ABSTRACT
In this essay the philosopher Bernard Harrison and the academic lawyer Lesley Klaff address the two main criticisms of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Definition of Antisemitism: that it is useless as a legal tool and illegitimately restricts freedom of speech. By drawing out the critical distinction between antisemitism as an emotional disposition – ‘hatred of Jews as Jews’ – and political antisemitism, that is, a delusive pseudo-explanatory political theory based on fear, a form of defamation ‘designed to explain why national or world politics are failing to move in ways congenial to the antisemite and his friends’, the authors show that what the Definition characterises as possibly antisemitic, depending on context, may indeed be so, and that ample means already exist in British statute law for giving legal effect to the clarifications it offers, not least The Public Order Act 1986 and The Equality Act 2010. They show that the mistake made by critics of the Definition is to think that a subjective, intentional ‘hostility towards Jews as Jews’ is all that the term antisemitism can mean, an impoverished and ahistorical reduction of the phenomena of antisemitism that the Definition precisely, and to its credit, avoids.
