Toward a New Definition of Campus Antisemitism

The new antisemitism wears a moral face—why we need a new definition now

“All children deserve to be treated with humanity,” my Stanford classmate appealed during a graduate seminar.

Out of nowhere, another classmate responded: that’s why she couldn’t stop thinking about how Israel doesn’t care about Gazan schoolchildren. I interrupted. “Israel doesn’t fund Gazan schools. Mostly, UNRWA does.” She clarified: Israel had manipulated UN member states into cutting funding from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA)—timing its announcement that agency employees participated in the October 7 massacre to weaponize antisemitism and punish Palestinians.

In seconds, a conversation about American schools transformed from a moral appeal into a full-blown conspiracy: that the Jewish state controls global institutions and bends the will of Western powers. I clocked what was happening, and alone stated her bias. 

That moment captures something we lack the language to describe. Campus antisemitism today is not just an extension of classical antisemitic tropes. It’s not just antizionism. It’s a hybrid form—a fusion of ancient stereotypes with modern progressive language, repackaged through social justice discourse and performative morality. And we lack the vocabulary to name it.

The moment I challenged her logic, I was cast as the enemy—not because I was wrong, but because I countered her attempt to spread misinformation. Because I refused to perform the expected participation in a conspiracy about Jews puppeteering global affairs. Because no one came to my defense. The teaching team ended class early. 

Today’s college and university campuses prize moral performance over factual literacy. So how do we build a framework capable of naming conspiratorial hatred from the far right, the scapegoating impulses of progressive politics, and the ritualized bias of academic culture?

In my last article, I wrote about what it means to stop apologizing for being a Jew; this piece builds on my story by examining how campus culture demands that we do exactly that—through silence, disavowal, and public performance.

This is where the current “definition wars” come in: the fierce debates over the IHRA Working Definition, the Jerusalem Declaration (JDA), and the Nexus Document. All three try to name what antisemitism looks like in the 21st century. All three have strengths. All three have limits. And all three fundamentally disagree on one critical question: Where to draw the line between antisemitism and antizionism?

You have a right to a strong opinion on that. But disagreement on one axis should not prevent us from engaging their ideas because we need all three to understand the terrain of campus antisemitism. Each reveals something essential:

• IHRA names antizionism as antisemitism, that the obsessive fixation on Israel is a hatred of Jews.
• JDA captures the public shaming and performative denunciation that define so many campus encounters.
• Nexus explains how antisemitism co-opts the language of social justice to repackage ancient hatred, hijacking Jewish memory and theorizing old conspiracies in new moral forms.

None of them is perfect. But none of them should be discarded if we hope to adequately understand and fight campus antisemitism.

The IHRA Working Definition is the most widely adopted framework of antisemitism globally.  This is not news. Its greatest strength is that it affirms what many Jews feel viscerally: that hatred of Israel functions as a proxy for hatred of Jews. In the United States, IHRA also provides the strongest legal footing for civil rights protections under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act—used to legislate against violations of anti-discrimination on college campuses at the federal level.

My classmate’s claim—that Israel manipulates world powers through cries of antisemitism—echoes the very pattern IHRA flags: when obsessive, conspiratorial focus on the Jewish state becomes a stand-in for classical antisemitic tropes.

But IHRA isn’t enough on its own. Its examples don’t fully describe what antisemitism felt like in that elite academic classroom: the shaming rituals, the social pressure to disavow Zionism, the assumption that Jews are inherently aligned with modern systems of power and oppression.

That’s where other frameworks become crucial.

The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA) is often dismissed by IHRA supporters as apologetics or a self-hating dodge. Nevertheless, it names something IHRA leaves implicit: the demand that Jews perform public denunciations of Zionism as a condition of moral legitimacy. In Guideline #8, it warns against “Requiring people, because they are Jewish, publicly to condemn Israel or Zionism.”

This is the ritual loyalty test that so many Jewish students and faculty know too well. It’s antisemitism not for criticizing Israel, but for singling out Jews and demanding symbolic self-renunciation in public spaces.

While the JDA refuses to admit how often antizionism is used as a socially acceptable proxy for Jew-hatred, it does give voice to a lived experience for many Jews on college campuses.

On this point, JDA captures the lived experience of many Jews on campus better than IHRA does: When antizionists label Jewish nationalism as a form of white supremacy, they require Jewish classmates and colleagues to denounce Zionism to as a performative gesture to “shed” their “privilege.”

At Stanford, when I stated my discomfort about not being “allowed” to feel the violence of my classmate’s exclusionary rhetoric and behavior, one Latina student told me: “You need to realize the optics of you, as a white woman, saying that six women of color wearing keffiyehs felt violent to you. We are the ones oppressed by this institution.”

