Antony Lerman

The furore over the Labour Party’s incomplete adoption of the IHRA’s definition of antisemitism has barely been out of the headlines all summer. But how has a working definition come to be regarded as a ‘gold standard’? Is it actually any good? Why did Labour risk (in the words of its deputy leader, Tom Watson) ‘disappear[ing] into a vortex of eternal shame’ if it didn’t adopt without qualification not only the definition but all 11‘illustrations’? And what will the consequences be now that it has?

Antony Lerman recently wrote a comprehensive (and uncompromising) analysis of the crisis in an essay for OpenDemocracy titled ‘Labour Should Ditch the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism Altogether’.

Antony Lerman is visiting senior fellow at the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue in Vienna and honorary fellow at the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/Non-Jewish Relations at Southampton University. He was the founding director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research and a founding member of Independent Jewish Voices, and is associate editor of Patterns of Prejudice, the academic journal on ‘race’, ethnicity, prejudice and exclusion.

He is the author of The Making and Unmaking of a Zionist: A personal and political journey (2012), and is currently working on a book provisionally titled Whatever Happened to Antisemitism?