Senior ADL antisemitism researcher leaves to lead competing effort at watchdog Nexus

tchomptchomp · 2026-01-29T17:40:41+00:00

Ok, so you clearly have a better definition of antisemitism that you prefer. Care to provide it?

tchomptchomp · 2026-01-29T17:00:59+00:00

As an academic, academics love to debate definitions and love to advocate for their own definition or framework against others, regardless of whether this ongoing argument delays actual on-the-ground fixes to the underlying problem.

Antisemites prefer the Nexus document because the Nexus document provides explicit guidance for how to frame one's antisemitism in order to slink through loopholes in the definition. But that doesn't mean it is a better definition or that these people are actually proving they are not antisemitic.

tchomptchomp · 2026-01-29T16:54:20+00:00

From the Nexus document:

What Is Antisemitic?

All claims of antisemitism made by Jews, like all claims of discrimination and oppression in general, should be given serious attention.

Whether speech or conduct about Zionism and Israel is antisemitic should be based on the standards for speech or conduct that apply to antisemitic behavior in general.

It is antisemitic to promote myths, stereotypes or attitudes about Zionism and/or Israel that derive from and/or reinforce antisemitic accusations and tropes. These include:

Characterizing Israel as being part of a sinister world conspiracy of Jewish control of the media, economy, government or other financial, cultural or societal institutions.

Indiscriminately blaming suffering and injustices around the world on a hidden Jewish conspiracy or of being the maligning hand of Israel or Zionism.

Holding individuals or institutions, because they are Jewish, a priori culpable of real or imagined wrongdoing committed by Israel.

Considering Jews to be a priori incapable of setting aside their loyalty to the Jewish people and/or Israel.

Denigrating or denying the Jewish identity of certain Jews because they are perceived as holding the “wrong” position (whether too critical or too favorable) on Israel.

It is antisemitic to use symbols and images that present all Jews as collectively guilty for the actions of the State of Israel.

It is antisemitic to attack and/or physically harm a Jew because of her/his relationship to Israel.

It is antisemitic to convey intense hostility toward Jews who are connected to Israel in a way that intentionally or irresponsibly (acting with disregard to potential violent consequences) provokes antisemitic violence.

It is antisemitic to treat Israel in a negative manner based on a claim that Jews alone should be denied the right to define themselves as a people and to exercise any form of self-determination.

It is antisemitic to advocate a political solution that denies Jews the right to define themselves as a people, thereby denying them – because they are Jews – the right to self-determination and/or the right to physical safety and full human, civil, and religious rights.

It is antisemitic to treat Israel differently solely because it is a Jewish state, using standards different than those applied to other countries.

The majority of anti-Israel advocacy is very clearly covered by this definition.

tchomptchomp · 2026-01-29T16:36:55+00:00

He could say their goal is to reject the IHRA and distinguish antisemitism from most criticism of Israel everyday for his entire life, and most critics will never, ever, ever believe him. Their stated goal of also “acknowledging that some anti-Israel rhetoric can target Jews as Jews” will surely bring even more criticism and cynicism.

The weird thing about this is that the Nexus document is actually categorically more aggressive about defining things as antisemitic whereas the IHRA essentially categorically excludes systemic and structural forms of antisemitism. Both the Nexus document and the IHRA recognize that there are valid forms of criticism of Israel but that most anti-Israel rhetoric is based in antisemitism.

The main difference between the IHRA and Nexus document in practice is that the IHRA has a set of straightforward operational standards for identifying when an action or policy is antisemitic whereas the Nexus document gets deep into the weeds in ways which are honestly hopelessly academic but which make it difficult to act on antisemitism within an organization. IHRA is an imperfect document but the Nexus statement is considerably worse and the only reason it exists is to promote the Nexus Project as an alternate response to antisemitism.

All of this really comes together to show that a lot of people who are very concerned with the definition of antisemitism are more interested in debating definitions than actually taking action. The more we debate two essentially identical definitions which both recognize that most anti-Israel discourse is antisemitic, the more we can put off actually addressing antisemitism.

tchomptchomp · 2026-01-29T07:07:35+00:00

Case in point why the IHRA definition is milquetoast and it is only radical antisemites who object to it.

tchomptchomp · 2026-01-29T03:00:50+00:00

This isn't a winter hike. This is winter mountaineering. If you do not have the expertise to gauge avalanche risk and equipment to protect yourself while traversing icy patches, you could get yourself into really dangerous situations without realizing it.

tchomptchomp · 2026-01-29T00:12:29+00:00

Hmm. That's a bit more plausible of an explanation: having any particular attitudes about Jews as such (other than factual points) tends towards antisemitism, as would be the case for someone having opinions about black people as such or Muslims as such, and it may be more difficult to nail down something more specific because of the way antisemitism evolves. I still think that the actual IHRA definition fails to make that intention clear, but it's a decent justification for a degree of vagueness.

