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The scorched-earth tactics that have characterized the opening weeks of the second Trump administration have been driven, in no small part, by an avalanche of executive orders — targeting everything from the environment to immigration and everyone from trans people to refugees, while also beginning to roll back 1960s-era civil rights laws.
One of these executive orders, “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism,” set its sights on some of the U.S. right’s favorite targets — higher education, progressive activism, non-U.S. citizens living in the U.S. — and laid the groundwork for addressing them using some of Trumpworld’s favorite “solutions”: deportation and threats to political opponents.
The executive order, like the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther, primarily assigns responsibility for antisemitism in the U.S. at the feet of (especially foreign) students and others protesting the atrocities in Gaza and supporting Palestinian liberation. That this is happening when the very same Trump administration is busy appointing Christian- and white nationalists to senior roles, and the straight-arm salute is rapidly becoming de rigueur among Republicans and the far right, shows that instead of being a genuine effort to protect Jews, the executive order — like many right-wing (and often centrist) approaches to fighting antisemitism — is simply repression by other means.
Although the executive order does not mention the contested IHRA definition of antisemitism by name, it is an explicit follow-up to the executive order on antisemitism Trump issued during his first term, which sought to have federal agencies refer to the IHRA definition when assessing certain civil rights complaints. And indeed, the 2025 executive order, in associating support for Palestinian rights exclusively with antisemitism, relies on one of the defining features of the IHRA definition that civil liberties advocates have long warned about — delegitimizing, censoring, and even criminalizing speech critical of Israel. The new executive order, as much as anything else, therefore represents a dramatic escalation in the weaponization of the IHRA definition and its internalized logic.
Yet even as Palestinians remain the primary targets of efforts to codify the IHRA definition, the definition also, according to a new legal paper, harms the very group it proposes to protect — Jewish people.
In “Defending Jews from the Definition of Antisemitism,” Itamar Mann and Lihi Yona, both associate professors of law at the University of Haifa, explore how codifying the IHRA definition, with its welding of Zionism to Jewish identity, could breach freedom of religion in the U.S.
As well as offering this and other potential legal avenues for progressives to confront the IHRA definition, the article also grapples with, as Yona explained in an interview with Diaspora Alliance, the inherent — but under-recognized — risks of appealing to the law to try and define the bounds of Jewish identity. In seeking such legal interventions, Yona said, Jewish communities “give legal systems a lot of power to decide who is a Jew and who is the right kind of Jew. And that never goes well.”
I spoke to Yona about these novel legal arguments against the IHRA definition, the legal history of conflating Zionism and Judaism in the U.S., and some of the ways the Trump administration is turning anti-discrimination law on its head.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
At the heart of your article is the argument that, in addition to the very clear and well-documented harms the IHRA definition and its codification pose to Palestinians, they also negatively affect Jews. What prompted you to formulate these arguments?
We wrote this article in the aftermath of October 7. Itamar Mann, my co-author, has been thinking a lot about questions of antisemitism in a more global context, while I came to this looking at how the IHRA definition is being codified into U.S. law. I’m really interested in what this is doing to Jewish identity, and in thinking about the power communities often give the law to shape their identity — and what we lose as communities when we give legal institutions that power.
You write in the article about some of the U.S. legal history that contributed to the conflation of Judaism and Zionism — can you share some of your findings?
We started out by looking back at how the question of antisemitism and its relationship to Israel had historically played out in the legal system in the U.S. In the post-World War 2 era courts were wrestling with the limits of freedom of speech in cases involving Nazis. Within those cases we saw a [far-right] discourse that was already tying together Zionism and Jewish identity under the familiar antisemitic trope of dual loyalty. In some cases, the prosecution and the courts accepted without question that any attack on Zionism was antisemitic speech. So we could see classical antisemitism and the legal system almost working together to produce this logic [of conflating Israel and Judaism].
Later on, post-1967 war, we saw a different but similar strand emerging, where courts began to ratify the idea that Israel is an inherent part of individual and communal Jewish identity, and that a critique of Israel is therefore a critique of Jewish identity. A paradox emerged in which the insistence on a connection between Zionism and Jewish identity is both an antisemitic trope — the assumption that all Jews are Zionists — but also a relevant message pushed forth by many within the Jewish community, or those purporting to represent Jewish interests.
Can you summarize your legal arguments about the IHRA definition’s potential harms to Jews and Jewish communities?
We acknowledge that for Jews throughout history religious identity has always been political, and that for many Jews around the world, Israel is a meaningful part of their Jewish identity — and that accordingly, criticizing or delegitimizing Israel feels like an attack on their Jewish identity. We agree with that argument because we see Jewish identity historically as different from other religions, in particular Christianity.
However, even though Israel plays a meaningful role in many Jewish people’s identity, that doesn’t mean in and of itself that people can’t criticize Zionism. For many people, there are good reasons to criticize Israel or object to Zionism that are not about Judaism.
The deeper argument we have against IHRA is that for many other Jewish people and communities, the political aspect of their Jewish identity revolves around an objection to Zionism or Israel. When we acknowledge that Jewish identity has always been political, we must also acknowledge diversity in those political manifestations. The problem with IHRA, and with the larger project that ties critiques of Israel and Zionism to antisemitism, is that it says that those Jews who have Jewish reasons for opposing Israel and Zionism are antisemites — meaning that something is inherently wrong with their Judaism.
