When Caryn Elaine Johnson—the daughter of a Baptist clergyman with no Jewish background and better known by the stage name “Whoopi Goldberg”—declared on The View that the Holocaust “isn’t about race,” she was immediately and rightly rebuked. Nazi ideology treated Jews as a race, and the Nuremberg Laws codified that racial definition into persecution and extermination. To deny this is to deny history.
Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was correct when he appeared on the next episode of the TV show and explained that her evaluation of the Holocaust as merely “man’s inhumanity to man” was inadequate. However, this piece of wisdom was a departure from ADL’s own position. After all, the organization itself used to define racism as: “The marginalization and/or oppression of people of colour based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people.” The Jewish Policy Center was right to call this “completely unacceptable.” By its definition, a billion Han Chinese cannot be racist toward Koreans or Mongolians, nor can Japanese be racist toward black people—because racism, according to the ADL, is something only white people can enact. By its own definition, the ADL should have defended Goldberg’s mistake—which only underscores how unworkable that definition is.
The problem is larger than this definition. The ADL has also been criticized for transforming from a watchdog of extremism into a partisan actor, reshaping civic education in the image of progressive ideology. Through its “No Place for Hate” initiative, the organization promoted school curricula emphasizing systemic racism, white privilege, and reparations—concepts far afield from its original mission of combating Jew-hatred. Jonathan S. Tobin, editor-in-chief of the Jewish News Syndicate, even spoke about a “betrayal of the organization’s responsibilities.” This is important because what comes with this shift is a downplay of left-wing antisemitism in academia, popular culture, and the left-wing of the Democratic Party. The ADL, for instance, defended two antisemitic members of Congress “largely on the basis that they were ‘women of color.’”
Some scholars of antisemitism fall into a similar ideological trap of viewing antisemitism through a CRT lens. In doing so, they miss what is distinctive about antisemitism itself and, worse, allow antisemitic tropes to slip into the conversation under the guise of scholarship.
In a way, Antisemitism and the Law is not just the perfect example for this trend but also an excellent title for a book surrounded by exactly that: antisemitism and the law. Robert Katz’s volume seeks to offer a “comprehensive examination” of how courts and legislatures have grappled with Jewish identity, antisemitism, and related questions of speech, crime, and advocacy. The book aims to equip students and practitioners with both historical perspective and strategic tools for combating Jew-hatred. Backed by major ADL funding and promoted for adoption in law schools, it presents itself as both scholarship and handbook. Yet the world from which it emerges suggests that the book may embody more of the problem than a solution.
Katz himself is professor of law at Indiana University and founder and director of the Center for the Study of Law and Antisemitism—an independent non-profit. He is also the co-organizer of the controversial “Law vs. Antisemitism” conferences, which are “inspired by the history of Critical Race Theory.” The other co-founder, Diane Kemker, identifies herself as a “Critical Race Theory person” and speaks in her ahistorical work about a “Jewish benefit from white supremacy and white privilege” and a “Jewish complicity with anti-Black racism.” The inaugural address at the first conference was delivered by a Harvard professor, a non-legal scholar, who argued in his work that Zionism was a means for its founder to “expose his genitals.” The claim recalls that famous line, often misattributed to Orwell: “That’s an idea so stupid only an intellectual could believe it.” In a later book, the Harvard professor then declared that “Jewish culture was steeped in fantasies (and occasionally, acts) of vengeance against Christians” and that “veins of hatred run through Jewish civilization.” As I argued in a piece for the Martin Center, these events don’t expose antisemitism; antisemitism exposes them—revealing the intellectual bankruptcy behind much of this scholarship. Yet they have drawn significant attendance, including figures such as Kenneth L. Marcus, former assistant secretary for civil rights under the first Trump administration, who later contributed to Antisemitism and the Law.
The problems of intellectual clarity visible at these conferences reappear in the book itself, whose structure creates confusion: Katz is listed as the book’s author while he is in fact the editor and main contributor of the volume. Much of the volume consists of Katz’s own essays, interspersed with other scholars’ conference papers and podcast transcripts, giving the impression of scholarship where much is commentary. Moreover, the front-matter “contributors” list fails to correspond consistently with the table of contents or the actual authorship of chapters. The result is a disorienting situation: contributors are sometimes not authors, and authors are not properly introduced, eroding clarity and accountability.
