June 2025

“Keywords Now” series, NYU Press

Co-authored by Michael Drexler, Keith P. Feldman, Emmaia Gelman, Glenn Hendler, Mark Levine, Brooke Lober, and Barry Trachtenberg

Rather than a static definition of antisemitism, this Keywords Now essay offers a history and analysis of how antisemitism has been constructed, and how and by whom it has been used. The essay emphasizes shifts and developments in the content of antisemitism, always closely connected to the contexts of place and time, power struggles and war, flows of capital, and surrounding ideas about race, religion, nation, and belonging.

The push to define antisemitism, driven largely by Zionist political institutions, has produced a series of definitions that are themselves racist and repressive — even some that are well-meaning. The 2016 IHRA “working definition of antisemitism” attempts to conflate critiques of Zionism and Israel with antisemitism, was created for the purpose of supporting Israeli colonization and misrepresented as a consensus document of IHRA members, and has been used to rationalize state violence from policing to genocide. The 2020 Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism offers a corrective that still focuses on Palestine and Palestinian liberation struggles as the site for assessing antisemitism, rather than European racial nationalisms. Another corrective, the 2021 Nexus Definition, fails to reckon with the way that bad-faith claims of antisemitism are the main instrument for preventing the discussion (study, teaching, protest, redress) of anti-Palestinian racism and Zionist colonialism.

Static definitions erase the changing contexts of history and power that give meaning antisemitism (and ideas like racism, hostility, and conflict.) Restoring those contexts allows for reckoning with real antisemitism and preventing its misuse as tool for repression.