Chicago, United States, on Aug. 22, 2024. Photo: J.W. Hendricks/NurPhoto via Reuters Connect

The City Council of Chicago, Illinois, voted on Tuesday to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, becoming one of many governments and municipalities to affirm its utility as a reference tool for identifying antisemitic hate crimes and a safeguard of Jewish civil rights.

The measure was passed on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which commemorated the 81st anniversary of the day when Jewish prisoners were liberated from Auschwitz, the Nazis’ deadliest extermination camp during World War II.

“Chicago now proudly joins a global consensus of more than 1,200 entities worldwide, including the United States, 37 US state governments, and 98 city and country bodies who have adopted this definition,” city council member Debra Silverstein, alderman of the 50th Ward, said in a statement praising the adoption. “At a time when antisemitic hate crimes are surging locally, this unanimous City Council action sends an unmistakable message that anti-Jewish hate has no place in Chicago.”

IHRA — an intergovernmental organization comprising dozens of countries including the US and Israel — adopted the “working definition” of antisemitism in 2016. Since then, 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.

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.

Chicago’s embrace of the definition comes amid a historic surge in antisemitic incidents across the US and the world.

In 2024, as reported by the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) latest annual audit, there were 9,354 antisemitic incidents — an average of 25.6 a day — across the US, creating an atmosphere of hate not experienced in the nearly thirty years since the ADL began tracking such data in 1979. Incidents of harassment, vandalism, and assault all increased by double digits, and for the first time ever a majority of outrages — 58 percent — were related to the existence of Israel as the world’s only Jewish state.

The ADL also reported dramatic rises in incidents on college campuses, which saw the largest growth in 2024. The 1,694 incidents tallied by the ADL amounted to an 84 percent increase over the previous year. Additionally, antisemites were emboldened to commit more offenses in public in 2024 than they did in 2023, perpetrating 19 percent more attacks on Jewish people, pro-Israel demonstrators, and businesses perceived as being Jewish-owned or affiliated with Jews.

Illinois alone saw the eighth most antisemitic incidents in the country with 336, a 59 percent increase from the previous year which led the nation.

The ADL’s “Heat Map,” which tracks hate crimes in real time, shows 105 antisemitic hate incidents recorded in 2025.

In one disturbing incident in the Highland Park suburb of Chicago, an antisemitic letter threatening violence was mailed to a resident’s home. So severe were its contents that the FBI and the Illinois Terrorism and Intelligence Center were called to the scene to establish that there was no imminent danger, according to local news outlets. Later, the local government shuttered all religious institutions as a precautionary measure.

With Tuesday’s measure, Chicago became the second largest US city to adopt the IHRA definition. However, it is now the largest to have it on the books as New York City under its new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, recently revoked it along with a series of other executive orders enacted by his predecessor to combat antisemitism

US Jewish groups sharply criticized the move.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry similarly lambasted the reversal as an invitation for intensified bigotry against Jewish New Yorkers, saying, “On his very first day as New York City mayor, Mamdani shows his true face: He scraps the IHRA definition of antisemitism and lifts restrictions on boycotting Israel. This isn’t leadership. It’s antisemitic gasoline on an open fire.”

The definition could have been problematic for Mamdani, a far-left democratic socialist and avowed anti-Zionist who has made anti-Israel activism a cornerstone of his political career and been widely accused of promoting antisemitic rhetoric. A supporter of boycotting all entities tied to Israel, he has repeatedly refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state; routinely accused Israel of “apartheid” and “genocide”; and refused to clearly condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” which has been used to call for violence against Jews and Israelis worldwide.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

The Israeli government’s second annual antisemitism conference in Jerusalem this week is part of a relatively recent move by the country to concern itself with countering global antisemitism.

Early Zionists presented the State of Israel as a solution to antisemitism, sometimes downplaying the concern Jews expressed about their persecution. “The Jewish people were mistaken for blaming antisemitism for all the troubles and suffering endured in the diaspora,” David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first prime minister, wrote in 1950. “This is one of the blind spots that the Jewish people were stricken with in exile.”

But in the decades since, and especially since the government established its Ministry of Strategic Affairs 20 years ago, Israel has poured tens of millions of dollars into fighting antisemitism in the diaspora.

“You must declare, no more antisemitism. Not here. Not now. Not anywhere,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told attendees at the Jerusalem conference. “Not on the right, not on the left.”

Netanyahu’s rhetoric mirrored the way many American Jews think about antisemitism, with concern shifting since Oct. 7 from an overwhelming focus on the far right to equal levels of concern across the political spectrum.

