Professor Yehuda Bauer, Yad Vashem - The World Holocaust Remembrance Centre speaking at the Commemoration of Holocaust Memorial Day event at the FCO in London, 25 January 2017. Wikicommons/FCO. Some rights reserved.
On 26 May 2016 the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) adopted a controversial and problematic working definition on anti-Semitism. On 12 December 2016 it was reported that the IHRA working definition would be adopted by the UK government, so as to ‘ensure that culprits will not be able to get away with being antisemitic because the term is ill-defined, or because different organisations or bodies have different interpretations of it’. On 19 December 2016, the chief historian of Yad Vashem, Professor Dina Porat, endorsed the IHRA definition and its adoption by the UK government quoting David Hirsh’s statement, a sociologist of contemporary antisemitism at Goldsmiths, that ‘The new definition of antisemitism is only a threat to antisemites’.
The debate regarding the IHRA working definition and particularly the examples for anti-Semitism it offers is ongoing, especially in light of last week’s decision of the National Executive Committee of the Labour party in the UK to approve a new code of conduct on anti-Semitism. Labour’s new code of conduct still draws on the IHRA working definition albeit without some of its controversial examples, especially those referring to criticism of the State of Israel.