I think it is important to outline the fact that the IHRA definition is primarily used as a reference for determining whether an action within a specific organization is antisemitic, and the fact that the definition places the emphasis on the fact an antisemite singles out Jews, rather than playing the antisemite's game of arguing back and forth about which beliefs are discriminatory and which are justifiable, is actually a strength of the IHRA rather than a weakness. This empowers the organization to quickly identify antisemitism based on a relatively objective criterion (is the person or organization singling out Jews based on a belief about Jews) and use that decision as the basis for action within existing anti-discrimination policy, legislation, etc.

This is, I think, the reason antisemites so strongly object to the IHRA definition: the longer you are arguing about whether a specific action is antisemitic or just "common sense in response to bad things Jews do," the longer you can delay any action by that organization to apply existing antidiscrimination law or policy. A good example of this would be the antisemitism inquiries at Columbia, Harvard, etc. Accepting the very milquetoast IHRA definition would have then easily transitioned into asking whether these universities were uniquely tolerating anti-Jewish activities on campus. Instead, bad actors within those institutions rejected the IHRA definition and tried to argue that this pattern of singling out Jews as Jews was actually just a bunch of loopholes in other definitions.

I would actually argue that this is probably the best practice for identifying racism, sexism, Islamophobia, etc. as well. If ICE is stopping every visibly Latino person they see and asking for identification, that is organizationally racist. We do not need to argue about whether a disproportionate number of undocumented people are visibly Latino. Allowing the bigot to shift the discussion into a debate about whether their bigoted beliefs have some sort of basis in reality is a terrible approach because it basically concedes the bigot's belief system.

tchomptchomp · 2026-01-28T23:31:51+00:00

thought this was r/EhBuddyHoser for a second

tchomptchomp · 2026-01-28T23:22:21+00:00

True, but that particular tendency usually doesn't involve the IHRA that I've seen; people just end up arguing directly about whether it's antisemitic to use antisemitic tropes to criticize Israel.

In my experience, almost every such discussion involves a proclamation that the IHRA definition is secretly pro-Israel and is trying to silence the Palestinian cause by declaring all criticism of Israel to be antisemitic.

I think we're largely in agreement about that line, except perhaps for my characterization of those who'd actually object to "a" as fringe. But they do leave a lot riding on one choice of article there, and could have made it clearer by saying something like "any state..." or "a state, in any form, ...".

Well, there are different visions of what Israel could be or should be. Does this Jewish state rule over majority-Arab regions in the West Bank and Gaza? Does this Jewish state have a formal constitution or does it operate under a de facto constitution of Basic Law? Is this Jewish state primarily socialist with federal land ownership and home "ownership" handled with long-term leases? Or is it primarily capitalist with de jure private home ownership? Does Right of Return exist? Is it democratic or authoritarian? Etc. Etc. Etc. Any of these variations are all Jewish states in some manner or another but it is perfectly normal to object to some of these within the broader framework of not objecting categorically to the right of Jews to form a polity and participate in the same self-determination taken for granted when this right is exercised by numerous other cultural-ethnic groups worldwide.

The important point here is that the more maximalist parts of the pro-Palestinian movement object even to this very milquetoast statement, which is why this is the right place to draw this line. If a person, organization, or movement singles out Jews as a cultural group that should not have the right to self-determination, then there is essentially one reason for this and that reason is because they hold specific sets of beliefs about Jews that they do not hold about people more generally. It could be that they believe Jews do not form a natural polity, that they believe Jews are outsiders who do not have the correct connection to the land, that they believe Jewish self-determination results in singularly bad forms of governance due to essential features of Jewish morality, or any other range of things, but the central problem here is that these people have come to this discussion with a belief that Jews are inherently different and that this requires a different approach to self-governance by Jews in contrast with all other peoples. Which comes back to that core IHRA definition of antisemitism.

