What does it mean to be Jewish? This ancient question has become a pressing civil rights controversy. Despite a recent resurgence of anti-Semitic incidents on American college campuses, the U.S. Department of Education s powerful Office for Civil Rights has been unable to protect Jewish students. This failure has been a problem not of execution but of conceptualization. The OCR has been unable to address anti-Jewish harassment because it lacks a coherent conception of either Jewish identity or anti-Jewish hatred. Given jurisdiction over race and national origin but not religion, federal...

What is anti-Semitism? The Definition of Anti-Semitism is the first book-length study to explore this central question in the context of the new anti-Semitism. Previous efforts to define 'anti-Semitism' have been complicated by the disreputable origins of the term, the discredited sources of its etymology, the diverse manifestations of the concept, and the contested politics of its applications. Nevertheless the task is an important one, not only because definitional clarity is required for the term to be understood, but also because the current conceptual confusion prevents resolution of...