New antisemitism

This page is a corrective companion to Wikipedia’s article New antisemitism. Wikipedia’s Israel-Palestine articles have a documented bias problem; below are the framing problems recorded in our audit (checked 2026-06), each verifiable against the live article.

“New antisemitism” is the name scholars and monitoring bodies gave, from the early 2000s on, to a hatred of Jews that had changed its cover story rather than its target: instead of race science or the old church libel, it hides behind the vocabulary of human rights, anti-colonialism, and criticism of a single state, Israel, to make the same animus respectable again. The label does not claim that criticizing Israeli policy is inherently bigoted; it names a specific, documented pattern in which double standards, conspiracy tropes, and calls to eliminate the Jewish state are aimed at Jews collectively under the banner of politics rather than race.

Origins: naming a shift, not inventing a slur

The word “antisemitism” itself was coined in 1879 by the German agitator Wilhelm Marr, who wanted a pseudo-scientific, racial term to replace religious “Jew-hatred” and make it sound respectable for a secular age. “New antisemitism” describes the next such rebrand, roughly 120 years later. Historians including Robert Wistrich, the Canadian jurist Irwin Cotler, and the American writer Phyllis Chesler began using the term systematically around 2002 to 2004, in the middle of the Second Intifada, when synagogue arsons and attacks on Jews surged across France and other parts of Europe even as the attackers and their defenders described their target as “Zionists,” not Jews. The pattern they identified was not new hatred so much as an old hatred wearing new, more defensible clothes.

The 3D test: telling criticism from bigotry

The most influential diagnostic tool came from the Soviet refusenik and Israeli politician Natan Sharansky, who in 2004 proposed what he called the 3D test for distinguishing legitimate criticism of Israel from antisemitism: demonization (casting Israel or Jews as uniquely evil, comparing the Jewish state to Nazi Germany), double standards (holding Israel to conduct expected of no other nation on earth, including nations engaged in far bloodier wars at the same time), and delegitimization (denying the Jewish people alone, among all peoples claiming self-determination, the right to a state). Sharansky was explicit that criticizing a specific Israeli government, policy, or war is not automatically antisemitic; the test exists precisely because that distinction matters and gets erased in both directions, by people who call all criticism bigotry and by people who use “criticism” to cover open Jew-hatred.

From a working definition to the IHRA standard

That diagnostic work fed into an institutional one. The European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia drafted a working definition in 2005 that, for the first time, listed contemporary examples alongside the classic ones: comparing Israeli policy to that of the Nazis, holding Jews collectively responsible for the acts of the Israeli government, and denying the Jewish people’s right to self-determination while affirming everyone else’s. That draft, refined over a decade, became the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism, adopted in 2016 and now used by more than 40 governments, hundreds of universities, and international bodies including the European Commission. The definition states plainly that “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic,” a sentence critics of the definition routinely omit when they describe it as a blanket silencer.

Where the pattern shows up

The documented cases are not abstract. The BDS movement, launched in 2005, calls for boycotting the one Jewish state among roughly 195 countries on earth while organizing no comparable campaign against China, Russia, Iran, or any state actually charged with genocide by the International Court of Justice; that asymmetry is the double standard, not the act of boycotting itself. The chant “globalize the intifada,” which spread on Western campuses after October 7, 2023, calls explicitly for exporting a campaign whose defining tactic was suicide bombings of Israeli buses and cafes. And the surge is measurable: the Anti-Defamation League’s Audit of Antisemitic Incidents recorded 9,354 antisemitic incidents in the United States in 2024, the highest figure in the audit’s history, a large share of them tied directly to anti-Israel rallies, campus encampments, and online harassment rather than to older, explicitly racial forms of the hatred.

The “weaponization” charge, and why it doesn’t hold

Wikipedia’s article foregrounds critics who argue the term “new antisemitism” is deployed cynically to shut down legitimate debate about Israeli policy, what is sometimes called the Livingstone Formulation: answering any accusation of antisemitism by claiming the accusation itself is the real offense. The charge treats the term as if it carries no test, when it has had one since 2004. The 3D framework and the IHRA definition both exist precisely to separate ordinary political disagreement, a harsh word about a settlement or a specific military operation, from demonization, double standards, and delegitimization aimed at Jews as a people; serious scholars, including some who helped write the IHRA definition, have argued in good faith about where individual examples draw that line, but a dispute over where a line sits is not proof the line doesn’t exist. What Wikipedia’s lead does is present the accusation of “weaponization” as the dominant frame before a reader ever encounters the test itself, the pattern the term was coined to describe, or the 9,354 incidents the ADL recorded in a single year. That is the inversion this page corrects: a working definition built to protect legitimate criticism, recast by its critics as the thing crushing it.

Anti-Zionism · Is anti-Zionism antisemitism? · Weaponization of antisemitism · IHRA definition · Antisemitism, the story · The oldest hatred

Sources

The live Wikipedia article, for comparison