Is the Antisemitism Awareness Act, a new bill designed to fight Jew hate, a threat to free speech? Christopher F. Rufo and Jenin Younes answered yes in a column for The Free Press last week, arguing that the legislation “violates our country’s most fundamental principles, including the letter and spirit of the First and Fourteenth Amendments, which guarantee Americans the rights to free speech and equal treatment under the law, regardless of their racial, ethnic, or religious identity.”
Ilya Shapiro, director of Constitutional Studies at the Manhattan Institute and the author of the forthcoming Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites, disagrees. Here’s Ilya on why the Antisemitism Awareness Act is no threat to our basic freedoms:
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Christopher Rufo and Jenin Younes do a nice job of arguing against the DEI-ification of Jews: reordering the privilege hierarchy such that antisemitism joins the pantheon of -isms and -phobias in our intersectional cancel culture. But that’s not what the Antisemitism Awareness Act does, which is why I part ways with their criticism.
The heart of Chris and Jenin’s error is this sentence: “The legislation codifies an ideologically charged definition of antisemitism into law, provides special protections based on group identity, and expands anti-discrimination enforcement to include constitutionally protected speech.” Each of these three points is wrong.
First, calling the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism “ideologically charged” fails to reckon with that definition on its own terms. The IHRA defines antisemitism as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” That’s not a radical outlier, but the gold standard accepted by scholars of all ideological stripes. And contrary to some commentary, it doesn’t cover teaching the New Testament, criticizing the Israeli government, and the like.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Free Press
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Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of Constitutional Studies at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.
Photo by Mohamad Salaheldin Abdelg Alsayed/Anadolu via Getty Images