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Written Testimony of Kenneth S. Stern

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Summary

Kenneth S. Stern, director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate and lead drafter of what is now the EUMC Working Definition of Antisemitism in its IHRA form, testifies on March 27, 2025 to the United States Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions hearing “Antisemitic Disruptions on Campus: Ensuring Safe Learning Environments for All Students” that campus Antisemitism must be fought without sacrificing free speech and Academic freedom: against codifying the IHRA definition for campus use, against the Trump administration’s funding threats against universities including Columbia University without due process, and for funding the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights and for education — courses, dialogue and AI — that counters Binary thinking (Written Testimony of Kenneth S. Stern, PDF p.1-2, p.19). The main testimony (PDF p.1-19) is followed by Appendix A (PDF p.20-43), the full text of his September 17, 2024 testimony to the United States Senate Judiciary Committee.

What the file is

Written testimony for the March 27, 2025 Senate hearing named in the Summary. 43 PDF pages (printed p.2-43 on PDF p.2-43; PDF p.1 unnumbered), about 20,177 words in the supplied count (20,054 words in the text copy by word count). Main text PDF p.1-19, with a Conclusion at PDF p.19, then Appendix A at PDF p.20-43: the complete text, as included, of Stern’s September 17, 2024 written testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, “A Threat to Justice Everywhere: Stemming the Tide of Hate Crimes in America”, which the main text’s footnote 8 includes and incorporates by reference, noting that a few small sections of it are also replicated in the main text. The text copy is clean and complete, with footnotes at page foot; several footnotes continue across a page break (the footnotes to PDF p.10-11, p.16-17 and p.29-30) and are reassembled in reading order in the reading notes. The Appendix A title page prints “UNITES STATES SENATE” as printed.