But history tells a different story.

Ashkenazi Jews for so long were an existential threat to white supremacy. The Holocaust wasn’t an aberration. A hatred of Jews so deep an entire society wanted to exterminate Jews and Judaism did not just ‘appear’ one day sometime in the 1930s. The genocide of European Jewry was the culmination of centuries of antisemitic belief that Jews could (and should) never belong. 

Critical race theory (CRT), a politico-academic framework—which my classmate alluded to when accusing me of white privilege—highlights how racism is embedded in Western systems. It says: “When European colonizers built a racial hierarchy into the law, they created modern understandings of race. They wrote American racism.” 

But this theory overlooks how antisemitism operated before colonial conquest—and continues to shape Jewish experience in ways that defy neat, binary ideas about race and power. A hatred of Jews was built into dominant European ideas about the world and structures of power well before either 1492 or 1619, so CRT, which is situated in a specific place and time period, does not account for the vast Jewish history. 

The JDA clarifies how Jews are demanded to renounce Zionism. To “acknowledge the optics.” Proponents of social justice ideologies like CRT, across college campuses, require Jews to accept our “white privilege” and use that structural power to demonize our community. American Jews with mixed or ambiguous ethno-racial heritage likely experience this dynamic differently. However, the demand for Jews to accept anti-Jewish depictions of our history and identity to “prove” we belong is part of campus antisemitism. 

The JDA still does not reckon, however, with how social justice frameworks like CRT are themselves weaponized to repackage classical antisemitic tropes to blame Jews for oppression.

The Nexus Document fills in this final gap. It situates antisemitism within a broader social framework, where ancient conspiracy theories are recast as moral critique. Nexus describes antisemitism as a linking conspiracy—a way of explaining injustice by blaming Jews for systemic problems. It shows how antisemitism serves a social function: to simplify complexity by identifying a scapegoat. It says: 

“Antisemitism works by portraying Jews as wielding disproportionate power and influence over societal institutions…This view is deeply enmeshed in how people process complex social problems.” “Antisemitism fulfills a social function: It provides an explanation for social disorders…while fomenting division between Jews and other minorities.”

This framing of antisemitism is crucial on campuses, where real grievances—against racism, capitalism, colonialism—often get redirected toward Jews, who are seen as uniquely powerful, privileged, or complicit.

In October 2024, for example, the Palestinian group “Queers in Palestine” called Zionism a global threat, tying it to capitalism, colonialism, and fragmentation. Their manifesto declared, “There is no such thing as individual liberation,” yet made clear that Jewish liberation—if tied to Zionism—was not welcome. Many of my classmates parodied these ideas. 

By framing Zionism as inherently oppressive, student activists erase Jewish history and invert its meanings: Jewish return becomes colonialism, Jewish defense becomes genocide, Jewish nationalism becomes white supremacy. These narratives don’t just uplift Palestinian suffering—they recast Jews as symbols of empire.

The rallying cry heard on so many campuses—“Nobody’s free until all of us are free”—calls for solidarity across struggles, envisioning a world where dignity and justice are shared by all. But on many college campuses today, that promise stops short when it comes to Jews.

This isn’t solidarity. It’s selective liberation. And it leaves Jews with an impossible choice: renounce our people’s story, or be written out of collective movements entirely.

My classmate’s argument about UNRWA—that Israel, and by extension Jews, strategically control United Nations decisions—perfectly illustrates how Jews are blamed for systemic harm and depicted as the obstacle to complex global problems.

Nexus names this moral alchemy that turns Jewish identity into an accusation. It explains why Jewish suffering is villainized unless it can be abstracted, universalized, or metaphorically repurposed.

Nexus gives us language for what happens when Jewish students are cast as oppressors—even as we are mourning fresh dead.

Campus antisemitism cannot be understood through any one of these definitions alone. It is not just classical hatred or modern conspiracy—it is a hybrid. It thrives on ignorance of Jewish history, on the misuse of liberation discourse, and on the belief that Jews must earn conditional belonging by disavowing our own community.

We need IHRA’s legal foundation and bravery to name the inherent relationship between antizionism and antisemitism. We need JDA’s sensitivity to performative exclusion. We need Nexus’s insight into how antisemitism disguises itself in the grammar of justice. But even together, they are not enough.

To meet this moment, we need a new definition—one that names the unique rituals, exclusions, and moral performances that define today’s campus antisemitism.

We need to write our own, because the academy already has in our absence.