Israel, though, has adopted a strategy to combat antisemitism with little precedent in the diaspora: It’s partnering with the far right to fight two groups that Amichai Chikli, Israel’s minister for diaspora affairs and countering antisemitism, believes are a shared enemy for Jews and European nationalists: the “woke far left” and Muslim extremists.

Concern about antisemitism on the right is relegated to what Chikli calls the “woke right,” meaning figures like Tucker Carlson and former U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who have turned against Israel in recent years.

This framework leaves space to partner with European officials like Jordan Bardella, a French politician who attended the conference and has called for closer ties between Israel and France even as he leads a party founded by a Holocaust denier.

Chikli’s approach threw last year’s inaugural conference into turmoil as Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, British Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis and several other prominent leaders pulled out of the event over the inclusion of far-right figures.

Yet Chikli doubled-down this year, reportedly dropping the ADL from his guest list while welcoming Sebastian Kurtz, the former Austrian chancellor who has railed against “political Islam,” far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders, and Dominik Tarczynski, a Polish member of European parliament who has called Islamists “sick animals” and pledged to “fight for Christian Europe until the final victory.”

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Some have argued that Jews should embrace these tactical alliances so long as they help address a common goal — support for Israel in Europe, say, or pressure on university leaders to address campus protests in the U.S.

But most diaspora Jews have taken a much dimmer view of antisemitism strategies that appear too one-sided. While the Israeli government presented Leo Terrell, Trump’s antisemitism task force chair, with its annual Award of Honor ahead of the conference, many Jews in the U.S. have opposed the antisemitism policies that Terrell and the White House have promoted.

And when the Heritage Foundation released their blueprint for Trump to fight antisemitism, several prominent Jewish organizations rushed to distance themselves from the plan, despite supporting some of its ideas for targeting anti-Zionists, because it completely ignored far-right antisemitism.

Israel, though, is in a bind.

Given their relatively small share of the population, Jews inevitably seek to craft narratives about antisemitism that can help build a broader coalition of supporters.

For liberal Jews, who make up a majority of the American Jewish community, that often means joining with other minority groups by connecting antisemitism to other forms of racism and discrimination.

But that’s a nonstarter for the Israeli government, which is now treated as a pariah by most non-Jewish liberals outside the country, compelling it to embrace a different narrative that views its controversial conduct in Gaza as an asset: Israel is on the front lines of the battle against the threat radical Islam poses not only to Israelis and Jews but also to white, Christian Europeans and Americans.

“This conference seeks to banish political correctness,” Chikli declared during his welcome address, outlining a “struggle of the free world against the imperialism and tyranny of radical Islam.”

It’s an effective strategy for joining Israel’s cause to that of the growing nationalist movements in Europe, though it also threatens to drive a deeper wedge between American Jews and Israel.

Chikli, at least, seems to have made his peace with such a rupture and suggested that it was liberal Jews who had gone “against Torah” by succumbing to “progressive, woke neo-communist ideology.”

“This is the reality,” he said. “At the core, we’re very different.”

GO DEEPER:

• Hosting Europe’s far-right again, minister says Diaspora criticism ‘just a disagreement’ (Times of Israel)
• Israel’s antisemitism confab welcomes far-right pols, but draws less fire than last year (Times of Israel)

The post Israel is teaming up with the far right to fight global antisemitism appeared first on The Forward.

The BBC logo is displayed above the entrance to the BBC headquarters in London, Britain, July 10, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Hollie Adams

The BBC apologized on Tuesday night after at least four of its presenters failed to mention the murder of Jews in the Holocaust during the national broadcaster’s coverage of International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

“BBC Breakfast” presenter Jon Kay said on air Tuesday morning that Holocaust Remembrance Day was “for remembering the six million people murdered by the Nazi regime over 80 years ago.” Several BBC broadcasts by some of its most well-known presenters included similar comments that omitted the mention of Jewish victims when discussing the Holocaust.

In one broadcast, “BBC News” presenter Martine Croxall also said Holocaust Remembrance Day is a day “for remembering the six million people who were murdered by the Nazi regime over 80 years ago.”

BBC World News presenter Matthew Amroliwala introduced a bulletin on his show with the same scripted line.

On the BBC Radio 4 program “Today,” presenter Caroline Nicholls discussed plans to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day and said in part: “Buildings across the UK will be illuminated this evening to mark Holocaust Memorial Day, which commemorates the six million people murdered by the Nazi regime more than 80 years ago.”

“Is the BBC trying to sever all ties with their Jewish listeners? Even on Holocaust Memorial Day, the BBC cannot bring itself to properly address antisemitism,” the Campaign Against Antisemitism posted on X. “This is absolutely disgraceful broadcasting. BBC, we demand an explanation for how this could have happened.”