Skip to content
Shoresh Wiki

IHRA definition

The IHRA definition is the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism, the most widely adopted definition of the term in the world. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, an intergovernmental body of 35 member countries founded to coordinate Holocaust research, education and remembrance, adopted it by consensus at its plenary in Bucharest on 26 May 2016. Its core text is two sentences: “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 made it consequential is the 11 illustrative examples appended to it, covering classic tropes about Jewish power, Holocaust denial and blood libel. Seven of the eleven concern Israel and Zionism: calling Israel’s existence a racist endeavor, holding Jews collectively responsible for Israeli government actions, applying double standards demanded of no other democracy, and comparing contemporary Israeli policy to the Nazis.

The document did not appear from nowhere. Its language derives almost verbatim from a 2005 “working definition” drafted by the EU Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, quietly dropped from that body’s website in 2013 without explanation. Civil society and Jewish organizations kept using it anyway, and the IHRA formally revived and adopted it in 2016. The United Kingdom became the first government to adopt it that year; by 2024 more than 45 countries, the European Commission, the US State Department, over 30 US states and hundreds of universities had endorsed it. It is explicitly “non-legally binding,” a tool for data collection, training and education rather than a criminal statute, though several jurisdictions have folded it into hate-crime guidance and campus nondiscrimination policy.

The Israel-related examples are the definition’s most contested feature and its most misused-against feature at once. They trace back to Natan Sharansky’s 2004 “3D test,” naming three markers that separate legitimate criticism of Israeli policy from antisemitism: demonization (portraying Israel as uniquely evil), double standards (judging Israel by a bar applied to no other state), and delegitimization (denying Israel’s right to exist). The definition’s own text carries the limiting principle its critics routinely omit: “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.” It does not criminalize opposing Israeli policy; it flags when criticism swaps ordinary political language for classic antisemitic tropes, such as Holocaust inversion or claims that a shadowy Jewish lobby controls Western governments.

Misuse runs both ways. Some campus administrators have cited the definition to suppress ordinary political speech about the occupation or settlements, an overreach the definition’s own text does not support. More commonly, though, it gets dismissed wholesale by critics who claim it exists purely to shield Israel from criticism, a framing addressed at is anti-zionism antisemitism and documented at the companion article on the working definition of antisemitism. Some who reject the definition specifically because its examples name anti-Zionism as a potential vector for antisemitism produced rival texts in 2021, the Jerusalem Declaration and the Nexus Document, both narrower on where anti-Zionism shades into antisemitism. Neither has been adopted by governments at anything close to IHRA’s scale. A related pattern, dismissing any Jewish institution’s account of antisemitism as itself the “real” problem, is what critics call the Livingstone Formulation.

The definition has also shaped real legal disputes, not just campus debates. In Frankel v. Regents of the University of California, a Jewish student sued after being blocked from a UCLA student government seat over her ties to a Jewish organization’s Israel trip, a case Becket litigated as a test of where antisemitic exclusion crosses into unconstitutional discrimination against Jewish students because of their Jewish identity and ties to Israel.

Section titled “Related pages”

Sources

Section titled “Sources”