The student government of Rutgers University has voted against a resolution to adopt what is widely considered the world’s leading definition of antisemitism, The Daily Targum, the university’s official campus newspaper, reported on Sunday.

According to the paper, the vote, conducted by secret ballot on Sunday, was influenced by a litany of anti-Zionist claims that the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism “does not protect Jewish people” but rather “diminishes the ability of other marginalized groups to protect themselves against hate speech.” Others argued that Zionism is not a component of Jewish identity.

Critics also argued that the IHRA definition is antisemitic in effect, with one speaker, who received affirmation from a member of the progressive group J Street, saying “that historically, this definition has perpetuated discrimination against Jewish people.” In one standout moment, it was even asserted that the student government’s Sexual Violence Education Committee (SVE) should not have sponsored the resolution to adopt the IHRA definition despite that Jewish women were subjected to rape and other sex crimes during Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel and imprisonment of Israeli hostages on Oct. 7, 2023.

IHRA, an intergovernmental organization comprising dozens of countries including the US, adopted the “working definition” of antisemitism in 2016. According to the definition, antisemitism “is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” It provides 11 specific, contemporary examples of antisemitism in public life, the media, schools, the workplace, and in the religious sphere. Beyond classic antisemitic behavior associated with the likes of the medieval period and Nazi Germany, the examples include denial of the Holocaust and newer forms of antisemitism targeting Israel such as demonizing the Jewish state, denying its right to exist, and holding it to standards not expected of any other democratic state.

The definition has been widely accepted by Jewish groups and lawmakers across the political spectrum, and it is now used by hundreds of governing institutions, including the US State Department, European Union, and United Nations. Dozens of US states have also formally adopted it through law or executive action.

Advocates of the IHRA definition have argued that formally adopting it will give law enforcement and other authorities a great ability to prosecute hate crimes and combat antisemitism more broadly.

Following the Rutgers resolution’s defeat, one Jewish student asked whether “any other group on campus” would be interrogated for requesting “help in stopping violence and hate against their community,” The Daily Targum said, an idea endorsed by the group Students Supporting Israel (SSI), which was present for the session.

Rutgers University has long been a hotbed of campus antisemitism, as previously reported by The Algemeiner.

In the past few years, the school’s predominantly Jewish AEPi fraternity house has been vandalized  no fewer than three times. In one incident, in April 2022, on the last day of the Jewish holiday of Passover, a caravan of participants from a Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) rally drove there, shouting antisemitic slurs and spitting in the direction of fraternity members. Four days later, before Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel, the house was egged during a 24-hour reading of the names of Holocaust victims.

SJP has been a wellspring of antisemitic rhetoric at Rutgers. It was one of dozens of SJP chapters that cheered Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel, an attack that resulted in hundreds of civilian deaths and numerous rapes of Israeli women. As video footage of the terrorist group’s atrocities circled the web, Rutgers SJP shared on its Instagram pages memes that said “Glory to resistance” and “the clock started running when the majority of the Palestinian population was expelled from their land by Zionists during the Nakba.” It added, “You are watching an occupied people rise up against an apartheid nuclear power that has been occupying them and making their life unlivable since 1948.”

The milieu of extremism at the school resulted in at least one death threat against the life of a Jewish student since last Oct. 7. In November 2023, a local news outlet reported, freshman Matthew Skorny, 19, called for the murder of a fraternity member he identified as an Israeli, saying on the popular social media forum YikYak, “To all the pro-Palestinian ralliers [sic] … Go kill him.”

Earlier this month, Rutgers settled a civil rights complaint in which a student reported to the Office for Civil Rights (OCR), an agency within the US Department of Education, that school officials failed to respond adequately to several antisemitic incidents.

OCR ultimately investigated several incidents, including someone’s calling for violence against an Israeli student — which went as far as posting their address on social media — the graffitiing of a Jewish student’s door with a swastika and desecrating a mezuzah that was affixed to it, and a series of threats made against the AEPi fraternity.

“OCR identified Title VI compliance concerns regarding both different treatment of students based on their shared ancestry as well as the university’s response to reports of alleged harassment and possible hostile environments for students based on students’ national origin,” OCR said in a statement. “The evidence the university has produced during OCR’s investigation so far reflects that the university likely operated a hostile environment … without redress as required under [Title VI of the US Civil Rights Act] and that the university subjected some students to discriminatory different treatment.”

The terms of the agreement between Rutgers and OCR include training employees to handle complaints of antisemitism, issuing a non-discrimination statement, and conducting a “climate survey” in which students report their opinions on discrimination at the school and the administration’s handling of it.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

The post Rutgers University Student Government Rejects IHRA Definition of Antisemitism first appeared on Algemeiner.com.