Section by section

  • Opening, biography and five main points (PDF p.1-2): Stern introduces the Bard Center for the Study of Hate, the Justus & Karin Rosenberg Foundation and his 25 years directing the American Jewish Committee division on antisemitism and extremism, where he was lead drafter of the text now known as the IHRA working definition. Five points: students have an absolute right against true threats, real harassment, intimidation, bullying, discrimination and assault, but should expect ideas that cut them to their core, against “intellectual safety” from right and left; any campus effort not grounded in free speech and academic freedom will fail, and hate-speech codes backfire; recent funding threats, including demanding a department be put in receivership, without investigation and due process are likely illegal and horrible policy; time/place/manner restrictions and, as a last resort, police have their place, but arrest should not be a first impulse; and campuses can be improved by programs, courses and even AI, while the Office of Civil Rights needs more funding given its backlog.
  • Hate studies and binary thinking (PDF p.2-3): His 2020 book The Conflict over the Conflict: The Israel/Palestine Campus Debate, grounded in Hate Studies, argues that in “us” versus “them” silos people crave simplicity and certainty, default to tribal, binary thinking, and give symbols — flags, slogans, or the IHRA definition itself — outsized importance; people fighting hate are not immune. Protesters claiming Israel is always evil and Zionists evil too, sometimes excluding them from social spaces, may or may not be antisemitism — Jews are anti-Zionist and non-Jewish Zionists are targeted too — but excluding Zionist students writ large as social pariahs is McCarthyism.
  • Silencing on both sides (PDF p.3-4): Pro-Israel speakers silenced by a heckler’s veto, a professor refusing a recommendation letter for study in Israel, and the Academic boycott push, which divides the academy by nationality — the academic boycott is a blacklist — are set against the pro-Israel side’s own silencing: Canary Mission dossiers of 18-22 year-olds, and Betar, a group classified as extremist by the ADL, compiling names of pro-Palestinian advocates. “You don’t fight a blacklist with a blacklist.”
  • Using law to silence pro-Palestinian speech (PDF p.4): Since 2010, efforts to employ the EUMC definition, now IHRA, against speech about Israel in Title VI cases; Stern quotes his 2017 testimony, in Written Testimony of Kenneth S. Stern, on the cases complaining of West Bank occupation programs, BDS films, one-sided classroom materials and an “Arabs and the Holocaust” program. The 2016 Senate-passed Antisemitism Awareness Act supporting material cited a Marquette professor’s suspension and the stopped American Sniper showing — both free-speech violations proponents wanted repeated for their side. In the UK, applying IHRA to campuses cancelled an “Israel Apartheid Week” event, praised by the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
  • Broad opposition to the Act (PDF p.5-6): When the legislation passed the House in the last Congress, opinion leaders on left and right opposed it on free-speech grounds, quoted in turn: Bret Stephens, Batya Ungar Sargon, Christopher Rufo and Jenin Younes (the Act operates “using the same coercive and corrosive principles as DEI”), the Cato Institute, The Federalist citing Rep. Harriet Hageman, and Tablet Magazine.
  • Anti-Zionism, the government and an internal Jewish question (PDF p.6-7): President Trump’s 2019 Executive Order considering IHRA, with Jared Kushner’s gloss that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, poses church/state problems, as does the deicide example that led some Republicans to object to the Act. Stern, a liberal Zionist for whom a link to Israel is important to his Jewish identity, as for the majority of American Jews, refuses to call younger anti-Zionist Jews antisemites or to let government decide this internal communal divide; anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian Jewish students have also been harassed as “kapos” or “traitors”. In Germany, IHRA was applied to Jews protesting the Gaza war, labelling them antisemites. Landau v. The Corp. of Haverford Col. (January 6, 2025) is quoted calling the claim that no religious question is asked in treating Zionism as essential to Jewish identity “disingenuous” and “likely strategic”. Anti-Zionism can be antisemitism when “Israel” is cut-and-pasted for “Jew” in the conspiracy tropes that define antisemitism at its most pernicious; no definition is needed to ferret that out, and for many Palestinians the objection is what the Jewish state’s formation did to their control of their own lives.
  • October 7 and its aftermath (PDF p.7-8): Most of this was in place before October 7; “The vicious Hamas attack, and the unrelenting Israeli response, have exacerbated the campus tensions”, above all the desire to stop the other side speaking. Wars involving Israel have always brought an uptick in attacks on Jews, settling when the shooting stops; this war has not stopped. The attack traumatised most Jews, recalling the Holocaust and pogroms; continual bombing, death and displacement recall the Nakba for Palestinians. Too few have empathy for both the Israelis killed or kidnapped and innocent Palestinians who suffered death, loss of limbs, family, homes and hope, or for both pro-Israel Jewish students and the other stressed students. “Binary thinking is the enemy of critical thinking.”
