Using the IHRA working definition

Adopting this definition creates no obligation and no penalty on its own. Anybody who tells a meeting otherwise can be corrected in front of it, and that single sentence is why the document is worth an hour of your evening.

The full text is public, it runs to about a page, and you can quote it accurately by tonight. Nobody has to authorise you to read it or raise it, and you need no role in any organisation to ask a committee to look at it. Read the whole thing first, qualifying sentences included, because that is what keeps you standing.

Its status where you are, and what your institution’s rules already require, differ by country and by institution. A confidently wrong answer on that is worse than no answer.

What the document actually is

On 26 May 2016, the plenary of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance met in Bucharest. It decided to adopt what it calls a “non-legally binding working definition of antisemitism”. The IHRA describes itself as an intergovernmental organisation with 35 member countries. The plenary is its decision-making body, made up of representatives from all of them.

The core definition 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.

Beneath it sits a set of illustrative examples, introduced with the words “to guide IHRA in its work, the following examples may serve as illustrations”. Eleven contemporary examples follow. Some concern Jews directly, several concern Israel.

The IHRA’s own page lists 46 UN member states as having adopted or endorsed it. Regional and local governments and several international organisations appear alongside them. The page also records that countries use different words for what they did, including adopt, endorse, recognise and support. So check what a given body actually resolved, rather than assuming.

What it is for, and what it is not

Its value is that it exists and is widely adopted. It gives an institution with no vocabulary for this a shared reference point, so that a form of hatred it struggles to name becomes nameable. That is a real thing to have. It is not the same as a thing that settles arguments.

It is not law. It is not a code of conduct. It is not a disciplinary standard, and adoption by itself imposes no duty and triggers no sanction. The text does say that antisemitic acts “are criminal when they are so defined by law”. That points at whatever law already exists rather than creating any.

The examples, and the words that qualify them

This is the passage most often quoted and least often quoted in full. The eleven contemporary examples are introduced like this:

Contemporary examples of antisemitism in public life, the media, schools, the workplace, and in the religious sphere could, taking into account the overall context, include, but are not limited to:

Read what that sentence is doing. It says “could”, not “are”. It requires the overall context to be taken into account. It says “not limited to”, which leaves the list open rather than exhaustive.

The Israel-related material carries its own qualification, immediately. Manifestations “might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity”, the text says. Then comes this:

However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.

Quote the examples without that sentence and without the context clause, and you have misrepresented the document. The person across the table may have the full text open.

Ask for a process, not only a definition

This is the most useful point on the page. A definition with nothing attached to it changes nothing. A body that adopts one and stops has bought itself a quiet year.

Before you write to anybody, know that this ask is slower than asking for adoption alone. Some institutions will take the words and refuse the rest. You can end up with a symbolic adoption and no working route, and asking for more can leave you looking like the difficult party. It is still almost always better to ask, because the alternative is a line in a minute book.

Four questions to put in writing, and they fit on one sheet:

1. Who receives a report, by name or by role, and how does somebody find them?
2. What happens in the first week after a report arrives?
3. What outcomes are available at the end, and who decides?
4. What protection for political expression is written into the same document?

If a body asks what implementation looks like, there is a published reference. The European Commission and the IHRA jointly published a handbook for the practical use of the working definition on 8 January 2021. It gathers 35 good practices from across Europe, from law enforcement training to incident recording, and 22 documented incidents. Point at that rather than inventing a scheme yourself.

How it gets used badly

Two ways, and both damage the person doing it.

The first is the conversation-ending citation, where the definition is read out as though it were a verdict. Reading it aloud does not do the work of explaining why a particular thing was antisemitic.

The second is stretching it. Apply the examples to political criticism the document itself excludes, and you will be shown the sentence you left out. That costs you the argument you had, and the next one.

The strongest version of the objection

Take this seriously, because it is serious, and because it comes from inside.

Kenneth Stern was the lead drafter of the text that became this definition. He worked at the time as the American Jewish Committee’s antisemitism expert. Writing in the Guardian in December 2019, he said it was “created primarily so that European data collectors could know what to include and exclude”. The purpose was monitoring antisemitism over time and across borders. It was, he wrote, “never intended to be a campus hate speech code”.

His argument is about what happens when a monitoring instrument is attached to consequences. The real damage, he wrote, is the chilling effect. Administrators gain a strong motive to suppress or condemn political speech for fear of litigation. Academics free to teach either nineteenth-century Jewish life in Poland or modern Israel “will probably choose the former as safer”. He also feared a cost to Jewish students, who would “get the reputation for using instruments of state to suppress their political opponents”.

He set a test worth sitting with. No definition of anti-black racism carries the force of law. If you wrote one, you would have to decide whether opposition to affirmative action belonged in it. He wrote all of this while describing himself as a Zionist.

The honest response

The objection is not stupid, and pretending it is will cost you the room.

Notice what it is aimed at. Almost everything Stern objects to is what other people attached to the definition, rather than what the document says. The document says non-legally binding. It requires overall context. It excludes criticism of Israel similar to that levelled at any other country.

Which makes the objection an argument for the process section above, rather than against the definition. Ask for adoption with a proportionate route, and an explicit protection for political expression in the same document. That answers him instead of talking past him.

What the objection does establish, and this part stands: an instrument built for counting incidents is not automatically a fair standard for judging one. The burden sits on whoever proposes adoption to say what happens next. If you cannot answer that, you are proposing the thing he warned about.

And a concession you may not want. If your hope is that this definition will end arguments or remove speakers, it will not. Every attempt to use it that way makes his case for him in public.

What to say when somebody raises it

Say these, or your own version of them. Nobody is asking you to recite.

“That objection comes from the person who drafted it, so I take it seriously. Here is what I am actually asking for.”

“I am not asking anyone to treat this as law. It is not law, and the text says so.”

“The definition requires overall context to be taken into account. I am asking you to apply it that way, not to skip that part.”

“If political speech is the worry, write the protection into the same document. I will support that wording.”

“I am not asking you to adopt a definition and stop. I am asking what happens the week after somebody reports something.”

An hour with the full text

Two questions answered from memory, because both get asked in the meeting. Does adopting the definition create any obligation or penalty on its own? And what are the qualifying sentences in the document itself, the ones most people quoting it have never read?

Then write two lines and one fallback, with a real day in them.

Action. “On Tuesday evening after I clear the table, I will read the full text on the IHRA site and copy the two qualifying sentences into my notes.”

Action. “When the next agenda for my committee is circulated, I will email the secretary that week with the four questions above.”

Coping. “If somebody tells me the definition is discredited, I will say I take the drafter’s objection seriously, and ask what process they would accept instead.”