Canadian universities and faculty must continue to push back against the speech-stifling IHRA antisemitism Working Definition
In January 2024, we wrote a blog post (and one of us, Blayne Haggart, wrote a companion piece) for the Centre for Free Expression raising concerns about the weaponization of antisemitism to stifle academic and political speech in the context of Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. We wrote it in the context of the then-upcoming and now proposed Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act. At the heart of the issue, however, was the push by officials and activists for Canada in general, and the post-secondary education sector in particular, to adopt a specific, expansive definition of antisemitism that would have the effect of silencing legitimate political criticisms of the state of Israel and its government.
As we noted in that column, this definition, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) “Working Definition,” strategically shuts down criticism of Israel’s conduct in its war on Hamas and Gaza and seeks domination over and silencing of Palestinians and their supporters.
We are far from the only people to highlight this specific definition’s silencing effect. To take only one example, in Canada, as we noted in that column, the University of Toronto’s Antisemitism Working Group in 2021 highlighted how the IHRA definition has the “potential as a basis for banning controversial speech, particularly speech and events that are critical of Israel.” We also noted that one of the definition’s draftees, Kenneth Stern, “has explicitly stated that it should not be used as “a campus hate speech code.” He notes that in the United States, ‘rightwing Jewish groups’ have “weaponized” it to “attack academic freedom and free speech’ in ways that ‘will harm not only pro-Palestinian advocates, but also Jewish students and faculty, and the academy itself’.”
Bernie Steinberg, former Executive Director of Harvard Hillel from 1993 to 2010, referred to this tactic, of conflating legitimate political critique with hate speech, as weaponized antisemitism.
Universities and post-secondary education under attack
In the year since we wrote those posts, the threat to academic and political freedom from weaponized antisemitism has only worsened. We are currently witnessing an important and alarming trend in calls for universities in Canada to adopt the IHRA definition.
Universities and post-secondary education in general have become a key fighting ground over the IHRA definition.
Hamas’ attacks on October 7, 2023 against Israel, and Israel’s subsequent, ongoing wars in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon have catalyzed a new generation of campus protests. Campus protests, including campus encampments, against the Israeli occupation of and genocide in Palestinian territories, occupied a significant amount of all Canadians’ attention over the past year. The varied reactions to these protests raised questions about the role of university administration in managing protests and addressing hate within universities. At the heart of the current campus speech debate is the definition of antisemitism: what speech on campuses is permitted and what constitutes antisemitism?
The role of universities in regulating on-campus speech has attracted the attention of politicians for allegedly being hotbeds of antisemitism. In the United States, a Republican-driven inquiry demanded in December 2023 to hear how university administrators were addressing antisemitism on their campuses, which resulted in the resignations of three presidents of major universities. That same month, in Canada, seemingly taking inspiration from this inquiry, five Liberal MPs wrote to the presidents of Canada’s 25 biggest universities in December, calling on them to report on the steps they have taken to deal with antisemitism, broadly defined, on their campuses.
In our previous column, we argued that this letter to university leaders represented an attempt to interfere with academic freedom and to censor criticism on Israel’s actions.
Politicians’ efforts to interfere in academic freedom have only increased in Canada since that letter to university leaders. At the request of Liberal MP Anthony Housefather, one of the five MPs who wrote to universities on antisemitism, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights in May 2024 began a study on “Antisemitism and Additional Measures to Address the Fears of Canada’s Jewish Community,” including at post-secondary institutions.
Between May and November, the committee heard from 23 witnesses and received 69 separate written submissions. The committee is currently considering a draft report.
Despite its wide-ranging title, post-secondary education is a primary focus of the committee, with 12 of the 23 witnesses coming from or directly representing post-secondary education institutions. These included the presidents of McGill University, Concordia University, the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia. While pro-IHRA supporters were well represented in the hearings, critical voices like Independent Jewish Voices Canada, Independent Jewish Voices Concordia and the Jewish Faculty Network, made their opposition to the definition in via written submissions.
Mandating the IHRA Working Definition for the post-secondary sector was a key focus of many submissions. For example, several Hillel chapters (Concordia, McGill and Edmonton) and the Allied Voices for Israel, directly called for the IHRA definition to be applied to universities.
Some groups went further, targeting the political opinions and past public (and private?) statements and actions of researchers themselves. The Council for a Secure Canada recommended “that government funding does not go to individuals and organizations that are in breach of the IHRA definition of antisemitism.” The full implications of the degrees of invasive and pervasive surveillance required to enforce this type of censure was brought home by the Jewish Federation of Edmonton’s call for “Proper vetting of grant recipients …, auditing for antisemitism by tracking intimidation, incidents, and hate crimes, …, creating a mechanism for accountability,” even when a project may have nothing to do with Isreal or Jews.
Sadly, these calls, including for linking funding to the IHRA Working Definition, were amplified by Deborah Lyon, Canada’s Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism. Among other things, Lyon recommended that “vetting mechanisms and protocols be developed and implemented to ensure prospective recipients of grants and contributions conduct themselves, online and otherwise, in a manner that is consistent with Canada’s anti-racism strategy,” which employs the IHRA definition.
Tying research funding to a definition that has been shown to be linked to the silencing of legitimate speech is beyond troubling. Taken together, these recommendations endorse a pervasive, continuous surveillance of faculty throughout their professional and personal lives for any perceived violation of the IHRA definition of antisemitism. These efforts go far beyond even the problematic ‘vetting’ of federal grant recipients for compliance with the anti-racism strategy. This degree of surveillance and unquestioned adherence to the IHRA Working Definition would make university teaching and scholarship completely untenable. As Haggart noted in his earlier post, the criticisms that Israel is currently receiving for its conduct of the war in Gaza (and Lebanon) and its two-tiered citizenship are utterly standard throughout political science. What’s being demanded here is nothing less than government censorship.
