In front of a chalk board, a star of david stands embedded in a wooden table.
(Image by Yael Mazor)

RIGHT-WING ANTISEMITISM is exploding. Nick Fuentes recently complained to Tucker Carlson about “organized Jewry” and Young Republicans think it’s normal to call someone “a fat stinky Jew.”  

Under pressure from national figures like JD Vance and Elon Musk (himself a dabbler in antisemitism), the Anti-Defamation League scrubbed right-wing hate groups from its website and abandoned its commitment to civil rights. Trump’s Coast Guard no longer classifies swastikas as hate symbols. A right-wing movement that announced itself with phrases like “The Jews will not replace us” is reaching the highest levels of politics. 

You might expect a state commission on antisemitism to make something of these developments. You would be disappointed.  

The Massachusetts State Commission on Combatting Antisemitism’s final report gives not a single paragraph of concentrated attention to ethnonationalism and right-wing antisemitism. Instead, it obsesses about criticism of Israel, while recommending a repressive medley of policies, like anonymous government hotlines, police initiatives, and new speech and protest restrictions. The commission’s primary interest is policing speech about Israel, not protecting American Jews. 

The problem is not just the commission’s embrace of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. That definition so hopelessly confuses criticism of Israel with antisemitism that even its lead drafter, Kenneth Stern, has repeatedly spoken out against its use for law and policy. It is a disaster for educational contexts. No wonder Donald Trump loves it. 

The deeper problem is that the commission wants antisemitism to be what people feel it to be. Whenever “many or most Jewish people” “feel unsafe” then statements are presumptively antisemitic.  

Since many Jews consider Israel or Zionism to be an intrinsic part of their identity, criticism of Israel or Zionism makes them feel attacked as Jews. It does not matter if the speaker is expressing a political opinion. “Irrespective of intent,” says the commission, everyone must defer to the “impact” on the hearer. 

We have been here before. Siding with “many or most Jews” invites the government to police Jewish identity itself. For instance, about 40 percent of American Jews think Israel is committing a genocide. Are those Jews presumptively antisemitic because those accusations make other Jews feel “unwelcome or unsafe”? What about the 75 percent of Jews who think Trump is using those fears about antisemitism as an excuse to limit speech and attack enemies? 

Many of those Jews worry we make antisemitism worse when we associate the fight against antisemitism with attacks on education or the curtailment of civil liberties. The commission manages a handful of empty, cosmetic sentences about any of this. 

It is doubtful the report’s authors even believe “impact” on hearers has priority over speaker’s “intent.” They say we have to take antisemitism “just as seriously as we take discrimination, harassment, bias and hate against other vulnerable minorities or nationalities.” So what about when the impact of pro-Israel speech on “other vulnerable minorities” like Palestinians, Muslims, or Arabs makes them feel “unwelcome and unsafe”? Is the commission ready to prohibit that speech?  

Whether out of bad faith or thoughtlessness, the report never considers this obvious question. While claiming they want Jews to have the same protections as other minorities, the report communicates the opposite. In practice, the commission is committed to Jewish exceptionalism. The report’s concern is not with universal rights but with how anti-Israel speech makes some Jews feel. 

This approach can only make antisemitism worse. It distracts from the interests that Jews share with all minorities in vigorous civil rights guarantees. No commission seriously concerned with antisemitism should be pitting Jews against other minorities in this way.  

The report tries to justify giving special attention to how criticism of Israel is presumptively antisemitic because of the “current local and global context since the horrific October 7th attacks.”  

Reading the report, you would think the only thing that happened of any relevance in the last two years were those horrific attacks. You would have no idea that students were being apprehended on street corners, scholars disciplined and fired, noncitizens refused visas or deported, universities denied funding or forced into punitive agreements, all for the kind of speech about Israel that the commission wants to discipline.  

You would not know some of those punished were Jews. Relative to Israel-related speech, the commission barely acknowledges intensifying right-wing antisemitism, nor does it mention the Christian nationalist playbook informing the Trump administration’s weaponization of fears about antisemitism for political purpose. The report can’t even incorporate the many Jewish groups who criticized Israel for killing at least 70,000 Palestinians, including tens of thousands of Palestinian children.  

If you ignore all of that “local and global context,” then most criticism of Israel might seem like picking on a Jewish state for being Jewish. Or you might think free speech concerns are just insensitive handwringing and that Jews are united in identifying with Israel. But you could only believe that if you have not read a paper since October 8, 2023. Or if you only watched Fox News.  

As an effort to construct a context for thinking about antisemitism in America, the report reads like someone who did the first day’s reading and then missed every other class. 

Even when the report gets things right it then gets them wrong. For instance, the commission accurately notes that it can be antisemitic to “call upon Jews to explain the actions of the Israeli government because they are Jewish” or to “hold Jews collectively responsible for the conduct of the Israeli government.” Yet the commission promotes that very way of thinking by emphasizing how central Israel is to Jewish identity when  determining what counts as antisemitic.  

So on the one hand, the commission wants everyone to shape their thinking and behavior around the assumption that Jews identify with Israel, while on the other hand the commission wants to condemn as antisemitic anyone who acts on that very assumption.  

The final report doubles down on an anti-democratic and unpopular approach. This is just the kind of right-wing vision of identity, education, and democracy that voters have already started repudiating. This is not the Massachusetts Way. 

Alex Gourevitch is an associate professor of political science at Brown University and a member of Concerned Jewish Faculty and Staff.