  • Recent events: Title VI, OCR and Columbia (PDF p.8-10): Under the heading “RECENT EVENTS”, Stern, a strong proponent of Title VI as one remedy — he was complainant for Jewish high school students who suffered antisemitic bullying, including a “Kick a Jew” day, resolved by OCR without leading with a clawback of funds — argues the new policy of threatening funding without a good-faith investigation and due process will harm Jewish students and may legally backfire under the unconstitutional-conditions doctrine (a legal analysis of the letters to 60 targeted institutions is quoted). OCR needs its budget doubled, as the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights letter of February 14, 2024 (endorsed by the ADL and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs) argued: OCR received more than six times as many complaints in 2022 as in 1981 with half the staff, and had more than 13,000 pending investigations; dismantling the Department of Education and giving the portfolio to the Department of Justice would be draconian. Columbia was “seemingly bullied into submission, without due process”; its agreement the previous Friday to administration demands, including putting a department in receivership, assaults faculty governance (the AAUP’s 1915 report, in Lee Bollinger’s words, and Keyishian v Board of Regents are quoted) and will disrupt research and students including Jewish students.
  • Mahmoud Khalil and the advocacy/harassment line (PDF p.10-11): Foreign students will likely go elsewhere after the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a green-card holder who, according to the administration, distributed “pro-Hamas propaganda” said to threaten United States foreign policy and national security; a Columbia journalism professor warned foreign students not to write about Ukraine, Gaza or protests because “nobody can protect you”. Law professors from left and right condemned the Columbia demands in a statement quoted in footnote 34. Stern presses the distinction between actual harassment and true threats, on one hand, and advocacy, on the other, and between advocacy and material support for terrorism; Students for Justice in Palestine chapters were suspended, in his footnote, not for what they did but for what they said.
  • IHRA on campus: Florida and the courts (PDF p.12-14): Quoting his September testimony, Stern argues a definition is not needed to tackle antisemitism — the ADL and AJC worked since the early 1900s without an official one — and that the definition is energetically used only to target speech regarding Israel, citing attempted cancellations at UMass Amherst, Indiana University, Columbia and UC Berkeley, before and after the 2019 Executive Order. Florida, which adopted IHRA by law in June 2024, ordered a keyword search of course descriptions and syllabi flagging Israel, Israeli, Palestine, Palestinian, Middle East, Zionism, Zionist, Judaism, Jewish, or Jews for review, which FIRE’s Tyler Coward said will chill speech. The McCarthy period and the questioning of Paul Sweezy in Sweezy v. New Hampshire frame the October 2024 ruling in Students for Justice in Palestine v. Abbott, quoted at length: incorporating IHRA into Texas university policies under Governor Abbott’s executive order is viewpoint discrimination, and a student calmly comparing Israel’s policies to the Nazis’ in a classroom is not a per se substantial disruption. In January 2025 Harvard University settled an antisemitism lawsuit agreeing to use the IHRA definition for staff reviewing discrimination complaints, while OCR’s settlement with George Washington University, over allegations of both antisemitism and anti-Palestinian animus arising largely from the same course, did not require or mention IHRA — leading to a thought experiment in which Harvard-style adoption of both IHRA and a definition of anti-Palestinian racism would clash and chill speech on both sides.
  • A data-collectors’ definition, and no special rules (PDF p.15): “We don’t have a Title VI definition of racism, for good reasons.” The definition’s text was developed to aid European data collectors — the “bean counters” — measuring antisemitism across time and borders; it was never to label anyone an antisemite. A parallel congressionally enshrined racism definition, including opposition to removing Confederate statues, to Black Lives Matter or to affirmative action as data points, is imagined. Hillel director Michael Brooks’s argument closes the section: no special rules for Jews; if the campus works well for all students, Jewish students will be protected.
  • Task forces, teaching and modelling disagreement (PDF p.16-17): University task-force reports on antisemitism and on Islamophobia read in tandem are mirror images — each side feels unheard and favoured against, pro-Israel students citing protest-rule enforcement and pro-Palestinian activists citing encampments allowed for other issues such as Occupy Wall Street but not for Gaza. Some campuses modelled respectful disagreement; on others, pro-Palestinian refusal to engage as “normalizing” and pro-Israel refusal to engage anti-Zionists block it, and faculty sit in tribal camps. Stern’s own teaching rule: the surest way to a bad grade is to parrot his views. The late Brooklyn College president Bob Hess’s “myth of the institution” — one community despite differences — frames his advice to students to develop the empathy to imagine the world in the other side’s shoes.
  • Education as the tool: Peel simulation, a terms class and Sway (PDF p.17-18): His disappointment that summer campuses mostly only reviewed time/place/manner rules, instead of listing new courses, leads to the examples closing his 2020 book: the University of Maryland simulation course on the 1936-37 Peel Commission, in which Amna Farooqi, a Pakistani Muslim student who became president of J Street U, played David Ben Gurion for weeks while an Israeli classmate played the Mufti of Jerusalem, and students left understanding why the conflict has not been solved; a Bard course on the contested terms genocide, settler colonialism, Zionism and antisemitism; and Sway, the Carnegie Mellon AI program guiding pairs of students through text discussion of contentious topics, on which 91 percent of students felt comfortable sharing their “honest opinion” and only 4 percent disagreed it was “valuable to chat with a student who did not share my perspective”.
