The IHRA definition isn’t a special shield for Jews. It’s the same framework every discrimination case already runs on—a resource for spotting the coded language and pretext that antisemitism hides behind. Don’t make it more complicated than it is.

On June 17, I sat on an employment law panel at the Brandeis Center’s National Legal Strategy Summit in Washington, DC, in a room full of litigators who spend their days on antisemitism cases.

What stuck with me was a conversation with a fellow panelist—a management-side employment attorney, more or less my old job—about the pushback he gets from employer clients whenever the IHRA definition of antisemitism comes up in an HR investigation. These clients, he shared, treat the definition like a live grenade. A special rule that makes a complaint from a Jewish employee more fraught, more legally treacherous, than a complaint from anyone else.

They have it backwards. The fear is honest—but it’s built on a caricature of the definition, not the definition itself. Read the actual text and the grenade turns out to be a tool they already know how to use.

And it isn’t only this one attorney’s clients who flinch. The IHRA definition is something that people actively organize against—teachers have walked out rather than sit through an anti-discrimination training that used it, officials have revoked it their first day in office, and there is a whole cottage industry of open letters insisting the definition is simply too dangerous to adopt. Read the coverage and you would think a working definition quietly rewrites the law. It doesn’t. So it is worth slowing down on what the definition actually is—and what it isn’t.

Finding the Cover Story

Before this work, I spent nearly a decade defending employers against discrimination claims. Fortune 500 companies, mostly. I was good at it.

Stripped of the branding, the job of an employment lawyer is pressure-testing. Someone walks in with a story—I was fired because I’m disabled, passed over because I’m a woman—and the employer has a reason ready: performance, restructuring, fit. The job is the unglamorous question underneath every one of these cases: is the reason the........

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