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Nuance is crucial in fighting hate. That’s why I helped write an alternative definition of antisemitism.
(JTA) — My 95-year-old mother knows a thing or two about trauma. Not only because she is a survivor of Auschwitz but also because she is a psychologist.
“What worries me,” my mother says, “is that we Jews will succumb to our past trauma rather than rise above it.”
I share my mother’s concern.
Jewish Americans face the threats of escalating antisemitism and growing white nationalism at the same time that the Israeli government’s anti-democratic policies are eliciting increasingly harsh condemnation worldwide.
There is no inherent relationship between antisemitism and the outcry over Israeli policies. But when they occur together, they can trigger traumatic memories and confuse our thinking. This confusion can lead to a dangerous conflation of issues at the intersection of Israel and antisemitism.
Prime Minister Netanyahu exploits this confusion to deflect condemnation of his policies. He constructs a misleading equation, portraying severe criticism of Israel as not only a threat to the Jewish state but also to the Jewish people.
To demonize his political opponents, Netanyahu invokes the ultimate act of antisemitism, the Holocaust. He did so when he blasted those negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran and when he reprimanded The New York Times over its criticism of the agreements he reached with far-right political parties. His strategy is to downplay antisemitism on the right and emphatically equate left-wing with right-wing antisemitism to obscure their distinctions.
Some Jewish organizations, perceiving strong criticism of Israel as threatening Jewish unity and the Jewish state, reflexively reinforce that equation. A case in point is Anti-Defamation League chief Jonathan Greenblatt’s approach to anti-Zionism.
Greenblatt used his keynote address at ADL’s annual leadership summit in May to hammer home his assertion that “Anti-Zionism is antisemitism. Full stop.” Over the past two weeks, he has played a leading role in the campaign to endorse the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance non legally binding working definition of antisemitism (IHRA) as the sole such definition in the Biden administration’s U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism. In a tweet urging its adoption, Greenblatt proclaimed: “Anything else permits antisemitism under the guise of anti-Zionism.”
Greenblatt was worried about reports that the White House would include other definitions in the strategy, such as the Nexus Document, which addresses “the complexities at the intersection of Israel and antisemitism.” Greenblatt has repeatedly denigrated Nexus by calling it a “pasted-up process organized by activists” and circulating inaccuracies like: “The Nexus definition assumes that unless there is outright violence involved, anti-Zionism is generally not antisemitism.”
In fact, the Nexus Document includes seven examples of anti-Zionist or anti-Israel behavior that should be considered antisemitic and four that might not be. As Dov Waxman, a member of the Nexus Task Force and chair of Israel Studies at UCLA, tweeted: “Nexus clearly identifies when criticism of Israel or opposition to it crosses the line into antisemitism. But because it is clearer than IHRA in this respect, it is less susceptible to being misused and weaponized against Palestinians and their supporters.”
It’s not that Greenblatt doesn’t understand the complexity of these issues. He has taken nuanced and moderate positions on anti-Zionism in the past. But complex formulas impede the use of simplistic equations. If Greenblatt wants to show that anti-Zionism is always an existential threat to both the Jewish state and the Jewish people, he can leave no room for nuance.
Ultimately, the White House acknowledged the significance of utilizing a varied set of resources to combat antisemitism, stating, “There are several definitions of antisemitism, which serve as valuable tools to raise awareness and increase understanding of antisemitism.” The strategy acknowledged that the United States had already “embraced” the IHRA version, describing it as the “most prominent,” and went on to say that it “welcomes and appreciates the Nexus Document” and other efforts.
That formula has angered some supporters of the IHRA definition, including World Jewish Congress president Ronald Lauder, who said: “The inclusion of a secondary definition in addition to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism is an unnecessary distraction from the real work that needs to be done.”
Like Greenblatt, Lauder wants to build a consensus around a simple explanation for a complex situation. But their approach actually diminishes our ability to carry out “the real work that needs to be done” because it weakens our ability to confront the dominant force fueling increased antisemitism in America: white supremacy
According to the ADL, white supremacy is the greatest danger facing Jewish Americans. As President Biden said in his opening remarks when the National Strategy was unveiled: “Our intelligence agencies have determined that domestic terrorism rooted in white supremacy — including antisemitism — is the greatest terrorist threat to our Homeland today.”