  • Conclusion of the main testimony (PDF p.19): Tensions have escalated since October 7, 2023; pro-Israel students are understandably stressed, but the doxing of pro-Palestinian students, who include Jews, and the escalating use of law against their speech threaten everyone’s. True threats, intimidation, assaults, bullying, class disruption and obstruction must be acted against. His greatest worry is the confluence of a desire to silence political speech over pro-Israel Jewish students’ discomfort, the gutting of the Department of Education and OCR, failure to see that anti-Zionist Jewish, Muslim, Arab, Palestinian and immigrant students also have difficulties, and, most significantly, failure of due process and threats including stripping funding and departmental receivership. “We cannot burn down the house in order to save it.”
  • Appendix A: summary of the September 2024 testimony (PDF p.20-22): Appendix A reproduces Stern’s September 17, 2024 testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee (see What the file is). Its opening repeats the biography at PDF p.1, then gives a summary in bullets: antisemitism at its most dangerous claims Jews conspire to harm humanity and that the conspiracy explains what goes wrong in the world; it is a threat to democracy and a miner’s canary, but hatred of non-Jews can also be its engine, as the Tree of Life synagogue shooting and the El Paso Walmart shooting, by shooters with virtually identical ideologies, show; haters crave simplicity and binary thinking, and IHRA is now the seductively simple tool; legally endorsing a binary — the UN’s 1975 Zionism=racism resolution, UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, or its mirror image, anti-Zionism is antisemitism — harms democracy; the scenario-swap test (a racism definition with political examples) condemns the parallel; House members’ deicide objection, and Senator Marshall’s proposed amendment to strike that example, admit the legislation targets expression and belief; “antisemite” and “antisemitism” should be sparingly used; the Zionist/anti-Zionist tent debate is an internal Jewish one raising church-state implications if Congress weighs in; Congress should instead underscore countering, not suppressing, hateful views, fund campus training, surveys, teaching and AI work, remove IHRA from the Countering Antisemitism Act, and fund the U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism.
  • Appendix A: three concerns of 1989 and their lessons (PDF p.22-23): Campus antisemitism, hate crimes and Resolution 3379 were his three concerns when he joined AJC in 1989. The 1990 manual on “bigotry on campus”, taught to about 200 presidents, held that special rules for Jews will not work and speech codes are constitutionally suspect and bad policy. He was an AJC lawyer on the Wisconsin v. Mitchell amicus brief with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, and lead drafter of the EUMC working definition, whose Mitchell-drawn lesson was that selecting a victim because of who they were (intent), not the perpetrator’s hatred (motive), is key. He staffed the November 1990 US Mission event, hosted by Ambassador Thomas Pickering with Senator Daniel P. Moynihan, that began the successful repeal of Resolution 3379; its lessons are that external politics drives such definitions (Cold War passage, Iron Curtain collapse and repeal) and that enshrining binary definitions in legal equations is dangerous, as his letter to the UN Secretary General warned of IHRA: “Antizionism is sometimes clearly antisemitic, it is sometimes clearly not antisemitic, and it is sometimes simply unclear”.
  • Appendix A: hate studies and antisemitism as a form of hate (PDF p.24-25): Under the heading “HATE STUDIES, AND ANTISEMITISM AS A FORM OF HATE”, the campus dynamics from the Hamas attack through spring 2024 are the dysfunction of his 2020 book, more intense. Hate studies, Jonathan Haidt’s morality that “blinds” and “binds”, and the outsized importance of symbols including IHRA are restated; the common core of the IHRA, Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism and Nexus Document definitions is the two-element conspiracy account of antisemitism. The Tree of Life shooter picked a synagogue that had joined a HIAS immigrant-support program amid politicians’ “invasion” frenzy; the El Paso and Buffalo Topps shooters had essentially the same ideology with different targets. Charlottesville’s “Jews will not replace us” chant shows antisemitism as the go-to conspiratorial explanation for white supremacists losing to people they see as inferior. Vilification of Muslims, immigrants or transgender people is not only bigoted toward them but a potential conveyer belt to antisemitism.
