The IHRA Definition

Summary

The most influential definition of antisemitism in U.S. law was written as a tool for counting hate crimes — and the man who drafted it now says it is being “weaponized” to silence protected speech. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) “working definition of antisemitism,” adopted in 2016, comes with eleven illustrative examples, seven concerning Israel, several of which cast certain criticism of Israel as potentially antisemitic. Originally a non-binding aid for European agencies collecting hate-crime data, it has since been adopted by governments and universities and — through the 2019 executive order and the proposed Antisemitism Awareness Act — codified into U.S. federal civil-rights enforcement. Its lead author, Kenneth Stern, a self-identified Zionist, has stated repeatedly and publicly that it was never meant to be a campus speech code. This article documents that journey from data tool to enforcement standard, and the objection of the person who wrote it.

Background

The definition originated not with a Holocaust-remembrance body but with Israel-advocacy efforts in the mid-2000s. According to the historical record, in 2004 an Israel-advocacy organization based in the United States led the drafting of a formal redefinition of antisemitism whose novel feature was to cast certain statements criticizing Israel as antisemitic. The lead drafter was Kenneth Stern, then the antisemitism expert at the American Jewish Committee, working with other experts including the historian Yehuda Bauer.

Stern has been explicit about the definition’s original, narrow purpose. As he testified to Congress, the definition was drafted to make it easier for data collectors to know what to put in their reports — to give European agencies a common standard for tracking antisemitic incidents across borders. It was a counting tool, not a legal standard or a speech regulation.

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

The Examples — Where Israel Enters

The core definition is unobjectionable. The controversy lies entirely in the eleven accompanying examples, of which roughly seven concern Israel. These examples — which the text says “may serve as illustrations” — include characterizing as potentially antisemitic such things as “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,” and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”

The definition does contain a protective clause. The text states: “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.” Defenders rely heavily on this sentence. Critics respond that the Israel-related examples are so broad — particularly the “double standards” and “self-determination” items — that they sweep in mainstream human-rights criticism, anti-Zionist political positions, and the advocacy of Palestinians for their own rights, and that in practice the examples, not the protective clause, are what get enforced.

Codification into U.S. Law and Policy

The definition’s journey from data-collection tool to enforcement standard is what makes it a suppression mechanism rather than a mere statement of values.

The 2019 Executive Order. In December 2019, President Trump signed an executive order directing that the IHRA definition be considered in enforcing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act — which governs discrimination at federally funded institutions, including universities. This meant that for the first time, the definition’s Israel-related examples became a reference standard in federal civil-rights investigations of college campuses.

The Antisemitism Awareness Act. Congress moved to codify the definition by statute. The Antisemitism Awareness Act — introduced by Representative Mike Lawler with bipartisan co-sponsorship and advanced with the support of House leadership — provides statutory authority requiring the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights to take the IHRA definition into consideration when investigating complaints of discrimination at institutions receiving federal funds. Members who voted against it from both parties cited infringement on free speech.

State and institutional adoption. More than two dozen U.S. states and numerous universities have adopted or endorsed the IHRA definition in some form, as have many foreign governments. In the UK, the government threatened to cut funding to educational institutions that declined to adopt it.

The legal mechanism is consistent across these adoptions: the definition is tied to funding and civil-rights enforcement, so that institutions face financial and legal pressure to treat the listed examples — including criticism of Israel — as potential discrimination they must police.

The Author’s Objection

The most powerful critique of the IHRA definition’s use comes from the person who wrote it — its lead drafter, a self-described Zionist, not a hostile outside critic.

In December 2019, responding to Trump’s executive order, Stern published an op-ed in The Guardian titled “I drafted the definition of antisemitism. Rightwing Jews are weaponizing it.” 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.”

Stern’s objection has been consistent over years and across the political spectrum of administrations. In congressional testimony in 2017, he warned against turning the definition into a Title VI enforcement tool, asking pointedly whether a comparable definition designed for Palestinians would then require administrators to police pro-Israel campus events that deny Palestinian self-determination. In December 2020 he urged the incoming Biden administration not to make adopting the definition a priority. In 2025, responding to the Trump administration’s use of the definition to justify canceling $400 million in funding to Columbia University and investigating dozens of colleges, Stern 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 case of Mahmoud Khalil — the Columbia green-card holder and protest leader detained by the administration — Stern was direct: the government said Khalil “was handing out pro-Hamas propaganda. Well, excuse me. I don’t like pro-Hamas propaganda, but that’s speech.” Stern characterized the broader campaign as “a total assault on the university.”