“We can’t take on white supremacy, xenophobia, anti-LGBTQ hate, or any form of hate without taking on the antisemitism that helps animate it,” says Amy Spitalnick, the CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and former head of Integrity First for America, which successfully sued the neo-Nazis who organized the deadly 2017 Charlottesville march. “And likewise, we can’t take on antisemitism without taking on white supremacy or these other forms of hate … All our fates are intertwined.”
But Israel’s policies create a dilemma. When many of our potential allies see Israel, they see a country that calls itself a democracy but enacts laws enshrining Jewish dominance over Palestinian citizens of Israel. And they see a country that has denied fundamental human rights to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza for 56 years. So, not surprisingly, they are moved to speak out about these realities.
Criticism of Israel will inevitably heighten in response to the policies and actions of this Israeli government. Some of Israel’s critics may indeed cross a line by using antisemitic tropes or stereotypes or denying Jews the same rights afforded to others, including Palestinians. When they do, they should not get a free pass. Full stop.
But we must resist the temptation to reflexively respond with accusations of Jew-hatred, even when the criticism of Israel is off-base or unjustified. We cannot afford to oversimplify complex issues by conflating political disagreements about Israel with antisemitism. If we do, we risk distracting from addressing the most dangerous instances of antisemitism and bigotry.
Times like these call on us to shed the weight of our past and approach these issues with clear minds and thoughtful consideration. “Sometimes we split the world into good and bad to guard ourselves against difficult realities,” my mother said. “If we can rid ourselves of the bad and make it so the other side is always guilty, then we feel safe. But by doing so, we lose the ability to find a solution.”
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Opinion: Hate crime law a tentative step forward
Canada has taken a long overdue step in strengthening our ability to confront hate. The federal government’s new legislation not only creates a stand-alone hate crime offence, it also does something our courts have wrestled with for decades, it codifies a definition of “hatred” in the Criminal Code. That clarity matters, but let us be clear from the start, not all is perfect in this law.
Until now, judges and Crown Attorneys relied on Supreme Court decisions going back to Keegstra in 1990 and Whatcott in 2013 to determine what “hatred” meant in law. Those cases established that hatred was not about mere insults or offensive speech, but about “detestation” and “vilification,” the kind of speech that isolates a community, marks them as less than fully human, and places them in real danger. The new legislation takes those definitions out of the legal textbooks and places them clearly in the Criminal Code. That matters for police officers deciding whether to lay charges, for Crowns weighing evidence, and for communities who have too often felt that the law was uncertain, inconsistent, or too slow.
For Jewish Canadians, Indigenous peoples, Muslim communities, Black Canadians, LGBTQ+ people, and many others who have borne the brunt of hate crimes, the signal is welcome, Canada is saying hate is not just a social problem, it is a crime against us all.
The bill also removes one of the most frustrating procedural roadblocks, the need to secure the personal consent of the provincial Attorney General before charges could be laid in hate propaganda cases. In practice, this meant that police and Crowns, even when they had strong evidence, could be stalled at the starting line because approval from the Attorney General was rarely granted. By removing this requirement, the new law allows police and Crown attorneys to proceed more swiftly and with more confidence. For communities long told to “just report it,” this change could finally build trust that the justice system is not only listening but ready to act.
Another important element is the protection of spaces where communities gather. The law makes it a crime to intimidate or obstruct people entering synagogues, schools, community centres, or other places primarily used by identifiable groups. That means no more hiding behind masks to frighten congregants on their way to worship or children on their way to school. These protections may seem obvious, but for too long communities at risk have faced such harassment without adequate recourse.
Just as important, the government has committed $12.9 million over six years, with nearly a million annually ongoing, to support new anti-hate projects. This includes funding to improve the collection and availability of hate crime data and to expand services for victims and survivors. These investments will help communities not only seek justice but also begin healing.
So yes, this is progress.
But progress does not equal victory.
