When Kenneth Stern drafted the working definition of antisemitism 20 years ago as director of the antisemitism division for the American Jewish Committee, he wanted to help researchers better understand the frequency of violence targeted at Jewish communities.
Antisemitism, he determined, should include any rhetorical and physical manifestations of hatred toward Jews, their community institutions, and their religious facilities. He exempted criticism of Israel, “similar to that leveled against any other country,” but said that “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” and “holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel” should count as antisemitism.
The definition has since been adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, and in 2019, it was incorporated into Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which dictates what counts as discrimination on college campuses, by an executive order from President Donald J. Trump. Over the next few years, more than 30 states adopted the definition in some way, including two — Georgia and South Dakota — that passed legislation doing so in January and March. On Wednesday, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas issued an executive order requiring all colleges in the state to update their free-speech policies to include the definition.
Since the October 7 attack on Israel and the subsequent campus protests around the Israel-Hamas war, Jewish advocacy groups and conservative organizations have used the definition in an attempt to suppress speakers, student organizations, and faculty who have expressed anti-Zionist views.
Stern, who is now the director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate, is alarmed by its use on college campuses. He believes colleges and politicians who adopt his definition into antidiscrimination policies could then censor anyone who criticizes or says something controversial about Israel. While the definition itself should help people identify clear harassment, using it in legislation allows colleges and lawmakers to clamp down on any protected speech, no matter if it’s harmful or offensive, Stern says.
Since 2008, nearly 200 complaints have been filed by Jewish advocacy groups as well as conservative organizations and lawmakers arguing that Jewish students — in both colleges and K-12 schools — have been discriminated against, according to the Foundation for Middle East Peace. More than 70 complaints mention Stern’s definition, including 25 since the start of the Israel-Hamas war. Many of them explicitly involve recent pro-Palestinian demonstrations and student organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine as well as faculty members who have expressed anti-Zionist views.
The Chronicle spoke with Stern about the origin of the definition and its contemporary use.
The tension on college campuses over the past few months isn’t new, and neither is the subsequent reaction from lawmakers, pressuring colleges to quell antisemitism. When did you start seeing the definition’s power changing?
The thing that sort of jump-started this was a 2010 Dear Colleague letter on Jews, Sikhs, and Muslims being covered for Title VI purposes. I supported the clarification. I was actually a complainant for a group of high-school students in upstate New York where there was a ‘kick a Jew day’ and swastikas on desks and the administration did nothing. I said this is a great tool to get their attention to actually have to deal with the fact that these Jewish kids are getting harassed and bullied and in a pervasively hostile environment.
But what happened was that people were saying we have this new enforcement tool — the potential is that schools can lose their funding — and let’s now marry this definition with this new power. There were some cases that talked about things that were clearly appropriate — they’d talk about spitting and things like that — but I was starting to see, to my great alarm, that they were taking things that were clearly covered with academic freedom, let alone speech, and saying, ‘Oh, let’s look at the discourse on campus inside and outside the classroom, find things that we think are violating the definition, and use that as a predicate at least in part for a Title VI case.’
They were enshrining a particular definition of something that’s inherently involving political speech into law. That gives the state’s approval of it in the context of an educational system.
Some of the biggest debates in using the definition have been around the examples you list. What was the intent behind including them and what are the consequences of putting them in this context?
The meat of the definition was the example. It was written with the idea of not just coming up with an academic exercise, but something that would be useful for the bean counters in Romania and Lithuania and Britain and other places to be able to identify things to grab. The hope was that we’d have a basis of comparing things, not only just things inside individual countries, but compare them across borders.
We also thought it was important to put data points related to some of the things about Israel. Because then as now, we’re seeing when things happen in the Middle East, it correlates with an uptick in antisemitic attacks. It wasn’t to describe anybody as an antisemite because they said something that was inside or outside the definition. The major point was to get clarity on what should be counted as a hate crime.
There’s a temptation to put a cocoon around these kids.
Then it started being used in these cases on campus. And that to me was a total travesty already at the time. One of the first things I did when I was hired at the American Jewish Committee was this comprehensive report of how do you deal with bigotry on campus. The bottom line of it, among other important observations, was no hate-speech codes. They’re unconstitutional. They block the ability of the campus to see all sorts of things that they actually can do to deal with bigotry.
Why do you think the definition’s use shifted so drastically?
