FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Tuesday, January 27, 2025
Concerned Jewish Faculty & Staff Urge Concord Select Board to Reject IHRA: “Don’t Bring MAGA Policies to Massachusetts”
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Read CJFS’s Letter to the Concord Select Board
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BOSTON – On this year’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Concerned Jewish Faculty & Staff (CJFS) called on the Concord Select Board to reject a proposal to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism. CJFS’s message was clear: “Do not codify IHRA into town policy.”
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CJFS voiced support for the Select Board’s commitment “to cultivating a society free from antisemitism.” But CJFS warned that “IHRA is not a well-designed tool to cultivate civic environments free from antisemitism. To the contrary, as CJFS explained to state lawmakers in July:
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[T]he IHRA definition has received widespread critique – including from one of its drafters, from human rights and other civil society groups, from Jewish Members of Congress, and from Jewish scholars of genocide and the Holocaust – because it conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism and has been routinely employed to silence legitimate criticism of Israel. Not only does this dynamic threaten academic freedom and critical inquiry on our campuses and communities, it also compromises our collective ability to prevent actual acts of antisemitism and to counter the dangerous ideologies on which they rest.
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CJFS further highlighted that “Jews across the political spectrum have voiced opposition to the IHRA definition.” In May 2024, two prominent Zionist Jewish organizations – JStreet and Nexus – urged the U.S. Senate to reject a GOP effort to codify IHRA into federal law. Joined by over 1,300 Jewish professors, that letter explained that “[b]y stifling criticism of Israel, the IHRA definition hardens the dangerous notion that Jewish identity is inextricably linked to every decision of Israel’s government. Far from combating antisemitism, this dynamic promises to amplify the real threats Jewish Americans already face.”
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Professor Jonathan Feingold, an expert on antidiscrimination, further cautioned that “IHRA functions like the discriminatory censorship laws MAGA legislatures have adopted in Red states, where the goal is to demean inclusionary values and deny students accurate information about racism in America.
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CJFS cautioned that we “already have examples of Jewish and Arab students and educators in Massachusetts being censored or accused of antisemitism for speaking about Palestine, such as the Brookline School Board’s decision to cancel an annual antiracism event rather than risk allowing students to speak in support of Palestinian freedom from occupation.” Unsealed documents recently revealed that Trump officials–apparently relying on a Trump Executive Order adopting IHRA–kidnnapped and revoked the visa of Tufts grad student Rümeysa Öztürk based on an op-ed that criticized her university and advocated for divestment from Israel.
In testimony before state lawmakers, Professor Zina Miller, a scholar of human rights law and international law, outlined IHRA’s broader harms:
[A]bsurd outcomes have already occurred where the IHRA definition has been adopted. When a Jewish survivor of a Hungarian ghetto wanted to give a talk at Manchester University entitled “You’re doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to me”, Israeli embassy officials declared that the title could be considered antisemitic under the IHRA definition and pressured university officials to change it, which they subsequently did on the grounds of its ‘provocative’ nature. That a Holocaust survivor was deemed antisemitic and censored for drawing on her own experiences to critique Israeli policy shows [IHRA’s] essential flaw.
In a spirit of solidarity, the Jewish scholars noted to the Concord Select Board that “[e]ven as we respect attempts to foster a civic culture free from antisemitism in these perilous times, the evidence is clear that IHRA is not the way to do so. "
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CJFS then directed the Select Board to the May 2024 letter signed by 1,300 Jewish faculty and prominent Zionist organizations: “If you feel compelled to adopt a definition of antisemitism, we encourage you to . . . join hundreds of Jewish scholars from across the globe who have endorsed alternative definitions of antisemitism–such as those contained in the Nexus Document or Jerusalem Declaration. Unlike the IHRA definition, these documents offer meaningful tools to combat antisemitism without undermining Jewish safety and civil rights by insulating Israel from legitimate criticism.”