Who Gets to Define Jewish Identity in Germany?
The German Bundestag is soon expected to vote on a resolution on “protecting Jewish life in Germany” that would tie public funding for culture and science to compliance with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. The resolution, a cross-party initiative from the SPD, Greens, FDP, and CDU/CSU, was proposed in response to the Hamas attack on Israel and rising antisemitism in Germany. Its key provision would expect federal, state, and municipal authorities to review art and science projects for “antisemitic narratives” before releasing funding. Notably, as many opponents of the IHRA definition have noted in recent years, the definition of antisemitism stretches to cover various forms of opposition to the state of Israel.
Regulating what it means to be Jewish in the U.S. and Germany
The IHRA definition’s regulatory approach presents fundamental challenges that extend beyond typical concerns about academic and artistic freedom. As legal scholar Matthias Goldmann argues, preventive control mechanisms pose practical difficulties—how can one evaluate potential antisemitic content before a project is fully realized? Importantly, by attempting to establish preventive control over what constitutes acceptable discourse about Israel and Jewish identity through funding restrictions, such measures risk mandating a singular vision of Jewish political expression in German cultural and academic spaces.
In the U.S., the IHRA definition has been increasingly codified into law, with multiple states passing legislation adopting the definition and labeling criticism of Israel and/or Zionism as antisemitism. The American experience with such measures, which we have recently studied, offers crucial insights as Germany considers this step.
While IHRA’s potential in curbing Palestinians’ political speech has been largely studied, another set of problems should warrant additional attention: the definition’s potential to regulate Jewish political identity into a singular version: one that coincides with the state of Israel. In doing so, it gives the state regulatory power to decide on what is, in fact, a burning question within Jewish circles.
A particularly illuminating example of how laws defining Jewish identity can create problematic interventions in internal Jewish debates comes from the 2013 case Katz v. Katz. The case involved a custody dispute within the Satmar community, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish group that opposes Zionism on religious grounds. When a Satmar father objected to his child traveling to Israel based on his anti-Zionist religious beliefs, the court had to carefully navigate this intra-Jewish dispute. The court recognized that deciding which parent’s position was more “authentically” Jewish would violate constitutional principles separating church and state.
Consider how such a case would be decided today under IHRA-influenced law. The definition states that “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination” is inherently antisemitic. Would the Satmar father’s religious position thus be classified as antisemitic? Would raising a child according to these beliefs be seen as promoting discriminatory ideology? This example reveals how legal definitions that conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism can force courts to take sides in fundamentally religious debates about Jewish identity and meaning. In doing so, courts may end up going far beyond the intended motivation of protecting Jewish life. Instead, they may end up inappropriately intervening in Jewish life, including the diversity of Jewish politics.
Censoring Jewish Voices in Germany
This dynamic has particular relevance for the German context, where the proposed resolution would similarly empower state actors to make determinations about legitimate versus illegitimate expressions of Jewish identity. The resolution would extend beyond obvious cases of antisemitic hatred to potentially restrict funding for artists, scholars, and cultural workers whose understanding of their Jewish identity leads them to critique Israeli policies or to abandon Zionism itself.
This is not merely a theoretical possibility. Jewish Israeli scholars and artists have in recent years been cancelled by German institutions, sometimes with little by way of explanation. At times, such individuals have even been accused of being antisemites, a spurious accusation that rests on a set of completely phantasmagorical assumptions. Such decisions have not only limited the freedom of expression of Jews in Germany. They have also unduly intervened in what it means to be Jewish, as well as in the possibility of Jewish-Palestinian solidarity on German soil.
The case of Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham and Palestinian journalist Basel Adra illustrates how such definitional measures in fact already work to silence both Jewish and Palestinian voices. After their documentary “No Other Land” won two awards at the 2024 Berlinale film festival, both filmmakers faced severe backlash for their acceptance speeches criticizing Israeli policies. While Adra highlighted Germany’s role in enabling Israel’s war in Gaza, Abraham described the apartheid system that creates unequal conditions for Israelis and Palestinians.