While these scholars treat race as the most important element in discussing antisemitism and Jewish life, they miss what matters and allow antisemitism itself to slip in.
One actual contributor, David Schraub, epitomizes the volume’s flaws. At a “Law vs. Antisemitism” conference, he advanced the dangerous claim that white Jews are “directly implicated in and often beneficiaries of our racist systems [in America],” and in some cases even “helped propagate White privilege.” By suggesting that Jews, as a monolithic group, are complicit in systemic injustice, Schraub echoes Kemker’s rhetoric, reminiscent of antisemitic tropes. His arguments also stand in sharp contrast to the history of the Civil Rights movement in America, which saw exceptionally strong Jewish involvement. In Antisemitism and the Law, Schraub now speculates about when “whiteness” confers or deprives Jews of power and privilege. Presented as legal analysis, his contribution reads less as law and more as ideological assertion, illustrating the volume’s tendency to conflate commentary with scholarship.
Schraub’s essay is not an outlier. The book as a whole displays a pronounced preoccupation with race, as in Marcus’s essay “The Jewish Racial Question”: “The question of Jewish racial construction may appear obvious to those who observe that many American Jews appear White, are perceived as White, and experience themselves as White.” The implication is that Jews therefore do not face the disadvantages endured by people of color in America. Yet why should this be the measure in a book devoted to antisemitism? To frame Jewish experience as if it were in competition with that of black Americans is to misunderstand the inquiry.
By narrowing antisemitism into a discussion around race and privilege, the volume sidesteps the urgent question of how the law responds to antisemitic violence in practice. Antisemitism and the Law bills itself as a “comprehensive examination.” Yet it remains silent on one of the most crucial topics: the intersection of antisemitism and psychological assessment in criminal law—a recurring issue in which courts at times treat antisemitic violence as the product of mental illness rather than moral agency. This omission is not abstract; it directly affects mens rea determinations, competency evaluations, and sentencing mitigation when antisemitic violence is reframed as madness rather than moral choice. This tendency has surfaced in several rulings, most notoriously in the case of Sarah Halimi.
Halimi, a 65-year-old Orthodox Jewish woman and retired kindergarten teacher, was tortured and murdered in her Paris apartment in 2017. Her attacker chanted verses from the Koran, shouted “Allahu Akbar” and antisemitic slurs, and then threw her still-living body out of a third-story window. Judges later declared him not criminally responsible under Article 122 of the French Penal Code. Independent psychiatric experts testified that he was undergoing a “psychotic episode” brought on by cannabis consumption, even while acknowledging that his motivation for killing was the fact that Halimi was Jewish. “The crime was the crime of a madman,” five psychiatrists wrote in Le Monde. “And in France we do not judge the mad.”
To treat antisemitic murder as merely the product of psychosis is to erase moral choice and collapse human action into pathology, as though life were one huge Stanford prison experiment. A book that aspires to be an exhaustive examination of antisemitism and the law should not ignore so vital a problem. The omission is telling: by dwelling on abstract racial categories, Katz and his contributors neglect the very cases where antisemitism and the law collide most urgently. While these scholars treat race as the most important element in discussing antisemitism and Jewish life—obsessing whether Jews are white, non-white, off-white, or ethnic—they miss what matters and allow antisemitism itself to slip in.
To misunderstand this is not a harmless mistake; it has consequences for how courts, legislatures, and civic institutions respond to the hatred. The impulse behind Antisemitism and the Law is right and even necessary. We do need a serious reckoning with how the law can confront antisemitism, and universities could use a handbook worthy of that task. But good intentions do not excuse poor reasoning. In my estimation, Antisemitism and the Law is best understood as a case study in what has often gone wrong within the modern academy: the substitution of ideology for scholarship, the evasion of crucial issues, and the astonishing willingness to let antisemitism creep in under the very pretext of combating it. The stakes are not academic alone. A jurisprudence that defines antisemitism in terms of “whiteness” and “privilege” trains students to confuse ideology with law and to mistake structural jargon for human responsibility. If left unchallenged, such teaching will erode both legal clarity and civic trust. If this is what now passes for a “comprehensive examination,” the danger is not only that students will be misled about antisemitism, but that they will be trained in a jurisprudence that no longer distinguishes between law and its negation. And they forget that while Jews can be victims of racism they should not be defined by race; no one should.