Often when communities — in this case Jewish, Zionist communities — turn to the law in the hope that the law will save them, they give legal systems a lot of power to decide who is a Jew and who is the right kind of Jew. And that never goes well.
We’re in another moment of accelerated accumulation of power for the Christian right in the U.S., parts of which are capitalizing on the current discord around antisemitism to advance their own political goals. You discuss in the article how redefining antisemitism to center on criticism of Israel helps the conservative Christian project — can you talk about that some more, and share some reflections on what you’re seeing on that front since Trump took office?
A prominent legal strategy of the Christian right is a very aggressive broadening of religious protections as a way of opting out of policies (often progressive) that conservatives do not want to take part in, from winning religious exemptions from Covid-19 vaccine mandates to LGBTQ anti-discrimination laws to abortion access.
We cite David Schraub’s analysis that in this moment of broadening religious exemptions, the Christian right is acknowledging the risk that progressive religious groups can come out with their own versions of religious exemptions, especially in this Trump era, to opt out from conservative policies they don’t want to play a part in. And so one of the ways in which the Christian right is trying to stop at least some of that counter-strategy is to define progressive Jews as not really Jews.
Once you can do that, you pull the rug out from under any attempt they may make to argue for religious exemption. This new wave of defining antisemitism in ways that capture a lot of progressive Jews and cast them as antisemites plays into this bigger picture, because once they can be characterized as not real Jews, the ability of progressives to push back against conservative policies using tools developed by the Christian right is undermined. So what’s happening with IHRA is part of a bigger shift.
What are some of the legal avenues progressives in the U.S. can take to fight back against the IHRA definition, and the redefinition of antisemitism more broadly?
Our legal argument has two main clusters. The first echoes the new strategy of the religious right, using the religious freedom protections they’ve carved out to allow non-Zionist Jews to argue for religious exemptions from many of the laws that are based on the IHRA definition. If my religion dictates a certain set of values, and if my Jewish beliefs compel me to speak against what is happening right now in Gaza, then the law should not intervene in how I express my religion. This general line of argument has some traction in the courts currently.
The second one is the establishment clause, which says the law should not intervene in what religion means, or in deciding that one denomination is more correct than another. We apply this idea to the struggle within the Jewish community over the meaning of Zionism. By pushing a certain type of intermingled political and Jewish identity — the Zionist one — the law is favoring one strand of Judaism over another.
We also apply two other protections to Jewish identity. The first is the interracial solidarity doctrine, an anti-discrimination protection that has helped white plaintiffs in the past sue for discrimination that infringes on their right to associate with Black people — for example, a white plaintiff suing a housing project that did not let Black people in. The Black [prospective] tenant sued over their own discrimination, but the white plaintiff argued that they were also losing something when their ability to be in relationship with Black people was denied through the act of discrimination. Given the reality of many Jews right now being fired and harassed for associating with Palestinians, we think you can use that defense to say, “I have an interest in my relationship with my Palestinian friends, colleagues, and allies, and I think the law should recognize and protect that.”
The second type of protection, which comes from sex discrimination, is based on the idea of stereotyping. Courts have recognized the idea that discriminating against or harassing someone because they didn’t act according to what you expected from them is discrimination. The case that developed this idea involved a woman who was denied promotion because the partners in the company [thought] she wasn’t feminine enough for the promotion. The Supreme Court decided that discriminated against her based on stereotypes about how women should look and behave. In the context of Jewish identity in the U.S., when Jews are discriminated against in the workplace because they fail to conform to an expectation of how Jews should behave — i.e. that Jews should be Zionists — we say that should be understood legally as a form of discrimination, because it punishes them for the gap between what it is thought they should do and what they decide to do with their identity.
Many of Trump’s executive orders seek to overturn anti-discrimination laws and policies on the grounds that they are discriminatory. How can we challenge the administration’s inversion of anti-discrimination policy?
This is part of a bigger legal and cultural war over the meaning of equality. The idea of equality and the many different things it can mean is being co-opted to advance clearly discriminatory policies, and to roll back achievements that were reached due to anti-discrimination protections.
There is a bigger problem we touch upon in the article, which is the inherent limits of identity politics to save us. When communities turn to the law to give them protection by recognizing their identity, [the law] has always been very limited in what it can offer and very vulnerable to the kind of takeover we’re seeing now. We see this with antisemitism, in the way that people are hiding behind calling others antisemites rather than having honest and uncomfortable conversations on Israel-Palestine.
Identity politics can turn on us through the right’s new grammar that casts white men as a subordinate group that needs tailored protections from discrimination. We saw it with white farmers in South Africa, and we see it in the U.S. with this imagined idea that society accepts racism as long as it’s against white people, which a Fifth-Circuit judge recently argued.
The left needs to try and imagine dealing with identity-based problems in ways that don’t further cement these problems, and that aren’t so focused on carving out spaces of protected identity within the law. Some of the protections we suggest in our article are grounded in identity-based protections, but we need to do both — use the tools we have to help people on the ground right now being fired, being silenced, being deported, but also start to develop new tools and a new language to think about justice that can meet this moment.
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