The legislation’s definition of hatred, detestation and vilification not mere offence or hurt feelings, is both precise and cautious. It tries to balance freedom of expression with the need to protect communities from real harm. That balance is crucial. Nobody wants to see a law that punishes criticism or satire, even if it makes us uncomfortable. At the same time, communities need protection from the toxic brew of rhetoric that we know can escalate into violence.
And here lies the problem, this law looks only at the traditional sphere of hate crimes and hate propaganda. What it does not yet confront is the digital ecosystem where hatred thrives, multiplies, and metastasizes.
We live in a world where conspiracy theories that once stayed in dimly lit basements now reach millions with a single click. Holocaust denial, racist caricatures, misogynist rants, antisemitic tropes, they all travel faster and hit harder online. A Facebook post, a TikTok video, or a Telegram channel can stoke the same kind of detestation and vilification the Criminal Code now defines, but at a speed and scale our laws are still catching up to.
Without integrating online harms into this new framework, Canada risks winning a legal battle while losing the societal war. A Pyrrhic victory, if you will.
Hate groups adapt quickly. They couch their language in irony or “just joking.” They migrate to platforms beyond the reach of Canadian courts. They recruit vulnerable young people not with burning crosses but with memes and livestreams. If our laws remain focused only on in-person hate crimes or printed pamphlets, we will forever be chasing yesterday’s problem.
The government has promised separate legislation on online harms. Communities targeted by hate cannot afford to wait much longer. Every month of delay is another month when young Canadians are radicalized in their bedrooms, another month when harassment campaigns go unchecked, another month when hatred festers behind a screen only to erupt into real world violence.
This new hate-crime law deserves praise. It is careful, measured, and long needed. But from the very beginning we should be honest, it is not perfect. Unless it is paired with a robust strategy for confronting online hate, one that forces platforms to act responsibly and gives law enforcement real tools to respond, it risks being remembered as a noble but incomplete gesture.
History will not judge us on the elegance of our legal definitions. It will judge us on whether we made our communities safer, whether we stood up for those targeted by hate, and whether we matched words with action.
Canada has given itself sharper legal tools. Now we must decide, will we use them to carve out a safer, more inclusive future, or will we leave them on the shelf while hate keeps spreading in the digital shadows? Because if we settle for half-measures, we may find that what looks like victory today is nothing more than defeat in slow motion.
Bernie M. Farber is the former CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress and founding chair emeritus of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network.
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Austria may withdraw from hosting Eurovision 2026 if Israel is excluded
The chancellor of Austria is pressuring its public broadcaster and the city of Vienna not to host next year’s Eurovision Song Contest if Israel is excluded.
The potential withdrawal from hosting the competition comes as several countries, including Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Spain and Iceland, have announced they will not participate in next year’s competition if Israel is included due to the war in Gaza.
Unlike those countries, Austria has a right-wing government. “It’s unacceptable that we, of all people, should prohibit a Jewish artist from coming to Vienna,” a top representative of the Austrian People’s Party told Austrian news outlet oe24.
The party’s leader, Chancellor Christian Stocker, and State Secretary Alexander Pröll are urging the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation and Vienna to cancel hosting if the boycott goes ahead.
The mayor of Vienna, Michael Ludwig, told oe24 that excluding Israel would be “a serious mistake,” but no formal plans to withdraw from hosting the competition have been announced. If the city does pull out of hosting, ORF would potentially owe the new host country up to 40 million euros, or roughly $46 million.
Members of the European Broadcasting Union are set to vote in November on whether the Israeli public broadcaster, KAN, will be allowed to participate in next year’s competition. They have previously rebuffed entreaties to exclude Israel, but pressure is higher this year.
Talks of Austria canceling its 2026 Eurovision hosting come after German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Sunday that Germany would skip the contest if Israel is boycotted.
“I consider it a scandal that this is even being discussed. Israel is part of it,” Merz told German talk show host Caren Miosga, according to German news outlet Der Spiegel. He added that he would “support” Germany voluntarily withdrawing from the competition if the boycott takes effect.
