Summary
Hatred of and prejudice against Jews, present, in Stern’s testimony, for thousands of years and appearing on college campuses as other hatreds do; the contested question in the testimony is not its existence but how a definition of it — the EUMC Working Definition of Antisemitism — should and should not be used (Written Testimony of Kenneth S. Stern, PDF p.1).
Details
- In the working definition’s data-collection logic, an act is antisemitic when a Jew is selected as a victim because he is a Jew, whatever the actor’s motive, including a positive stereotype such as Jews being rich (the French kidnapping case, PDF p.6).
- Stern’s campus account: isolated severe cases exist (The Evergreen State College), but “in very few is antisemitism – or anti-Israel animus – an issue” among thousands of United States campuses; larger campus problems he names are the alt-right’s recruiting and the dismissal of antisemitism in debates over whether Jews are white (PDF p.3, p.12).
- The equation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism is presented as the definition’s contested campus application, not as settled: Stern argues it would give anti-Zionist Jews less protection than Zionist Jews (PDF p.11-12).
Where sources disagree
- Barghouti treats charges of anti-Semitism against BDS, in Chapter 10 of Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights, as an argument against the movement to be answered; Stern treats some such charges as a speech-policing use of a definition he drafted for another purpose. The two sources approach the term from opposed positions in the boycott debate.
Related pages
Written Testimony of Kenneth S. Stern, EUMC Working Definition of Antisemitism, Antisemitism Awareness Act, Academic freedom, Zionism