The response was telling: German politicians levelled charges of antisemitism, and the culture minister pointedly noted she was only applauding the “Jewish-Israeli journalist,” delegitimizing Adra’s voice entirely. This episode demonstrates how the IHRA framework can be weaponized to delegitimize even Jewish Israelis who critique state policy, while rendering Palestinian perspectives completely invisible. It represents precisely the kind of chilling effect that critics of the Bundestag resolution fear it would institutionalize through funding restrictions.
The stakes are high on both sides of the Atlantic. In the U.S., it remains to be seen how the student protest movement develops and what protections U.S. law will or will not grant Jewish students who express solidarity with Palestinians based on their Jewish values. In Germany, civil society organizations including Amnesty International have warned that the resolution “disregards the plurality of positions held by Jews living in Germany” and risks creating legal uncertainty that would chill legitimate political expression.
In the Name of Communal Pluralism
At the core of both the German and the American contexts is a crucial question: who gets to define Jewish identity and its relationship to Israel? Throughout history, Jewish political traditions have never fit neatly into liberal categories separating religion from politics. From Biblical times through the diaspora and into modernity, Jewish communities have developed various ways of understanding the relationship between religious obligation and political commitment. This isn’t a bug but a feature of Jewish experience. The challenge facing both German and American policymakers isn’t how to enforce a particular vision of Jewish political expression, but rather how to create frameworks that can accommodate multiple, sometimes competing interpretations of Jewish identity and political life.
The fight against antisemitism is urgent and necessary. But it must be pursued through means that strengthen rather than weaken Jewish plurality. As the American experience demonstrates, when we allow legal definitions of antisemitism to constrain legitimate political and religious expression, we risk replicating rather than combating the tendency of antisemitism itself to tell Jews who they must be, rather than letting Jewish communities determine that for themselves.
The debate over the IHRA definition’s adoption in Germany also illuminates a broader theoretical challenge facing liberal democracies in an age of resurgent religious nationalism. Both the German resolution and similar U.S. measures reflect an attempt to resolve the tension between religious and political identity by mandating their fusion in a particular way—a move that parallels the broader authoritarian tendency of contemporary religious nationalism to enforce homogeneous interpretations of tradition. But, as both Daniel Boyarin and Noah Feldman helped us understand in their recent books (though in very different ways), Jewish political thought offers a compelling alternative: one that recognizes the inevitability of religion-politics entanglement while insisting on plurality in how such entanglement occurs.
Rather than either enforcing a strict separation of church and state (as classical liberalism demands) or prescribing a single legitimate form of religious-political fusion (as religious nationalists coercively attempt), we suggest protecting communities’ autonomy to determine for themselves how religious and political commitments interrelate. This insight has implications far beyond Jewish-Israeli politics—it points toward how liberal constitutionalism might better accommodate various forms of religious-political identity while actively resisting the anti-pluralistic and increasingly totalizing impulses of religious nationalist movements globally.
An Alternative Path
Perhaps the Bundestag’s upcoming vote offers an opportunity to chart a different course—one that protects Jewish life by preserving rather than constraining its diversity. To take such a course, German legislators must remember that anti-Zionist Judaism is a legitimate form of Judaism, and has been so for generations.
An alternative Resolution could draw inspiration from the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, which offers a more nuanced framework that both confronts antisemitism and protects pluralistic discourse. Unlike the IHRA definition, the Jerusalem Declaration explicitly distinguishes between antisemitism and legitimate criticism of Israel while providing clear guidelines for identifying coded antisemitic speech. Indeed, a group of scholars is currently seeking endorsements for an alternative “resolution on the protection of Jewish life”, much in the same spirit (see especially Article 7).
Such an approach would better serve Germany’s dual commitments to fighting antisemitism and preserving constitutional freedoms—including the right of Jewish communities to define their own relationship to Israel.
This analysis draws from our article “Defending Jews from the Definition of Antisemitism” (forthcoming, UCLA Law Review). We presented an earlier version at the Hertie School in Berlin, where conversations, especially with Silvia Steininger, helped us develop the German comparative angle.