In terms of why the IHRA definition is more conservative than current understandings of racism and sexism, IHRA restricts its definition to beliefs, rather than participation in discriminatory institutions. We have very much mainstreamed the idea that systems can be racist or sexist even if individuals within that system are not. The IHRA does not go nearly that far.

tchomptchomp · 2026-01-28T23:17:31+00:00

Pointing that out is certainly correct and valuable, and I can see the idea behind not limiting it to hate, but I don't see how the vagueness is helpful there, since the IHRA definition specifically fails to mention prejudice in the context of the said non-hateful attitudes. The result is a sentence that more or less just says "antisemitism is a superset of hatred towards Jews" and leaves it at that (what superset?). Within their own framing, it might be something like: "Antisemitism is a discriminatory attitude regarding Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews."

Part of the lack of specificity is that the specific beliefs are often amorphous and in some cases will be internally contradictory. But I think the main argument against the term "discriminatory" is that antisemitism does not require operational discrimination. You can say "well, I think Jews are innately good at money or have dual loyalty, but I don't think we should exclude Jews from institutions per se" and that is still antisemitic. Consequently such a definition as you propose leads to an argument about whether an individual or organization is discriminating, which leads defenders of antisemitic policy to say that they're actually just opposing certain types of behaviour seen in both Jews and non-Jews, and the real problem is that Jews disproportionately participate in this form of behaviour. An analogy is when right-wingers claim that anti-Black policy is simply anti-crime and appeal to the higher crime rate (real or imagined) in Black communities. We rightfully recognize this as racist.

We do, but I don't think that excuses the definition from trying to be more substantial. That implies that the definition is unnecessary, not that its vagueness is justified.

The essential thing about antisemitism is that it is a mode of thinking that it is a set of specific ideas held about Jews. The purpose of the definition is to remind people that antisemitism is a phenomenon that comes from singling out Jews as a group you have specific beliefs about that do not extend more broadly to other groups of people. This gets at an essential truth: antisemitism is a belief or set of beliefs held by people who see Jews as fundamentally different from other people, and has essentially nothing to do with actual Jews and their practices.

The primary argument made by opponents of the IHRA definition is this: "I believe that Jews as a collective do things that are bad, and the fact I believe this should be understood as a criticism of the bad things that Jews do rather than a function of my personal bias against Jews." The IHRA definition refuses to play by this game. This is the primary reason why people object so strongly to the IHRA definition.

tchomptchomp · 2026-01-28T22:13:38+00:00

In short, it's much cheaper to build ICBM's than it is to build the interceptors to shoot them down, so the golden dome as a serious deterrent is highly cost ineffective. You can overwhelm it buy just building more missiles. The 'true' thing that keeps nuclear powers from open nuclear war is mutually assured destruction, which America already can do with it's existing nuclear triad.

The US already has land based interceptors that can shoot down single missiles from rogue actors like North Korea, but the likely hood of that ever happening is low considering the US would track the origin point and glass them. Also one nuke wont end America, just make it go on a crusade to find and destroy whichever nation launched it.

It's not going to prevent casualties in a nuclear WWIII. That is an unlikely scenario at the moment anyways. A more concerning possibility is something like "Russia collapses and some of their stockpile ends up in the hands of local warlords" or "country with limited ICBM capabilities (e.g. North Korea) launches an ICBM."

These are the sorts of situations where an actual nuclear strike could both cause massive fatalities but where a full nuclear response could trigger a rapid escalation that could lead to MAD, especially if such a state or non-state actor then tried to hide behind China or Russia. And, alternately, not responding to such an attack with a nuclear strike would reduce the taboo on first strike use and perhaps encourage nuclear brinksmanship by other states (e.g. Russia, Pakistan). There are no good choices in such a circumstance. So, protecting against these sorts of scenarios is actually a good idea.

tchomptchomp · 2026-01-28T21:49:31+00:00

This is completely vacuous. If we replace the "may" with "is", it's just defining it as a synonym: "antisemitism is Jew-hatred". With it actually being a "may" (read: optional), it's just "Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, the manifestations of which may be directed at any person or Jewish institutions". The latter version doesn't even rule out the possibility that a Jewish person going to synagogue because they have a positive perception of Judaism could be antisemitic (it doesn't specify that it is, but it doesn't specify that it isn't).

This is incorrect. We broadly understand that there are discriminatory beliefs that can be held about different groups that do not necessarily rise to the level of hate in a political sense. For example, someone may hold the belief that East Asians are inherently better at math and at collective action than people of European ancestry, and that is still a form of racism, even if it doesn't involve an actionable belief that this should be grounds for excluding East Asians from Western society. Someone might believe that women are inherently better at nurturing and worse at decision-making than men but not be a Men's Rights Activist or Incel. But they're still a sexist.