  • Appendix A: the IHRA definition — drafting and abuse (PDF p.26-28): Under the heading “THE INTERNATIONAL HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE ALLIANCE WORKING DEFINITION OF ANTISEMITISM (IHRA)”: after the peace process collapsed and the Second Intifada began, the EUMC’s 2004 report lacked a common definition; its stereotype template seemed to exclude attacks on Jews by attackers upset about Israel — the firebombing of a Montreal Jewish Day school after Israel assassinated a Hamas leader, weeks before EUMC leader Beate Winkler’s May 2004 AJC speech. Rabbi Andrew Baker negotiated and Stern drafted, with Professor Yehuda Bauer among others; a later effort to deny he was lead drafter is rebutted in footnote 19. The Israel-related examples reflected a correlation with antisemitism levels; it “was never intended to target or chill speech on a college campus”, and his 2017 testimony is incorporated by reference. The 2010 “dear colleague” letter extending Title VI protection to Jews, Sikhs and Muslims as ethnicities, which he supported and used as complainant for Jewish high school students in upstate New York, was followed by Title VI complaints pointing to acts such as spitting but also to pure speech about Israel — the 2017 quotation on occupation programs, BDS films, classroom materials and “Arabs and the Holocaust” is repeated — and Kenneth Marcus’s 2013 appraisal is quoted in substance: even lost cases made it harder for “Israel haters” to organise and put administrators on notice. The 2017 University of Central Lancashire “Israel Apartheid Week” ban and the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s praise and call for other countries to follow are quoted. The argument that antisemitism must be defined in order to tackle it, the Kanye West and Charlottesville absences, the event-cancellation attempts at UMass Amherst, Indiana University, Columbia and UC Berkeley, and Florida’s keyword search are then repeated from the main testimony.
  • Appendix A: suppression beyond campus (PDF p.29): Around 2020 IHRA was used beyond campus: Secretary of State Pompeo floated declaring Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch antisemitic under it, threatening their funding; an EU Handbook on the IHRA website states the goal to “support control and supervision mechanisms and to ensure that funding does not go to entities and projects that promote antisemitism”; House Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith and colleagues asked the IRS whether it has a definition of antisemitism for evaluating tax-exempt purpose; New Jersey legislation would adopt IHRA as a filter for funding DEI programs. Justice Louis Brandeis in Whitney v. California is quoted: “the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence”.
  • Appendix A: McCarthyism in both directions (PDF p.29-30): The McCarthy period and the Sweezy questioning, with Justice Frankfurter’s concurrence that social-science inquiry “must be left as unfettered as possible”, are repeated from the main testimony. Targeting conspiracies to commit violence or espionage differs fundamentally from mere belief, teaching and association. Pro-Palestinian dogmatism — insisting institutions take a pro-Palestinian position, helping force a San Francisco museum director out, threats and vandalism against Brooklyn Museum directors, and pressure on PEN America — is also a form of McCarthyism, while in Germany’s art world Jews see McCarthyism in the other direction, from the state insisting on a pro-Israel line.
  • Appendix A: scenario-swap, Volokh and the parallel definition (PDF p.31-32): Once IHRA is opened via law, partisans stretch it and the threat alone chills speech; Germany’s cancellations and funding threats are the object lesson, and Armenian-genocide expression laws in Turkey and Armenia the mirror. “If you wouldn’t do this about race, you shouldn’t do it about antisemitism.” Eugene Volokh’s thought experiment of a parallel anti-Palestinian bigotry definition — denying Palestinian self-determination, double standards for a group waging insurrection, and drawing comparisons of Palestinian policy and attitudes towards Jews to the Nazis — applied to a professor who rejected a Gaza-born applicant after publicly opposing a Palestinian state, is quoted: such an argument would be wrong and dangerous to academic freedom, would sharply chill advocacy on the conflict, and “the same is true of HR6090”; speech such as calling all Jews or all Palestinians “scum” could still be evidence of deliberate discrimination in a particular action.
  • Appendix A: politics on the left and right, and the December 5 hearing (PDF p.32-34): Under “ANTISEMITISM – POLITICS ON THE LEFT AND RIGHT”, both sides downplay antisemitism from their own side: Hungary’s Victor Orban (as printed), who promoted antisemitism in campaigns, praised including by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a friend of Israel, and left tropes excused on the left. “Antisemitism” should be used only in the clearest cases — as Stern says he used it at AJC against David Duke and Louis Farrakan (as printed). The December 5 House hearing exchange between Rep. Elise Stefanik and three college presidents is analysed: Stefanik’s insistence that “From the River to the Sea” is a call for genocide was a bait and switch — Hamas means it so, but a survey showed 66 percent of Jewish college students heard it that way while only 14 percent of Muslim students meant it that way, and the 1977 Likud platform said “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty”. Advocating genocide should be robustly condemned but mere expression countered, not disciplined — as Duke, who at LSU in 1969 advocated Blacks be returned to Africa and Jews exterminated and in 1970 paraded at Tulane in a Nazi uniform, was vilified but not disciplined.
  • Appendix A: church-state and religious freedom (PDF p.34-36): Under “CHURCH STATE AND RELIGIOUS FREEDOM CONCERNS”, opposition to the House-passed Act came from pro-Palestinian-aligned members, pro-Israel Democrats such as Rep. Jerrold Nadler, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene on religious-freedom grounds, quoted from her X post on H.R. 6090 and the deicide example; Senator Roger Marshall would support the bill with an amendment striking that reference. Kushner’s 2019 gloss is repeated. Before 1948 many Jews opposed Zionism; Satmar Jews remain anti-Zionist theologically and are “inside the tent”; younger Jews in Students for Justice in Palestine, IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace, many from mainstream Jewish backgrounds and day schools, tell a repeated story of reaching college, learning of the occupation, feeling betrayed, and holding that a state prioritising Jews over non-Jews cannot be reconciled with Judaism’s teachings on repairing the world and treating the stranger. Declaring their religious beliefs antisemitic by congressional definition would be as inappropriate as for Christians’.
