The IHRA definition of antisemitism

What it is

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance adopted its working definition of antisemitism at a plenary meeting in Bucharest on May 26, 2016. ¹ The definition itself is short. It calls antisemitism "a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews," and says the rhetorical and physical forms it takes are aimed at Jewish or non-Jewish individuals, their property, and Jewish community institutions and religious facilities. ¹ Everything else people argue about sits in the material attached to those two sentences.

The text was not written in 2016. It began as a working definition published by a European Union monitoring agency on January 28, 2005, and the drafting that produced it was coordinated by Kenneth Stern of the American Jewish Committee, working with scholars including Yehuda Bauer and Dina Porat. ¹ IHRA picked up the existing language a decade later and gave it the weight of a 31-country intergovernmental body. ⁶

Attached to the definition are eleven contemporary examples. ² Four cover ground nobody fights about: threats against Jews, conspiracy myths about Jewish power, holding Jews collectively responsible, and Holocaust denial. ¹ Seven touch Israel in some way, including denying the Jewish people the right to self-determination and accusing Jews of being more loyal to Israel than to their own countries. ¹ The definition also carries a limiting sentence: criticism of Israel "similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic." ²

Adoption has been wide. More than a thousand governments, universities, and organizations have taken up the definition in some form, including over half of U.S. states plus the District of Columbia. ² The State Department has used it since 2010 and the Department of Education since 2019. ²

The consequential step in the United States came on December 11, 2019, when Executive Order 13899 directed federal agencies enforcing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to consider the IHRA definition and its contemporary examples when evaluating whether conduct was motivated by antisemitic intent. ³ The order also says agencies "shall not diminish or infringe upon any right protected under Federal law or under the First Amendment," and that determining whether particular conduct is prohibited discrimination still requires a case-by-case look at the specific allegations. ³ In May 2023, the White House national strategy called IHRA the most prominent of several definitions, said the United States has embraced it, and added that the administration "welcomes and appreciates the Nexus Document and notes other such efforts." ⁶

Why it still matters

IHRA stayed a training document until federal civil rights enforcement started citing it.

The case for IHRA is straightforward. Hostility toward Jews in 2026 often arrives dressed as politics, and a definition that refuses to say so leaves police departments, campus administrators, and incident-tracking bodies without language for what they are looking at. The eleven examples exist because the drafters wanted investigators to recognize patterns, not to litigate philosophy. ADL, which supports the definition, backs its use by government agencies and schools as a guide for training and for assessing discrimination claims, and at the same time opposes using it to create legally enforceable restrictions on speech. ²

The case against is also real, and it is not made only by people hostile to Israel. In March 2021 a group of scholars of Holocaust history, Jewish studies, and Middle East studies released the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism under the auspices of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, signed initially by about 200 academics and now by more than 400. ⁴ Its definition is one line: discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews, or against Jewish institutions as Jewish. ⁴ It then adds fifteen guidelines. Guideline 12 says opposing Zionism as a form of nationalism is not in itself antisemitic. ⁴ Guideline 14 says boycott, divestment, and sanctions aimed at Israel are standard nonviolent political tools and are not, on their own, antisemitic. ⁴

The Nexus Document takes a third route. Produced by a task force first hosted at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School and now affiliated with Bard College's Center for the Study of Hate, it was published in February 2021 after a November 2020 white paper and updated in June 2024. ⁵ It lists what it considers antisemitic, including holding individual Jews responsible for Israeli government actions and treating Israel differently solely because it is a Jewish state, and separately lists what it says is not, including harsh criticism of Israel's policies or of Zionism. ⁵

All three documents agree that some Israel-related speech is antisemitic. Nexus says treating Israel differently solely because it is a Jewish state qualifies. ⁵ The JDA reserves its own section for Israel-Palestine conduct it calls antisemitic. ⁴ None of the three claims the category does not exist. The disagreement is over where the line sits, and more than that, over who gets to apply it and with what consequences attached.

Our view: the same document can be right as a description and wrong as a rulebook. A detective writing up a synagogue arson can use IHRA's eleven examples as intended. A university disciplinary hearing over a protest sign is asking the same text to do a job it wasn't built for. The executive order's own First Amendment language concedes that the definition does not settle the hard cases by itself. ³ The fight over IHRA has become a proxy for a different question, which is how much of campus speech policy anyone wants federal civil rights law to run.

The words you'll hear

Working definition. The two-sentence IHRA text adopted May 26, 2016, describing antisemitism as a certain perception of Jews that may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. ¹

The eleven examples. The contemporary illustrations attached to the definition, four covering classic antisemitic tropes and Holocaust denial, seven touching Israel. ^{1 2}

Non-legally binding. IHRA's own framing, and the White House's: the definition creates no law by itself and carries force only where a government or institution attaches it to something. ⁶

Title VI. The section of the 1964 Civil Rights Act barring discrimination by federally funded institutions, and the enforcement channel Executive Order 13899 pointed at the IHRA definition in December 2019. ³

JDA. The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, released March 25, 2021, with a one-line definition and fifteen guidelines, including one holding that BDS is not in itself antisemitic. ⁴

Nexus Document. A separate framework from a task force now housed at Bard College, published in February 2021 and updated in June 2024, which the 2023 U.S. national strategy explicitly welcomed alongside IHRA. ^{5 6}