Key Figures

• Kenneth Stern — Lead drafter of the IHRA working definition; self-described Zionist; director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate; the definition’s most prominent critic regarding its use as a speech code.
• International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) — Intergovernmental body that adopted the definition in 2016 as “non-legally binding.”
• American Jewish Committee / ADL — Major Jewish organizations that promote the definition’s adoption; the ADL acknowledges that some of the Israel-related examples describe constitutionally protected speech.
• Antisemitism Awareness Act — Federal legislation codifying the definition into Title VI civil-rights enforcement.
• Mahmoud Khalil — Columbia protest leader and green-card holder whose detention Stern cited as an example of speech being punished under the antisemitism banner.

Official Position

Proponents — including the ADL, the American Jewish Committee, and the governments that adopted it — argue the definition is a valuable, non-binding educational tool that helps identify genuine antisemitism, that it explicitly protects ordinary criticism of Israel, and that there is no evidence from adopting countries that it has suppressed legitimate advocacy. The ADL position is notable for conceding a key point: it acknowledges that some of the Israel-related examples “are protected speech under the First Amendment,” and cautions that applying the definition “must be done in a careful and appropriate manner.”

Critics — including the ACLU, Palestine Legal, numerous academics, the definition’s own author, and civil-liberties scholars — argue that codifying the definition into funding and civil-rights enforcement converts its broad Israel-related examples into a mechanism for investigating and punishing protected political speech, that it singles out one foreign country for protection from criticism extended to no other, and that it chills academic freedom and Palestinian-rights advocacy specifically.

Consequences

The definition’s codification has produced concrete enforcement actions: federal civil-rights investigations of universities premised on campus criticism of Israel, the cancellation of hundreds of millions of dollars in university funding, and the detention of at least one protest leader on grounds his own definition’s author characterized as the punishment of protected speech. The chilling effect documented throughout this category — faculty, students, and institutions self-censoring on Israel — is reinforced by a definition that gives that self-censorship a legal architecture.

As of 2026, the Antisemitism Awareness Act and parallel state measures remain the subject of active free-speech litigation and debate. Some bodies, including the drafters of the 2023 U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, declined to formally adopt the IHRA definition as the binding standard despite lobbying — a sign the underlying dispute remains unresolved at the highest levels of policy.

Significance

The IHRA definition is the capstone of this category because it is the mechanism that gives all the others legal form. Anti-BDS laws, media pressure, academic firings, and employment retaliation each operate on a particular front; the IHRA definition supplies a single, government-adopted standard under which criticism of Israel can be formally classified as antisemitism and therefore as actionable discrimination. Its trajectory — from a non-binding data-collection tool into Title VI civil-rights enforcement, tied to university funding and used to justify the cancellation of hundreds of millions of dollars and the detention of a protest leader — is the clearest documented example of how the suppression of Israel criticism has been institutionalized into American law. And the case against that use does not rest on the claims of Palestinian activists or anti-Israel partisans. It rests, most authoritatively, on the sustained, on-the-record objections of the definition’s own lead drafter — a Zionist who has said, across multiple administrations and in the nation’s major outlets, that the instrument he created was never meant to police speech and is being weaponized to do exactly that. When the author of the definition warns that it is being used to make students less safe and to assault the university, the question of whether the suppression is real has been answered by the most credible possible witness.

Sources

• IHRA, “Working Definition of Antisemitism,” holocaustremembrance.com (the definition and its eleven examples)
• Kenneth Stern, “I Drafted the Definition of Antisemitism. Rightwing Jews Are Weaponizing It,” The Guardian, December 13, 2019
• Kenneth Stern, Written Testimony, U.S. House Judiciary Committee, November 7, 2017 — docs.house.gov
• 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
• ADL, “About the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism” — adl.org (acknowledges some examples are First Amendment-protected speech)
• Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) and Sahar Aziz (Rutgers Law), “Threats to Free Speech and Palestinian Civil Rights: The IHRA Definition,” 2025 — critical legal analysis
• Palestine Question Encyclopedia (palquest.org), “The IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism” — documents the definition’s origins
• Congressional record and bill summary, Antisemitism Awareness Act (Rep. Mike Lawler)