AS MASSACHUSETTS LEGISLATORS consider recommendations from the state’s Special Commission on Combating Antisemitism, they face a critical choice: Will they protect civil liberties while fighting genuine antisemitism, or will they enable the kind of authoritarian overreach that former Ambassador Alan Solomont warned the commission about in his powerful June testimony?
The stakes could not be higher. Real antisemitism is rising, fueled primarily by white supremacists and Christian nationalists. But at the same time, accusations of antisemitism are being weaponized to justify crackdowns on universities, unions, and free speech.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther provides an explicit blueprint for this strategy, and the state commission’s recommendations—whether intentionally or not—align disturbingly well with it.
The stated goal of Project Esther is to take down the Palestine solidarity movement, targeting free speech, unions, educators, universities, and all civic spaces where there is support for Palestine. Its foundational claim is that the US is experiencing a “virulently anti-Israel, anti-Zionist and anti-American ‘pro-Palestinian movement'” that supports Hamas.
The commission’s genesis reveals the problem. State Sen. Cynthia Creem has said that the effort was encouraged by Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt. This matters because the ADL has undergone a troubling transformation.
In October, the Forward reported that the ADL “has removed entirely from the ‘What We Do’ page of its website a section called ‘Protect Civil Rights.’” The removal, reported Forward, eliminated a passage from the organization’s website that read, “Our founders established ADL with the clear understanding that the fight against any one form of prejudice or hate cannot succeed without countering hate of all forms.”
The commission has pointed to ADL statistics about the rise of antisemitism, but the data often conflate criticisms of Israel with antisemitism. In 2024 Jewish Currents published a line-by-line analysis of the ADL’s antisemitism audit documenting the extent of the flaws in its methodology. “In addition to identifying more than a thousand items we believe were misclassified as antisemitic—all cases of speech critical of Israel or Zionism,” it reported, “we found that the data included misapplications of the organization’s own standards and often did not provide enough information for us to assess the group’s judgment.”
Despite extensive testimony about these data flaws, the commission never questioned ADL numbers.
Over and over, organizations, subject matter scholars, legal experts, Holocaust survivors, social justice activists, and constituents (many of whom are Jewish) submitted testimony, analyses, documentation, and reports to the commission outlining their concerns.
While the preamble to the final commission recommendations finally acknowledges a diversity of opinions within the Jewish community and the need to preserve democratic rights, the body of the recommendations entirely ignores the divergence of opinion and contradicts its promise of protecting speech. Not a single footnote references testimony of those who differ from the commission’s dominant narrative.
The commission’s recommendations center on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism—the Trump administration’s preferred weapon for campus investigations. This is alarming for several reasons.
Because of the ways that the definition has been used to suppress speech, its key author, Kenneth Stern, has warned about its implementation, In a September essay titled “A Bad Deal: By Adopting the IHRA Definition of Antisemitism, Universities are Sacrificing Academic Freedom,” Stern writes that “proscribing opinions that do not conform to an official definition destroys academic freedom and free speech.”
The ACLU explicitly warns that the definition threatens First Amendment rights. And, critically, a US District Court judge recently found that the Trump administration used “an unconstitutionally broad definition of antisemitism” as cover for unlawful attacks on universities.
All of this matters beyond education policy. The commission recommendations create enforcement mechanisms that could suppress protected speech: reporting systems for “problematic curriculum,” specific targeting of teachers’ unions, and language that could enable legal challenges to any criticism of Israeli policy. Organizations like the ADL and Israeli American Civic Action Network are already promoting these recommendations to school districts despite lack of legislative approval.
Pitfalls of the approach followed by the commission were highlighted in the testimony in June of Alan Solomont, the former US ambassador to Spain and Andorra. Solomont, the former chair of the board of Combined Jewish Philanthropies, the founding dean of the Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University, and a respected leader of the Greater Boston Jewish community, warned against the dangers of weaponizing antisemitism and specifically alerted commissioners about Project Esther.
Ambassador Solomont urged a different path. He recommended using multiple definitional frameworks of antisemitism to “foster informed dialogue without restricting political speech or academic inquiry.” He warned that “democracy protects Jewish Americans. Authoritarianism endangers us. Throughout Jewish history we’ve learned what happens when democratic societies cast aside due process and civil liberties. When governments start labeling certain groups as dangerous and unworthy of basic rights, it rarely stops with the first target.”
Meanwhile, commissioner Ruth Fuller advised that the IHRA definition of antisemitism was a “lightning rod” whose inclusion should be reconsidered.
Both were ignored.
Here’s what many Jews know but the commission won’t acknowledge: Conflating Jewish identity with support for Israel increases antisemitism. By insisting that criticizing Israeli government policy is antisemitic, we make all Jews responsible for those policies.
Massachusetts legislators must reject the Special Commission on Combating Antisemitism’s current recommendations. Real antisemitism demands a serious response—one that targets white supremacists and Christian nationalists, not student protesters and teachers’ unions. One that protects the civil liberties of all residents, including the many Jews who hold diverse views on Israel and Zionism. One that strengthens democracy rather than enabling its erosion.
The question isn’t whether to fight antisemitism. It’s how to fight it without sacrificing the democratic rights that actually keep Jewish people—and everyone else—safe.
Elsa Auerbach is a professor emerita at the University of Massachusetts Boston, the daughter of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, and a member of Jewish Voice for Peace.
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