I’d Rather Ask “How Do We Win the Struggle against Anti-Zionism?” Than “Is This Anti-Semitic?”

Joshua Muravchik’s essay is a very smart but strangely academic discussion of two definitions of anti-Semitism. He likes the one that is sponsored by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), and he strongly dislikes the other, the Jerusalem Declaration on Anti-Semitism (JDA). The IHRA definition identifies most statements of anti-Zionism as anti-Semitic; the JDA definition, by contrast, tries to establish a distance between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, holding that some examples of the first are also examples of the second, but some are not. In his analysis of these two definitions, Muravchik quotes a goodly number of awful anti-Semitic sentences (many of which could be condemned by both definitions); he invokes history; he warns us against becoming complicit in the work of Jew-haters if we don’t endorse the IHRA definition.

I call his essay academic because it is abstracted from the inescapably political environment in which questions of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are situated. Muravchik never addresses any of the actual battles in which people like him, or like me, have to respond to anti-Zionist arguments on a campus, in a professional association, or a union, or a political party. Though he identifies me as a signer of the JDA definition, he does not address, or even mention, my reasons for signing it. Those reasons have to do with my political judgments, not my philosophical commitments or definitional arguments. I prefer the JDA because it is more helpful in the immediate circumstances of my political battles.

Muravchik also does not mention that in the very different circumstances of a battle over anti-Semitism in the UK, I endorsed (in Fathom magazine) the position of the people defending the IHRA definition. Local circumstances matter. The critical question, I believe, is always “How do we win the struggle against anti-Zionism?” In the cases where I have been directly involved, it wouldn’t help to ask Muravchik’s question: “Is this anti-Semitic?”