Working Definition of Antisemitism

The Working Definition of Antisemitism, now known as the IHRA definition, is a short, non-legally-binding text drafted by Jewish civil-rights researchers in 2004 to 2005 and formally adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in 2016, designed to give governments, police forces and universities a common, usable standard for recognizing antisemitism when it did not announce itself with a swastika. It has since been adopted, in whole or with minor variation, by more than 40 national governments and well over a thousand local authorities, universities and civic bodies. Wikipedia’s own article frames this document, in its own lead, primarily as a tool that “weaponize[s] antisemitism” to “stifle free speech.”

Where it came from

By the early 2000s, European researchers tracking a sharp rise in antisemitic vandalism and violence kept running into the same problem: police and prosecutors had no shared checklist for what counted. The EU’s Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC, later the Fundamental Rights Agency) convened Jewish organizations and scholars to draft one. A principal author was Kenneth Stern, then working for the American Jewish Committee, drawing partly on Natan Sharansky’s 2004 “3D test” for identifying when criticism of Israel tips into antisemitism: demonization, double standards, and delegitimization. The EUMC circulated a “working definition” in 2005. It was never formally adopted by the EU body itself and quietly dropped from the agency’s website in 2013, but the text kept getting used because nothing better existed. In May 2016, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, an intergovernmental body of 35 member states founded to coordinate Holocaust research and remembrance, adopted a lightly revised version at its plenary in Bucharest. That is the text now cited worldwide.

The operative sentence is deliberately short: “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.” On its own, that single sentence is uncontroversial; it says nothing about Israel at all.

The eleven examples

What makes the document usable, and what makes it a target, is the list of eleven illustrative examples IHRA attached to guide application. Four are classic Jew-hatred with no connection to Israel: accusing Jews of dual loyalty, invoking the blood libel, citing conspiracy myths about Jewish control of institutions, and denying or minimizing the Holocaust. The other seven concern Israel, and they are the ones that generate the argument: calling the existence of a Jewish state a racist endeavor, applying standards of behavior to Israel not expected of other democracies, drawing comparisons between Israeli policy and Nazism, and holding Jews collectively responsible for the Israeli government’s actions. IHRA’s own text is explicit that “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.” The document was written to catch the double standard, not to immunize Israel from criticism, but that caveat is the sentence most often lost when the definition gets summarized in a headline.

Who uses it, and why

The United States applied the definition administratively in 2019, when an executive order directed federal civil-rights enforcement under Title VI to consider it in assessing complaints on campuses. The United Kingdom adopted it in 2016, and dozens of governments including Germany, France, Canada and Austria followed. Hundreds of universities have adopted or referenced it in disciplinary policy, most consequentially after Frankel v. Regents of the University of California, a federal case brought after Jewish students were excluded from a UCLA student-government slate over their support for Israel; the settlement pushed the university to adopt IHRA-informed guidance for the first time. The definition exists to give investigators something more concrete than “I know it when I see it,” the same problem that pushed the US State Department, years earlier, to build antisemitism-tracking categories directly out of Sharansky’s 3D framework.

The strongest objection, and why it still doesn’t hold

The strongest version of the objection deserves a hearing before it gets answered. Kenneth Stern, its own lead drafter, has argued publicly since 2017 that university administrators have at times misapplied it as a speech code to punish pure political advocacy rather than actual bigotry, testifying to Congress against that use. In 2021, a group of scholars including some involved in the original 2005 drafting published the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, a rival text that narrows the Israel-related examples and states more explicitly that boycotts, comparisons to other historical injustices, and one-state or two-state advocacy are not inherently antisemitic on their own. A separate Nexus Document reaches similar conclusions from an American vantage point. IHRA’s defenders respond that the document’s own text already contains the caveat critics say is missing, that “may be” and “could, taking into account the overall context” precede every Israel-related example precisely so that context, not the words alone, decides each case, and that no legally binding restriction on speech has ever rested on the definition alone; its use has been administrative and evidentiary, not criminal.

The record it answers

The definition was not written in a vacuum, and treating its adoption as the story rather than the incidents that drove it inverts the record. The Anti-Defamation League’s audit tracked antisemitic incidents in the United States at record highs following the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, part of a rise researchers on both sides of the definition debate agree is real regardless of how any one text defines the term. A framing that opens with “weaponized to stifle free speech” and buries the eleven examples, four of which have nothing to do with Israel or Zionism at all, tells the reader the fight over the document is the main event. The eleven examples, and the incidents that made a common definition necessary in the first place, are the main event.

Antisemitism, the glossary term · The IHRA definition, glossary entry · Is anti-Zionism antisemitism? · New Antisemitism · Weaponization of Antisemitism · Wikipedia & the Conflict: the full audit

Sources

The live Wikipedia article, for comparison.