  • Appendix A: the challenge of focusing only on antisemitism (PDF p.36-38): Under that heading: post-October 7, focusing on campus antisemitism alone, while anti-Muslim, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian hatred also rises — and the House held multiple hearings on antisemitism but none including those — worsens dysfunction and antisemitism itself. Doxing trucks, the banning of SJP at Brandeis for disapproved speech, cancelled events (including an ASU Rashida Tlaib event), Jews called supporters of genocide and Muslims and Palestinians called terrorists are listed; visibly Jewish students and Muslim and Palestinian students, especially women in hijab, share the same fear of physical assault. The two Stanford task-force reports are mirror images of perceived double standards and disregard, documenting students afraid to speak or reveal identity; pro-Israel students cite rule enforcement, pro-Palestinian students cite doxing, lost job prospects and asymmetric donor pressure. Unquestioned bullying and violence over Israel on campus exist, and a remedy aimed at stamping Israel speech as hateful, rather than at ensuring no one is bullied, exacerbates the perceived double standard.
  • Appendix A: what to do instead (PDF p.38-40): Under “WHAT TO DO INSTEAD”: Congress should underscore that universities must ensure no one is bullied, harassed, intimidated, threatened or discriminated against, beyond Title VI and for students outside protected classes too, while rejecting intellectual safety from the left (trigger warnings, safe spaces, microaggression hunts become a binary filter inviting groupthink) and from the right (state laws restricting teaching about race or gender, politicians deciding broad topics are beyond the pale). The same free-speech principle protects conservative speakers and speakers saying Palestine should be free from the river to the sea; IHRA codification, in either the AAA or the CAA version, “is designed to restrict speech”. Five recommendations replace codification: build institutional capacity against bullying and threats for all students; stress that students should expect to be deeply disturbed and be helped toward intellectual curiosity and empathy; encourage units and classes on free speech and academic freedom; encourage Hate Studies programs, classes and research; and encourage classes on discussing divisive topics and debate groups, including AI projects such as Sway. Faculty who block colleagues on social media should instead model difficult discussion and prioritise students.
  • Appendix A: the National Strategy and a superordinate goal (PDF p.40-42): If Congress passes the Countering Antisemitism Act it must first strip out any mention of IHRA; the Act would implement the U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism with staffing and resources. The Strategy is quoted: it describes antisemitism in its own words as “also a pernicious conspiracy theory that often features myths about Jewish power and control”, mentions IHRA just once, in the past tense — the definition “which the United States has embraced” — and “welcomes and appreciates” the Nexus Document and other efforts; its focus is on actions. Stern’s question to an ABA section considering adopting IHRA is quoted on building consensus versus picking a side. His final proposal, first made to the House Homeland Security Committee in 2022, rests on the Robbers Cave experiment: two groups of boys at an Oklahoma summer camp, bonded separately and set in competition, developed and acted on animosity, then had to cooperate to fix the camp’s drinking water supply, and that superordinate goal, or larger group identity, reduced the hate. A national service program mixing teenagers from different backgrounds on a common mission helping others — his example is a Latinx teenager from Texas, a Jewish teenager from New York and a Black teenager from Los Angeles building homes for American Indian people in South Dakota — might, he stresses might, reduce “us” versus “them” thinking and hate crime, and a pilot might even pay for itself if it reduces the cost of hate. The conclusion’s argument closes at PDF p.42 — Congress should combat antisemitism “not by defining disfavored ideas about Israel, but rather by concrete actions that bring Americans together across divides”, rebelling against “the orthodoxy of binaries” — with a recollection of the Rev. Martin Luther King that continues to PDF p.43.
  • Appendix A: conclusion completed (PDF p.43): The King recollection completes: King was not talking about special rules or definitions or rights for Black people, but about what America should be and what it owed to every American. Stern assigns King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” when he teaches and hopes students note its line “the goal of America is freedom”; free speech is essential to that freedom, and King fought for it, including from jail. Final paragraph: antisemitism and all forms of hate must be opposed, but free speech must not be sacrificed, especially by a congressionally endorsed definition of what political speech is hateful: “Once we open that Pandora’s box, tomorrow it might be your political speech that is targeted through law.” The testimony ends there.