There’s a tendency for people who share a concern about Jewish students going to school and hearing things that cause some discomfort. There’s a temptation to put a cocoon around these kids. Using the definition was seen as a way to help protect Jewish students from hearing things that might cause some discomfort.
I don’t expect outside advocates to really appreciate what academic freedom means and what free speech means. I see them as trying to use whatever tools are handy in the toolbox to achieve a desired result, and that’s to beat down political speech. And it’s not just on this side.
Students and others want to ascribe the other side as not only wrong, but evil, and feel empowered to try to sanction them in one way or another. When the pro-Palestinian folks did what they did at Berkeley, that’s a problem, and when Jewish organizations and legislators are trying to use laws in this way, that’s a problem, too. (In February, police at the University of California at Berkeley shut down an event organized by multiple Jewish student groups after pro-Palestinian demonstrators broke down a door to the building and shattered a window.)
Is there something about this moment that’s different? What are some of the major consequences of these new states passing laws with the definition?
We’re living in a very difficult time. After October 7th, everything is on steroids for clearly understandable reasons. There have been instances where things happen with Jewish students that are deeply troubling. I mean we just saw what happened at Berkeley. We saw Jewish students being shoved and assaulted in some places. But I don’t recall anybody saying, ‘We have to really look at the definition of antisemitism to understand what happened at Berkeley is wrong,’ or ‘We really have to look at the definition of antisemitism when we see Jewish students being singled out and slurs being thrown at them.’
This is only looking at particular forms of pro-Palestinian speech and it’s in an environment where Brandeis, for example, kicked out Students for Justice in Palestine, [Gov. Ron] DeSantis kicked out SJP. I disagree with SJP, but it’s just speech. If they’re doing something that’s harassing, intimidating, whatever, that’s a different story. But it was just because of their speech after October 7th that they were disqualified in some places.
This moment is a great opportunity for colleges to reimagine how to deal with contentious issues on the campus.
We’re seeing a moment where the proponents are trying to police speech about Israel on the campus both because I suspect legitimately they have concerns for Jewish students, but also because this is the tactic they’ve decided to take pre-October 7th and see it as an opportunity to push it. They suspect legislators are going to be amenable to this, because who wants to be on the record as opposing fighting antisemitism? It’s a political risk.
Are there ways that these laws are linked to other issues of censorship?
They’re instructive about where this type of legislation leads in terms of making a common cause of people with that restrictive agenda on wanting to ban books, restrict what could be taught about gender, restrict what could be taught about race. We’re putting the thumb on the scale of what could be taught, as opposed to building programs to have more discussion on campus about why there are different views. That’s to me problematic, but that seems to be where we are.
So, how should colleges move forward?
This moment is a great opportunity for colleges to reimagine how to deal with contentious issues on the campus. How are you going to increase teaching about antisemitism and how are you going to talk about issues of human hatred? In my courses, the bottom line is that whatever you do on these issues, do not do something that is going to diminish academic freedom. Don’t do anything that sacrifices it.
There’s so many things one can do — courses, training, surveys, units on what academic freedom means, why is free speech important. No one should be bullied, no one should be harassed. But students should be expected to have their ideas be disturbed and they’re going to hear things that cut to their core. They’re in an environment to figure out ‘Why does this disturb me?’ ‘How can we talk about this?’ ‘Why do people have different points of view that I find deplorable?’
Passion is certainly appropriate for a college student. You can decide things about who your political associates are and find certain people that you don’t want to be around because of their politics as opposed to religion and so forth. While you have a right to do that, you should also recognize that you’re not going to solve Israel-Palestine. Maybe you might, but the likelihood is that you’re not going to be the person as an 18-, 19-, 20-year-old that’s going to somehow solve something that seems intractable.
You have control over how you treat your classmates and the environment you want to be in. Be aware that what you do has an impact on your campus climate, and if you want to be an advocate for a particular political position, you ought to be able to put your mind in the place of the person that’s your opponent.
Are you optimistic that colleges will use this moment to focus more on encouraging critical thinking and empathy?
You know, I don’t know. I would love to see movement in that direction. We are increasing the capacity to understand human hatred and why we get into these boxes and how they manifest in brain science and social psychology. There’s just so much we can do to help students understand the moments that we’re living through.
Those are the things, if we treat them well, Jewish students will come out very well like everybody else, maybe even better. But when we jump to the easy solution of ‘we hate this speech and we want to stop it,’ that is not only missing an opportunity, but it’s also very counterproductive, and in both the short term and the long term will harm the interests of Jewish students and Jewish faculty.