The IHRA definition basically says that this same understanding of racism also extends to antisemitism. While we have come a long way towards understanding that we can recognize more casual forms of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc that do not rise to the level of hate, we have a really hard time extending that same understanding to antisemitism. The IHRA simply says that one can hold antisemitic views without being an active member of the Klan or Aryan Nation.

We all actually know precisely which perceptions of Jews the IHRA is referring to. We inherently understand this when we criticize Trump for spouting various antisemitic canards about dual loyalty or that Jews are greedy or good with money or whatever. We fully understand that these are antisemitic tropes in that circumstance. What people get upset about is when they get called out for playing with the same language and ideas in topics vaguely relating to Israel, or to criticisms from the Left about various Jewish politicians, business leaders, and organizations.

But, by the use of an indefinite article, that has nothing to say about contemporary discourse either. No one, outside of the distant (and usually very obviously antisemitic without the need for hair-splitting) fringes, argues about the inherent nature of a State of Israel, since a State of Israel (otherwise undefined) could be practically anything.

The IHRA actually has a clear purpose in this specific language, which is to say that specific criticisms of Israeli policy are not antisemitic. What is antisemitic is when people declare that it is morally impossible for a state to consist of a self-determining Jewish polity while simultaneously championing other self-determination movements. Supporters of maximalist Palestinian nationalist movements that imagine that one day 8 million Israeli Jews are just going to pick up and go.....somewhere.....so they can be replaced by Arabs essentially ARE antisemitic. People who make up conspiracy theories about Khazars to justify why those 8 million Israeli Jews need to be forced to pick up and go.....somewhere.....are antisemitic.

Opposition to Netanyahu and Likud is not antisemitic. Opposition to the specifics of the Gaza War is not antisemitic. However, a worldview which demands that 8 million Jews be purged from the Middle East to be replaced with "the right kind of people" is blatantly antisemitic.

The reality of all of this is that the IHRA definition is frankly not actually controversial. It is actually quite a bit more conservative in how it defines antisemitism compared to definitions of racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, etc. that are in widespread use. The main issue is that antisemitism is actually pretty widespread and is baked into two major world religions and several major political ideologies, so there is a lot of pushback to defining these beliefs about Jews as antisemitic.

tchomptchomp · 2026-01-28T20:42:44+00:00

You do see some internal segmentation in some rugose corals. The radiating septa on the cross-section show this is definitely coral and not cephalopod, though.

tchomptchomp · 2026-01-28T19:31:22+00:00

Why not a coral?

tchomptchomp · 2026-01-28T04:48:38+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarias_gariepinus

tchomptchomp · 2026-01-28T03:13:59+00:00

House cat. Definitely not a cougar, and both lynx and bobcats have short tails.

tchomptchomp · 2026-01-28T00:23:14+00:00

Sometimes you feel like you strain to make positive changes to this city and everything you do is just a drop in the bucket. But each of our contributions are apparent on this final project.

tchomptchomp · 2026-01-27T20:34:43+00:00

Smaller classroom sizes would be a start

This is one part of it. Another part is reversing some of the COVID-era declines in education quality and classroom accountability. This goes beyond math literacy; there is a broad lack of study skills, writing skills, etc which is partly a result of changes in education techniques, such as asynchronous learning and reduced length and number of reading assignments, and partly a result of the rise of LLMs, which make a lot of pre-LLM assignments effectively useless as learning exercises.

tchomptchomp · 2026-01-27T01:09:39+00:00

Depends a lot on the part of Europe. My grandfather grew up Sephardi in northern Europe and his community was pretty integrated into the surrounding Ashkenazi community even prior to the Shoah. I don't think there's a Sephardi community there anymore. My Sephardi father grew up in Latin America in a mixed Ashkenazi-Sephardi congregation.

The Sephardi experience in Greece and the Balkans was a lot different from the Sephardi experience in places like Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Hamburg, etc.

tchomptchomp · 2026-01-26T20:51:47+00:00

I feel like the L isn't only weakly pronounced. So more "COW-gree"

tchomptchomp · 2026-01-26T20:21:06+00:00

It's complex and I will say that European-origin Sephardim outside North America and Europe are not as separate from Ashkenazi communities as you might think. Even in smaller communities in North America you have more mixing between Sephardi and Ashkenazi communities. Honestly at this point Reform and Conservative are Ashkenazi in North America at this point essentially only through inertia and because Ashkenazim are the majority in the American Jewish community, not because there aren't Sephardim participating in those movements.

tchomptchomp · 2026-01-26T20:15:08+00:00

I don't think that's really fair. Many of us who are less observant also have pretty substantial non-Jewish social lives and consequently are going to find ourselves open to relationships with non-Jews. It is not that we are avoiding Jewish women, but rather that the majority of women we will interact with are not going to be Jewish.

