The IHRA Definition

In December 2019, the man who wrote the most influential definition of antisemitism in American law published an article about what was being done with it. The headline was “I drafted the definition of antisemitism. Rightwing Jews are weaponizing it.”

Kenneth Stern is not a critic of Israel. He is a self-described Zionist who spent years as the antisemitism expert at the American Jewish Committee. He drafted the working definition in 2004, and he has spent the years since objecting, in Congress, in the national press, and across administrations of both parties, to the use being made of it.

What it was built for

The original purpose was narrow and technical. European agencies were trying to track antisemitic incidents across borders and had no common standard for what to count. Stern drafted a definition to solve that problem. As he later told Congress, it was written to make it easier for data collectors to know what to put in their reports.

A version was picked up by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, and in May 2016 the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance formally adopted it as a non-legally binding working definition. The core sentence is unobjectionable: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.”

Nobody argues about that sentence. The argument is about what comes after it.

The examples

The definition carries eleven illustrative examples, and roughly seven concern Israel. Among them, treating as potentially antisemitic:

• “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor”
• applying “double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation”
• “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis”

The text also contains a protective clause, and it deserves to be quoted because defenders rely on it heavily: “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.”

The dispute is about which part does the work in practice. Critics argue the double standards and self-determination examples are broad enough to capture mainstream human rights criticism, anti-Zionist political argument, and Palestinian advocacy for Palestinian rights, and that when the definition is applied it is the examples that get cited, not the protective sentence.

From counting tool to enforcement standard

A non-binding definition used by statisticians is one thing. What happened next is another.

December 2019. An executive order directed that the IHRA definition be considered in enforcing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which governs discrimination at federally funded institutions, including every university that takes federal money. For the first time the Israel-related examples became a reference standard in federal civil rights investigations of American campuses.

The Antisemitism Awareness Act. Congress moved to put it in statute, requiring the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights to take the definition into account when investigating complaints at federally funded institutions. Members of both parties who voted against it cited free speech.

States and institutions. More than two dozen states and numerous universities have adopted or endorsed it in some form. In the United Kingdom, the government threatened to cut funding to educational institutions that declined.

The mechanism is the same everywhere: attach the definition to money and to civil rights enforcement, and institutions will police the listed examples themselves rather than risk the funding.

What the author kept saying

Stern’s objection has been continuous, and it has not tracked party.

Responding to the 2019 executive order, he wrote that the definition “was never intended to be a campus hate speech code, but that’s what Donald Trump’s executive order accomplished this week,” and that the order “is an attack on academic freedom and free speech, and will harm not only pro-Palestinian advocates, but also Jewish students and faculty, and the academy itself.”

Testifying to the House in 2017, he warned against exactly this use, and asked a question worth sitting with: if a comparable definition were written for Palestinians, would administrators then be obliged to police pro-Israel campus events that deny Palestinian self-determination?

In December 2020 he urged the incoming Biden administration not to make adoption a priority.

In 2025, after the definition was used to justify cancelling $400 million in funding to Columbia University and opening investigations into dozens of colleges, he told NPR that weaponizing antisemitism makes Jewish students “less safe,” because “it puts pro-Israel Jewish students in a situation where they may be seen as trying to suppress speech rather than answer it.”

On the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia protest leader and lawful permanent resident, Stern was blunt. The government said Khalil “was handing out pro-Hamas propaganda. Well, excuse me. I don’t like pro-Hamas propaganda, but that’s speech.” He described the wider campaign as “a total assault on the university.”

The case for it

Proponents, including the ADL and the American Jewish Committee, argue the definition is a useful educational tool that helps institutions recognize genuine antisemitism, that it expressly protects ordinary criticism of Israel, and that adopting countries have not in fact suppressed legitimate advocacy.

One point in the proponents’ own materials is worth noting, because it concedes more than it may intend. The ADL acknowledges that some of the Israel-related examples describe speech that is protected under the First Amendment, and cautions that the definition must be applied carefully and appropriately. That is an acknowledgment that the instrument, applied without care, reaches constitutionally protected expression.

Why it matters

Every other case in this category operates on one front. Anti-BDS laws work through contracts. Donor pressure works through universities. Employment consequences work through employers.

The IHRA definition is the piece that gives all of it a common legal vocabulary. It supplies a government-adopted standard under which criticism of a foreign state can be classified as discrimination, and then attaches that standard to federal funding.

What makes the objection difficult to dismiss is its source. This is not an argument advanced primarily by Palestinian advocates or by opponents of Israel. The most authoritative critic of how the definition is being used is the person who wrote it, a Zionist, testifying to Congress and writing in the national press across three administrations, saying that the tool he built to count hate crimes was never meant to police speech and is now being used to do exactly that.

Sources

• International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, “Working Definition of Antisemitism,” including the eleven illustrative examples
• Kenneth Stern, “I Drafted the Definition of Antisemitism. Rightwing Jews Are Weaponizing It,” The Guardian, December 13, 2019
• Kenneth Stern, written testimony to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, November 7, 2017
• NPR, “Weaponizing Antisemitism Makes Students ‘Less Safe,’ Says Drafter of Definition,” March 20, 2025
• Kenneth Stern, “Steering the Biden Administration Wrong on Anti-Semitism,” Times of Israel, December 10, 2020
• Executive Order on Combating Anti-Semitism, December 11, 2019
• Congressional record and bill text, Antisemitism Awareness Act
• Anti-Defamation League, “About the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism,” including its acknowledgment that some examples describe protected speech
• Sahar Aziz (Rutgers Law) and the Institute for Middle East Understanding, legal analysis of the definition and First Amendment concerns, 2025