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Hamas' Oct. 7 attacks on Israel have injected new momentum into a long-simmering debate around whether criticism of Israel should be legally construed as antisemitism, with potentially far-reaching impact on free speech in the United States and the ability to protest Israeli treatment of Palestinians.
The debate is reaching into Congress, where lawmakers are holding votes on nonbinding measures conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism and where a bipartisan House group is backing legislation that would codify an expansive definition of antisemitism for the purposes of enforcing anti-discrimination laws at federally funded education programs.
The discourse is deeply emotional and politically fraught, particularly among Democrats because the overwhelming majority of Jewish lawmakers belong to the party and its youthful, progressive grassroots are strongly pushing for a cease-fire in Israel's war against the Palestinian military group Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Against that backdrop, 92 House members, all Democrats, voted "present" Dec. 5 on a nonbinding resolution (H Res 894) that "clearly and firmly states that anti-Zionism is antisemitism." The measure from Rep. David Kustoff, R-Tenn., was adopted, 311-14, with the support of 95 Democrats.
The unusually high number of present votes came after three prominent Jewish Democrats, including the longest-serving Jewish member of the House, Jerrold Nadler of New York, as well as Reps. Dan Goldman of New York and Jamie Raskin of Maryland, urged their Democratic colleagues to vote present.
In a joint statement, they said the resolution was "unserious," aimed at scoring "cheap political points," and did "not account for the complexity of Judaism itself and ignores nuanced examples such as the Satmar sect, a Hasidic Jewish movement, which remains staunchly anti-Zionist and quite obviously is not antisemitic."
Kustoff, the bill's sponsor, is also Jewish.
Nadler, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, rebuked GOP efforts to politicize antisemitism to divide Democrats in a Dec. 5 floor speech, drawing attention to Republicans' behavior.
"If our friends on the other side of the aisle were serious about combating antisemitism, they would have spoken up when former President Trump called the Nazis in Charlottesville 'very fine people.' They would...