germany when a German Jew-hater sought a word that sounded more scholarly, and therefore objective and legitimate, than “Judenhass,” Jew-hate. If we are to welcome into our progressive activism tent as many as possible, we must enable those who need criticism of Israel as a mask to hide their hate to avail themselves of that rhetorical option. We will thus enable them to continue painting their incitement to terrorism, justification of mass murder, glorification of violence, dehumanization of Israelis, denial of Jewish peoplehood, and Holocaust minimization – or denial, or inversion, or what have you – as “legitimate criticism of Israel.”

For we cannot call ourselves truly progressive unless we subordinate Jewish interests to those who will drop us like a dirty rag once our utility to them wanes.

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