The US must wake up and take antisemitism more seriously - opinion

When the Nazis unleashed their fury on European Jews, my parents were brutalized at Auschwitz and Buchenwald and their families were viciously slain. Surviving the Holocaust, they shouldered a sacred duty to battle antisemitism in all its forms.

With Jew-hatred skyrocketing across the ideological spectrum, President Joe Biden’s recently unveiled National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism should have been a welcome development in advancing my parents’ efforts. However, the strategy fails to deliver substance. Instead, the Biden Administration has sacrificed courage and the effectiveness of some potentially worthy initiatives, to mollify its party’s progressive wing. 

The strategy assigns tasks to the administration, as well as corresponding “calls to action” for Congress and “whole of society” to confront the anti-Jewish venom that lately has left US Jews shaken. Efforts to galvanize across government agencies are impressive, but at least 70 of approximately 100 Executive Branch actions don’t actually address Jew-hatred or Jewish needs alone. And several of those are a stretch with no mention of Jews at all, such as work the Commerce Department will do on digital equity projects that “promote digital inclusion.”

That’s despite FBI statistics the Biden plan cites showing 63% of religious hate crimes are motivated by antisemitism while American Jews account for only 2.4% of the population.

The disconnect doesn’t end there.

As it sets out its agenda for increasing awareness and understanding of antisemitism, Biden’s plan states, “If we cannot name, identify, and admit a problem, we cannot begin to solve it.” 

But the strategy violates that pronouncement by giving equal weight to two conflicting definitions of antisemitism. It is a foundational flaw that undermines the plan’s calls for accountability, which will thwart efforts to combat Jew hatred.

IHRA definition should be standard

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance “working definition” has bipartisan and international support. The EU’s recently released antisemitism strategy calls it “the benchmark for promoting a rights-based and victim-centered approach,” referencing it nine times. But the Biden strategy mentions it only once, alongside the progressive-championed Nexus definition. 

The IHRA definition covers Jew-hatred from both the Right and Left, listing contemporary examples of antisemitism such as comparing Israeli policy to that of the Nazis and applying standards to Israel not expected of any other democratic nation.

Nexus, by contrast, states that paying disproportionate attention to Israel and treating it differently than other countries is not proof of antisemitism. And it says opposition to Zionism or Israel doesn’t necessarily reflect Jew hatred or “purposefully lead to antisemitic behaviors and conditions.”

Drawing a distinction between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, as Nexus does, provides cover to a mutating hate and ignores history. Soviet antisemitism was expressed as anti-Zionism, notes Izabella Tabarovsky, an expert on Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda and senior advisor at the Kennan Institute. Under a widely adopted anti-Zionist policy, Soviet Jews were “oppressed and repressed,” she said. “No Jew really was safe.”

Troubling as well, the administration lists, in a strategy fact sheet, the Council on American-Islamic Relations as one of several “stakeholders” with “commitments.” The council will “educate religious communities” about protecting houses of worship from hate incidents. But with a history of animus toward Jews and Israel, the CAIR is hardly an appropriate good-will ambassador on the subject of Jew-hatred in the broader faith community and refers to “Zionist organizations” as “enemies” alongside an appeal to “pay attention to the Zionist synagogues” among other mainstream Jewish institutions. 

CAIR erases the centrality of Zionism to Jewish identity by framing Zionism as a “political ideology” different from “the religion of Judaism,” giving itself license to deny its own antisemitism by denouncing Jew-hatred from the far right.

Strikingly, more than 80% of American Jews say Israel is an essential or important part of what being Jewish means to them, the Pew Research Center found. But in an apparent nod to CAIR and its ilk, Zionism is not mentioned in the US strategy.

Also notably missing is the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, which targets only Israel and whose co-founder, Omar Barghouti, has advocated for “euthanasia for the Zionist experiment.” 

This is a conspicuous exclusion given US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s strongly worded statement to an AIPAC audience recently, that rejected the BDS movement “for unfairly singling out Israel.” Its absence dismisses a significant source of antisemitism on college campuses. Shay Cohen, a rising junior at University of California, Berkeley, who has helped beleaguered Jews on campus in her student-government role, calls the BDS omission “absurd” and said the targeting of Jewish students by BDS supporters is vastly understated.

Jews at Berkeley are routinely called “dirty Zionist” and subjected to nonstop vitriol comparing Israel to Nazis. 

Nine student groups at the law school recently adopted a new bylaw pledging not to invite speakers who support Zionism, effectively forcing Jews to self-select out of those groups.

Despite numerous commitments on record to do so, the Biden Administration has yet to issue Education Department regulations for an Executive Order signed in 2019 that includes Jews in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and also requires government officials to consider the IHRA definition of antisemitism when investigating complaints. 

“This regulation would be the most important thing that the Biden Administration is doing to address antisemitism in a substantive way,” Kenneth L. Marcus, former US assistant secretary of Education for Civil Rights and chairman of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, told me. But the strategy doesn’t mention any work on those regulations. Nor is it discussed in a simultaneous launch of an Education Department Antisemitism Awareness Campaign. Instead, the department issued a “Dear Colleague” letter in conjunction with the strategy rollout “to remind” schools of their obligations under Title VI.

Particularly vexing is the dramatic spike in antisemitism in kindergarten through 12th-grade classrooms, with the Anti-Defamation League reporting a 49% increase between 2021 and 2022. More teachers are using “the class as a stage to promote their hatred,” said Karen Bar-Or, senior national director of activism for the Israeli-American Council, which tracks school incidents around the US and assists affected families.

This hatred is popping up in world-history and social-studies courses, in math classes with anti-Israel and antisemitic word problems, and even in physics class, with a teacher writing antisemitic invectives related to Israel on a whiteboard.

It is permeating ethnic studies as well, through the so-called Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum being peddled to school systems across the US and in similar coursework independently developed at the local level, Bar-Or said.

The Biden strategy calls for Jews and antisemitism to be covered in ethnic studies and diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility programs. But the strategy’s lack of clarity over what constitutes antisemitism will frustrate inclusion of the full breadth of Jew-hatred.

Crucially, folding Jews into ethnic studies or DEIA is no guarantee the material will be free of anti-Israel and antisemitic content. It’s an issue inhabiting both those spaces that the strategy fails to address.

Holocaust education, another plan highlight, is also ripe for problematic content. State programs already contain resources that employ Holocaust inversion, a misappropriation that portrays Israelis as modern-day Nazis. Expect it to proliferate without the IHRA definition – which specifically calls that out – as the designated guardrail. 

With such fundamental shortcomings, one must wonder whether the Biden Administration has thrown the Jewish community a bone while it grovels for an unvetted deal with Iran – a regime that, among other nefarious pursuits, bankrolls terrorism against Israel while calling for its destruction, and targets Jews elsewhere for murder. 

None of this inspires confidence that Jews will be better protected, as my parents had hoped.

The author is an award-winning journalist who has written and lectured widely about antisemitism. The recipient of a journalism fellowship, she studied at the Harvard Kennedy School and has been correspondent for The Boston Globe, reporter for AP, and published in The Wall Street Journal.