Labour anti-Semitism Inquiry chair Shami Chakrabarti speaks on Labour's anti-Semitism inquiry findings at Savoy Place, London, June, 2016. Jonathan Brady/Press Association. All rights reserved.
The definition of antisemitism proposed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) in May 2016 and adopted soon thereafter by the UK government has been widely debated, first in the UK, and then across Europe and North America. The debate has been accompanied by many heated discussions around what does and does not constitute antisemitism, particularly in connection with the definition’s adoption by the Labour Party in September 2018. Yet, in the heat of argument, little has been said about the implications of defining racism for legal and quasi-legal purposes, or about the difficulty of separating the two domains from each other.
In August 2018, I published the first extended scholarly critique of the IHRA definition: “Legal Form and Legal Legitimacy: The IHRA Definition of Antisemitism as a Case Study in Censored Speech.” Because the article addressed a gap in the public debate, it received a great deal of attention from the leftist groups concerned about the negative effect that the definition was having on free speech as well as Palestinian advocacy. I was interviewed about the article in the Morning Star. An abbreviated version of the argument appeared in Prospect, and summaries were produced by Jewish Voice for Labour and for the newsletter of the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine. These engagements further revealed to me just how much remains unresolved in the adjudication and application of the definition, notwithstanding the media’s tendency to simplify the issues at stake.