Key passages

Evidence the work relies on

  • Stern’s own biography and drafting role, as at PDF p.1: Bard Center director; Rosenberg Foundation director before that; AJC antisemitism and extremism director for 25 years and lead drafter of the IHRA text; part of the Lipstadt defence effort, the 1997 White House Conference on Hate Crimes, the 2001 Stockholm delegation, and author of a 1995 militia-movement report with an April 19 attack warning.
  • His own prior testimony and writings, incorporated or quoted: his 2017 House Judiciary testimony (quoted at PDF p.4 and, in Appendix A, incorporated by reference at PDF p.26, footnote 20), his September 17, 2024 Senate Judiciary testimony (reproduced entire as Appendix A, PDF p.20-43), his 2022 House Homeland Security Committee testimony (PDF p.41, footnote 78), his 2020 book The Conflict over the Conflict, his 1990 “Bigotry on Campus” manual, and his letter to the UN Secretary General (PDF p.23, p.40).
  • Court decisions as quoted: Landau v. The Corp. of Haverford Col., Civil Action 24-2044, decided January 6, 2025 (PDF p.7, footnote 23); Students for Justice in Palestine v. Abbott, W.D. Texas, October 28, 2024 (PDF p.13-14, footnote 47); Keyishian v Board of Regents, 385 U.S. 589 (1967) (PDF p.10); Sweezy v. New Hampshire and Frankfurter’s concurrence (PDF p.13); Wisconsin v. Mitchell, on which he was an amicus lawyer (PDF p.22-23); Whitney v. California and Brandeis (PDF p.29).
  • Government and institutional documents: the February 14, 2024 Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights letter on doubling OCR’s budget, with its 1981-2022 complaint and staffing figures and more than 13,000 pending investigations (PDF p.9); the Columbia University Task Force on Antisemitism Report 2 (PDF p.6, footnote 21; PDF p.36, footnote 60); the reports of the two Stanford task forces on antisemitism and on Islamophobia (PDF p.37, footnote 66 gives only URLs); the EU Handbook for the use of the IHRA definition (PDF p.29, footnotes 35-37); the U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism (PDF p.40-41, footnote 76); Harvard’s January 2025 settlement statement and George Washington University’s OCR settlement statement (PDF p.14, footnotes 48-50).
  • Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, cited by URL at PDF p.43, footnote 79, for the line Stern assigns in his teaching and quotes at the close of Appendix A.
  • Surveys and program data as cited: a survey, via the CPOST Understanding Campus Fears report, that 66 percent of Jewish college students heard “from the river to the sea” as a call for genocide while 14 percent of Muslim students meant it that way (PDF p.33, footnote 49); Sway’s reported findings that 91 percent of students felt comfortable sharing their “honest opinion” and 4 percent disagreed a cross-perspective chat was valuable (PDF p.18, footnote 57).
  • Footnoted press and opinion sources for the events he cites, among them the New York Times, Haaretz, Deutsche Welle, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Columbia Spectator, the Forward and NBC News, together with opinion statements opposing the Act collected by the Foundation for Middle East Peace (PDF p.5, footnote 13) and the constitutional law scholars’ statement on Columbia (PDF p.11, footnote 34).

Analysis

The testimony’s method, across both its parts, is insider authority joined to two tests. Stern speaks as the IHRA text’s lead drafter to argue the definition was built for European data collectors keyed to victim selection, and that transferring it into campus law changes its function into a speech filter. The scenario-swap test — would Congress codify a racism definition, or a parallel anti-Palestinian bigotry definition, with political examples? — and the mirror-image evidence — antisemitism and Islamophobia task-force reports, pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian McCarthyism, Germany and the United States — are used to show the instrument cuts in whichever direction its holders point it. Its positive program is institutional rather than definitional: due process before funding threats, a funded OCR investigating and remedying actual harassment, and education that trains students out of binary thinking. It is advocacy testimony by an interested party — a self-described liberal Zionist and the definition’s drafter defending his own drafting purpose against later users — and most of its post-October 7 evidence is footnoted press, opinion and institutional material that the testimony quotes or links rather than reproduces; its two components overlap substantially, since the 2025 testimony quotes and then appends his 2024 testimony, so several passages (the Florida keyword search, the Sweezy questioning, the Israelism cancellation) appear twice, as the 2025 text itself notes only in part. Appendix A closes on PDF p.43 by completing its recollection of Martin Luther King: the argument ends not with a definition but with King’s account of America and freedom, and a warning that a congressionally endorsed definition of hateful political speech opens a Pandora’s box that may next be turned on the reader’s own speech.