We’ve been here before
There is significant, widespread opposition to the IHRA amongst labour, civil liberty, student, and Indigenous organizations, to say nothing of voices within the diverse Jewish community. As with the general threat posed by the IHRA definition, our concerns are shared by some 47 Canadian faculty associations, as well as the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations, and over 600 university academics in Canada.
Significantly, the university sector as a whole has been aware of the dangers from adopting the IHRA definition for a very long time. This is not a kneejerk reaction to the current phase of Israel-Palestine conflict. In 2021, for example, CAUT rejected the IHRA definition, declaring that the definition “poses a significant threat to academic freedom at Canadian universities and colleges and has already been used on a number of occasions to censor and impede the academic freedom of teachers and researchers who have developed anti-racist and decolonial perspectives on the policies and practices of the state of Israel.”
Any adoption of the IHRA definition in universities would profoundly imperil academic freedom, stifle essential scholarly debate and, perhaps most frustratingly, not effectively address antisemitism. Beyond its effects on the academic community, a 2021 open letter from 150 Jewish faculty members at Canadian universities arguing against the adoption of the IHRA Working Definition noted the IHRA Working Definition’s overall pernicious effect on the Jewish community as a whole: “Not only does it essentialize Jewish identity, culture, and theology, it also equates Jewishness and Judaism with the State of Israel—effectively erasing generations of debate within Jewish communities.”
This push by Lyon, Housefather and their allies to impose an IHRA Working Definition loyalty test on the post-secondary sector is an egregious attempt to restrict academic freedom in Canadian universities. It is illiberal and anti-democratic, 21st century McCarthyism.
Canadian academics and universities should reject outright any proposal to link federal grant funding to vetting academics for their compliance with the IHRA definition. Publicly funded research should not be held to any political preconditions. Researchers need to be critical and unafraid to ask difficult, even controversial, questions, the results subject to evaluations for their scholarly merit, not on whether they meet an ideological purity test.
Second, Canadian academics and universities should continue to strongly oppose any proposal to monitor academics' teaching, research or professional engagement online for compliance with the HRA definition. Surveillance of this type would fundamentally threaten academic freedom. Equally importantly, by conflating the two it would stifle attempts to discuss and prevent antisemitism while shutting down necessary research and debates on Isreal and Palestinians. Debates, that as we've already noted, would not be out of place were they to be involve literally any other country on the planet.
The IHRA Working Definition has been considered and found wanting time and again within the context of academia. This previous work offers a sound foundation, not just for continuing to fight ongoing efforts to restrict academic inquiry in the name of fighting antisemitism, but for understanding how to protect academic freedom while taken actual, substantive action to combat actually existing antisemitism.
In 2021, the University of Toronto's Working Group on Antisemitism noted that that the university's “distinctive position in society precludes adoption of any definition as a basis for banning the expression of controversial, troubling, or offensive views.” This is in part because it's in universities where we as a society generate and critique the definitions and ideas that are adopted by the rest of society. Imposing a definition like the IHRA Working Definition forecloses debate before it begins.
Along those lines, the report also calls upon the University of Toronto to “frequently reiterate its commitment to academic freedom and inclusion.” Academic freedom, the report underlines, is not conditional upon “taking any specific position” on any question, nor can “preconditions” be attached to participation in any participation academic events or discussions. Universities, in other words, must not impose preconditions, such as the IHRA definition, to academics' teaching, research or participation in public scholarly life.
For those who are genuinely interested in fighting antisemitism and hate speech, incessant calls to adopt a specific definition – let alone one with a dispiriting track record of sowing division and silencing speech – are little more than a distraction. As the U of T Working Group points out, the U of T's Anti-Black Racism Task Force did not recommend a definition of anti-Black racism.
Here, too, we can look to the University of Toronto for a way forward. In a just-released draft “Guide to Law and Policy regarding Antisemitism and Anti-Israel Discrimination at the University of Toronto,” it explicitly eschews any definition of antisemitism. Instead, it turns for guidance to already-existing policies and laws such as the Human Rights Code and the Criminal Code. After all, hate speech, including antisemitism, is already illegal.
As University of Waterloo political scientist Emmett Macfarlane notes approvingly, by sticking “strictly to existing human rights and workplace law,” the university’s draft proposal avoids the usual trouble that comes when “they try to carve out new rules or approaches within the bounds of the law, censoring or punishing otherwise lawful speech.” By focusing on “expression (or acts of discrimination) that clearly infringe existing laws and workplace policies,” it avoids wading into the morass of hurt feelings, “offensive political, social or moral language.”
Taken together, the 2021 Working Group report and this new draft statement offer the University of Toronto and other Canadian universities a solid foundation for taking antisemitism and other hate crimes seriously. But all of this work will be for nothing if the IHRA Working Definition is imposed on the sector. Which is why university administrators and faculties’ first order of business should be holding the line against an idea that’s as retrograde and offensive now as it was in 2021 (and earlier). As Harvard Hillel’s Bernie Steinberg said of this weaponized antisemitism in the US context, in the fight against antisemitism, including from “alt-right white-supremacist politics,” “we must put aside all fabricated and weaponized charges of ‘antisemitism’ that serve to silence criticism of Israeli policy and its sponsors.”
