Partisans on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict increasingly want standards around antisemitism spelled out in writing. Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

By Arno Rosenfeld August 13, 2024

Most of you have a personal sense of what antisemitism is. But not everyone is familiar with antisemitism. So people keep trying to translate these subjective understandings — you know it when you see it — into guidelines that can be consistently applied.

The result is often something either anodyne to the point of being meaningless or so controversial that it breaks under the weight of its contradictions.

I have written about how the agreeable approach of Kamala Harris — “When Israel is singled out because of anti-Jewish hatred, that is antisemitism,” she likes to say — doesn’t clarify much.

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And last week I covered a set of recommendations for university officials that are so precise — student clubs must admit Jewish members regardless of their position on Israel, for example — that they could technically force a Zionist club to admit students who wanted to boycott Israel.

I was confronted with another attempt to craft guidelines during a roundtable discussion last week with Deborah Lipstadt, the U.S. envoy for countering antisemitism, where she was promoting a global plan for fighting antisemitism endorsed by more than thirty countries.

The first guideline implored government officials to “speak out” against antisemitism. “Swiftly, clearly, unequivocally, whenever and wherever it happens — in other words, don’t froufrou around,” Lipstadt said. “This one was extremely important to me.”

But it’s impossible for government officials to speak out against literally every instance of antisemitism. There’s always picking and choosing to be done. And given that antisemitism has become politicized — a reality acknowledged in a second guideline, to “avoid politicization” — the incidents that we hear about are often the ones picked up on by political partisans.

Media Matters, a progressive watchdog group, blasts out alerts every time a right-wing pundit talks to someone who has said problematic things about Jews. And StopAntisemitism, which is bankrolled by a conservative philanthropist, names “antisemites of the week,” who are often obscure left-wing critics of Israel.

Are leaders supposed to condemn every incident that these and dozens of other similar groups trumpet without assessing their motives or the seriousness of the offense?

No, Lipstadt told me, of course not.

“When we say ‘wherever and whenever,’ I’m not expecting the head of state to respond to every Tweet,” she said.

So if it’s not every offensive Tweet, then what is the threshold Lipstadt wants to see before a leader should feel compelled to “speak out”?

“I can’t draw lines for heads of states or heads of universities or heads of cities,” she told me. “But I think we know when it’s something that’s really significant and when it’s not.”

Fair enough. But if we’re ultimately deferring to that familiar standard then why the clamor to enshrine definitions and guidelines?

The peril — and promise — of guidelines

When the debate over antisemitism definitions exploded early in the Biden administration, support for using a definition generally meant you thought anti-Zionism was antisemitic. But as time has gone on — and two new definitions entered the mix from the left — anti-Zionists have also started demanding that definitions be used.

In both cases, the motive may be a desire for rigid standards to punish or redeem actions in a manner that runs contrary to a more commonsense analysis.

A dean might consider it normal for a group of Jewish anti-Zionists to protest student government funding for the campus Hillel over its litmus test for Israel programming that bans anti-Zionism. But if the university had signed onto the Hillel guidelines that insist such a demand is “antisemitism pure and simple,” that same dean might instead feel compelled to condemn the protest.

And, on the flip side, some pro-Palestinian advocates want an affirmation that nobody can “decide for Palestinians and their allies what is acceptable to say.” That kind of blank check might compel administrators to stay silent in the face of a demonstration against Hillel that featured Hamas iconography, that they would otherwise condemn.

Lipstadt is something of a partisan in the definitions game. But when I pressed her last week, she came back with a piece of Talmudic advice. “Tafasta merube lo tafasta,” she said. “If you grasped many, you did not grasp anything.”

In the Talmud, it’s part of a rabbinic injunction that, in cases of uncertainty, you should take the more restrained approach.

“You’ve got to be judicious, ” she explained. “And that’s a matter of judgment.”

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