People, organizations, places and events

Kenneth S. Stern, Bard Center for the Study of Hate, United States Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, United States Senate Judiciary Committee, Justus & Karin Rosenberg Foundation, American Jewish Committee, Antisemitism Awareness Act, Countering Antisemitism Act, EUMC Working Definition of Antisemitism, Canary Mission, Simon Wiesenthal Center, Columbia University, Mahmoud Khalil, Harvard University, Students for Justice in Palestine, Students for Justice in Palestine v. Abbott, Landau v. The Corp. of Haverford College, Tree of Life synagogue shooting, UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, Daniel P. Moynihan, Benjamin Netanyahu, Elise Stefanik, Jerrold Nadler, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Roger Marshall, IfNotNow, Jewish Voice for Peace, Martin Luther King, Lee Bollinger, American Association of University Professors

Concepts

Antisemitism, Academic freedom, Academic boycott, BDS movement, Zionism, Hate Studies, Binary thinking, Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, Nexus Document, U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism

How it relates to other sources

  • With Written Testimony of Kenneth S. Stern: the same author returns to the same argument eight years on. The 2017 testimony’s core — the definition was made for data collectors, not to target or chill campus speech; Title VI complaints about occupation programs, BDS films and “Arabs and the Holocaust” were the abuse to resist; an academic boycott is a blacklist — is quoted, incorporated, and restated. What is new is the post-October 7 landscape: the 2019 Executive Order and its Kushner gloss treated at length, the House passage of the Act and the conservative free-speech opposition, the German application to Jewish Gaza protesters, the Florida keyword search, the SJP v. Abbott ruling, Harvard’s IHRA settlement, and the 2025 funding threats against Columbia and the Khalil arrest, none of which the 2017 testimony could address.
  • On the IHRA definition against From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine: the anthology’s contributors treat the adopted IHRA definition as an instrument for criminalising Palestine solidarity; Stern, its drafter, agrees it is being used to suppress pro-Palestinian speech, including in the UK cancellation both works in effect cite, but argues from its drafting purpose and a free-speech principle, not from the anthology’s account of Zionism.
  • On the Academic boycott against Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights: as in 2017, Stern calls the academic boycott a blacklist that divides the academy by nationality, directly against Barghouti’s defence of PACBI’s institutional boycott; the two again agree the early Title VI complaints about BDS and occupation teaching were brought, and disagree in evaluating them.
  • On Students for Justice in Palestine: Palestine: A Socialist Introduction presents SJP as a base of the Palestine movement; Stern defends SJP chapters’ speech rights against suspension and banning while also describing some pro-Palestinian organising’s dogmatism as McCarthyism.

Open questions

  • The work names the Act Stern supports only in variant forms: “Countering Antisemitism Act” at PDF p.22 and p.40, but “Combating Antisemitism Act” at PDF p.30; the two names are recorded as printed. At PDF p.39 the text says only “in either the AAA or the CAA version” and does not expand “CAA”, so which of those names “CAA” abbreviates is not stated there.
  • Printed slips recorded as printed: “UNITES STATES SENATE” on the Appendix A title page (PDF p.20); “Two few” for “Too few” (PDF p.8); “antionist” for anti-Zionist (PDF p.19); “Farrakan” for Farrakhan (PDF p.33); “Victor Orban” for Viktor Orban (PDF p.32).
  • The main testimony’s footnote 8 says a few small sections of the September 2024 testimony are replicated in it; in fact several long passages — the Florida keyword search with the Coward quotation, the Sweezy questioning and Frankfurter concurrence, the Israelism and event-cancellation material, the 2017 Title VI quotation — are replicated nearly verbatim at PDF p.12-13 and p.27-29 of Appendix A.
  • The Florida keyword-search order is dated only “early August” in the 2025 main text (PDF p.12), in a passage quoted from the September 2024 testimony where the year is 2024; the 2025 text does not restate the year there.
  • Figures are given through footnoted intermediaries rather than primary data in the text: the 66 percent / 14 percent “river to the sea” survey figures are cited to the CPOST report, and the Sway 91 percent / 4 percent figures to Sway’s own overview and findings pages; neither underlying study is in raw/.
  • Stern quotes the Haverford decision, the SJP v. Abbott ruling and the National Strategy at length, but the full texts of those documents, of the IHRA definition, and of the proposed Acts are not reproduced; they are cited by footnote URLs.

Coverage

PDF p.1-43 of 43, read in full in parts 1-2. The main testimony is read in full (PDF p.1-19) and Appendix A in full (PDF p.20-43), ending with the completion of the 2024 testimony’s conclusion on PDF p.43.

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