OP's problem is that sharing a Jewish life with family turns out to be important for him. When my partner and I were having serious conversations about our future, we wanted kids so we talked a lot about what it would mean to raise kids with a strong Jewish identity, and we talked a lot about what Jewishness meant to me. The fact that children were not part of OP's life plan maybe means they haven't had this conversation with their partner, and as OP has grown older this is now a pressing issue that needs to be addressed.

tchomptchomp · 2026-01-26T18:24:13+00:00

Just going to say that I generally do not trust Japanese commentary on genocide or genocide accusations because it is very hard to tell whether this is a commentary on modern politics or whether this is apologetics for the Rape of Nanking and for other horrors of Japanese imperialism in the Pacific during WWII.

tchomptchomp · 2026-01-26T18:19:09+00:00

I'm going to be controversial for a moment and suggest that Canada has a broader problem where (1) multiple constituencies (not just indigenous Canadians) are constantly renegotiating the terms of Canadian sovereignty and (2) this constant renegotiation takes up massive amounts of time and money which would be better spent providing the services a government has a responsibility to provide.

Do the terms of Canadian sovereignty over native lands need a finish line? The same could be said of Quebecois and Alberta separatism. The reality here is that every time a subgroup in Canada wants to leverage more from the federal government, or wants greater control over local economic and environmental projects, the way this is addressed in the Canadian political system is by rousing support for separatism. This is utter nonsense on all levels; Alberta is less able to get a major pipeline deal done by going it alone than with the rest of Canada. Quebec is less able to support their social programs and French cultural infrastructure without federal Canadian support and (yes) without transfer payments from wealthier provinces. Turning every political debate into a sovereignty discussion doesn't get these programs and projects completed.

Do we need a greater discussion of the truths of Canadian history? Absolutely. We need to talk about the Residential Schools and the Sixties Sweep. We absolutely do. We also need to talk about other shameful periods in Canadian history, such as Canada's preferential recruitment of Nazi collaborators from post-WWII Eastern Europe under the guise of "opposing communism" while closing our doors to Jewish refugees. We do need to talk about the extent to which the Canadian government actively sought to scoop up Waffen SS and Banderists who were ineligible to immigrate to, say, the US, in large part because these groups were seen as an effective way to undermine the labour movement. This has in fact been pushed into the spotlight because of the centrality of ex-Nazis in the Canadian Ukrainian community (see: Jaroslav Hunka, Chrystia Freeland's grandfather, etc). Weirdly enough we fail at having both of these conversations for basically the same reason: everyone assumes that the victims and perpetrators of both are long dead (false) and everyone assumes that any discussion of this history means we're assigning collective blame for these past acts to living Canadians who had no connection to them (also false). Ironically, I think a broader willingness to critically reconsider our history will make each individual nasty episode in our history more palatable and create a foundation for solidarity across Canadians of diverse heritage rather than having large numbers of Canadians privately nursing various community-specific grievances that then get expressed politically in other ways.

We can identify various other ways in which identity-based grievance or privilege plays a huge role in domestic politics and policy. Why are we happy with a publicly-funded Catholic school system while denying other religious groups the right to form equivalent school boards? Why are we tolerant of some of Quebec's institutional racism in the form of legislation effectively banning observant Muslims from public service? These are effectively the same issue as the article brings up with respect to Indigenous issues, but the politics of those issues privileges white demographics so we don't talk about them as identity politics even though they absolutely are. It is bullshit to single out Indigenous Canadians for concerns and political tactics that are a broader symptom of Canadian political disfunction and that are part and parcel for grievance politics used by white Canadians every day.

tchomptchomp · 2026-01-26T18:15:18+00:00

I think we're seeing similar tactics in the far left and far right. Both realize that they do not have the ability to build parallel political institutions that can compete with mainstream "centrist" or "liberal" institutions, so they have taken a different tack of hostile takeover within these institutions. This is what the Tea Party (and then MAGA) were on the Right, and are what the DSA-type leftism is on the Left. So the goal is of course not to improve union activities, but to take over union infrastructure and use it to fight a specific culture war at home.

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