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László Krasznahorkai, whose family hid Jewish roots during Holocaust, wins literature Nobel
For decades, Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai has written sentences that seem to stretch to the end of time — long, feverish, unpunctuated meditations on chaos, faith, and collapse. Now, the writer once dubbed “the contemporary master of apocalypse” has received the world’s highest literary honor. On Thursday, the Swedish Academy awarded Krasznahorkai, 71, the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Born in 1954 in the small Hungarian town of Gyula to a Jewish family that survived the Holocaust and concealed its identity, Krasznahorkai has spent decades chronicling moral disintegration and spiritual endurance.
If you don’t read Hungarian, you might know Krasznahorkai through film: his longtime collaborator Béla Tarr turned several of his novels into movies — Sátántangó (a seven-hour black-and-white epic), Werckmeister Harmonies, and The Turin Horse — all staples of international art-house cinema.
Who is László Krasznahorkai?
A cult figure in world literature, Krasznahorkai is known for sprawling, hypnotic prose and bleak humor. He first drew attention in 1985 with Sátántangó, a novel about life in a decaying Hungarian village.
He has since written a series of darkly comic epics, including The Melancholy of Resistance and Seiobo There Below — each circling questions of despair and transcendence.
Some of his later novels, including Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming and Herscht 07769, feature neo-Nazis and right-wing extremists. The latter contains only a single period in 400 pages. The rest is one relentless cascade of clauses — a symbol of his determination to hold chaos together by grammar alone.
He won the Man Booker International Prize in 2015.
How does his Jewish background fit into his work?
Krasznahorkai rarely writes explicitly about Judaism, but the sense of exile, concealment, and moral reckoning runs through his fiction. As antisemitism intensified in the 1930s, his grandfather changed the family name to the more Hungarian-sounding Krasznahorkai. “Our original name was Korin, a Jewish name. With this name, he would never have survived,” the writer told an interviewer in 2018. “My grandfather was very wise.”
Decades later, Krasznahorkai gave the name Korin to the doomed archivist who narrates his 1999 novel War and War — turning family history into fiction. Krasznahorkai didn’t learn about his Jewish ancestry until he was 11, when his father finally told him. “In the socialist era, it was forbidden to mention it,” he recalled.
That buried history gives his novels their haunted tone. In a way, his work continues a Jewish literary tradition: bearing witness in extremity, searching for meaning in ruin.
In that 2018 interview, Krasznahorkai described himself as “half Jewish,” then added darkly: “If things carry on in Hungary as they seem likely to do, I’ll soon be entirely Jewish.”
Do Jews disproportionally win Nobels?
Jews make up about 0.2 percent of the world’s population but have received roughly 20 percent of Nobel Prizes across all categories — a record that spans science, peace, and the arts. That lineage stretches from Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Richard Feynman in physics to Rita Levi-Montalcini and Gertrude Elion in medicine, Milton Friedman and Daniel Kahneman in economics, and Henry Kissinger and Elie Wiesel in peace.
Krasznahorkai now joins that global pantheon — one that also includes Isaac Bashevis Singer, a longtime Forward staff writer, whose Yiddish storytelling won him the 1978 Nobel in Literature.
Who are some other Jewish Nobel laureates in literature?
Louise Glück (2020): The American poet mined family grief and faith, blending autobiography and myth to confront the quiet devastations of ordinary life.
Bob Dylan (2016): The folk legend was honored “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” His Jewish heritage and biblical imagery made his win both celebrated and debated.
Imre Kertész (2002): A Holocaust survivor who was honored in 2002 for Fatelessness, a semi-autobiographical work about a boy in Nazi concentration camps.
Elias Canetti (1981): Born to a Sephardic family in Bulgaria and raised in Vienna, he spent much of his life in exile from fascism. His noted work of nonfiction, Crowds and Power, dissects how mobs become monsters — and how leaders learn to feed them.
Saul Bellow (1976): The Canadian-born American novelist who captured the restless intellect and moral hunger of postwar Jewish life. His novels, including Herzog and The Adventures of Augie March, turned immigrant striving and urban alienation into high art.
JTA contributed to this report.
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