The IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism

The IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism is a short, non-legally-binding text adopted by consensus of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s member governments on 26 May 2016 in Bucharest, Romania, defining antisemitism as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews,” and pairing that core sentence with eleven illustrative examples of how the hatred shows up in practice, including several involving the State of Israel. It is not a law. It is a diagnostic tool, built by historians and diplomats to give monitors, educators, and investigators a common yardstick, and it has since become the most adopted antisemitism definition on earth, embraced by governments, universities, and international bodies precisely because earlier efforts to name the problem kept dissolving into disagreement about what actually counted.

What it is

The definition itself is one paragraph: “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.” A second paragraph adds the clause that does most of the real work in today’s arguments: “Manifestations might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.” Eleven “contemporary examples” follow, covering everything from calling for violence against Jews to Holocaust denial to blood-libel imagery, and closing with several that address Israel directly: denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination “by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” applying double standards “not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation,” and holding Jews collectively responsible for the actions of the Israeli state.

Who wrote it

The definition’s roots run back to 2005, when the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC), an EU body, circulated a working draft to help European researchers and police log a wave of antisemitic incidents that had spiked across the continent during the Second Intifada. Kenneth Stern, an American Jewish Committee lawyer, led that original drafting effort. The EUMC text was used informally for years, then quietly dropped from the successor Fundamental Rights Agency’s website around 2013 amid academic criticism, leaving the field without an agreed text. The IHRA, an intergovernmental body founded in 1998 to coordinate Holocaust education and remembrance among its member states, picked the draft back up, revised it, and put it to its full Plenary. On 26 May 2016 the delegates adopted it by consensus, meaning every member government present agreed to the wording, a higher bar than a simple majority vote.

Where and when

The adoption happened at the IHRA Plenary meeting held in Bucharest, Romania, on 26 May 2016, under Romania’s rotating IHRA chairmanship that year. From that single meeting the text spread outward. The United Kingdom became the first country to formally adopt it, in December 2016. The US State Department had already been using an earlier version internally since 2010; in December 2019 President Trump’s Executive Order 13899 directed federal agencies enforcing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to consider the IHRA definition and its examples when investigating campus discrimination complaints. By the mid-2020s more than 40 national governments, the European Commission, most US states, and several hundred universities, city councils, and sports federations had adopted or endorsed the text, making it by far the most widely used antisemitism definition of any kind.

Why it came about

The immediate trigger was practical, not theoretical: European monitors in the early 2000s needed a shared standard so that an incident logged as antisemitic in Paris meant the same thing as one logged in Berlin or Rome, at a moment when antisemitic violence in Europe was rising sharply alongside the Second Intifada and its aftermath. The deeper problem the drafters were solving is what scholars call “new antisemitism”: hatred of Jews that no longer announces itself with the old religious or racial vocabulary but migrates into political language about the Jewish state. Older definitions, built for a world of pogroms and racial pseudoscience, had no vocabulary for that migration. The Israel-related examples exist because the drafters concluded, after cataloguing real incidents, that a definition silent on that channel would miss a large and growing share of the phenomenon it was meant to catch.

How it is used, and misused

In practice the definition functions as a training and reference tool, not a criminal statute: it tells a university Title VI officer, a police hate-crime unit, or a diplomat what pattern to look for, and several US civil lawsuits, including Frankel v. Regents of the University of California over the treatment of Jewish and Zionist students at UCLA, have cited it as evidence of what conduct institutions themselves recognize as antisemitic. It has also become the target of a specific and recurring misrepresentation: the claim that IHRA “brands all criticism of Israel antisemitic.” The definition’s own text refutes that directly, in the sentence quoted above, and only 7 of its 11 examples touch Israel at all; each example is explicitly conditional on “taking into account the overall context,” not automatic. That has not stopped the claim from becoming a talking point in BDS campaigns and campus disputes, part of a broader pattern of treating the alarm over antisemitism itself as the thing to be debunked, described on this wiki as the alarm over antisemitism reframed as a weapon. A genuine, good-faith debate exists too: Kenneth Stern himself later told Congress he opposed writing the definition into binding campus speech codes, warning it could chill legitimate political argument if misapplied as a censorship rule rather than a diagnostic guide, and in 2021 a group of scholars published a rival text, the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, narrowing the Israel-related examples. IHRA’s own governments have not withdrawn or revised the 2016 text in response.

Legal status today

The definition remains explicitly “non-legally binding,” the phrase used in the adopting resolution itself. No country has made it a criminal law; adopting governments and institutions use it administratively, for training staff, classifying incidents in statistics, and guiding, not dictating, the outcome of discrimination investigations. That distinction between guidance and law is frequently lost in both directions: opponents describe adoption as if it criminalized speech, while some proponents cite it as though it were binding precedent. Read on its own terms, it is what it says it is: a working definition, meant to be a common starting point for a conversation that, before 2016, too often could not even agree on its terms.

The Working Definition of Antisemitism, the Wikipedia companion · IHRA Definition, glossary entry · New Antisemitism · Is anti-Zionism antisemitism? · Weaponization of Antisemitism