There is an organization in America that claims to fight antisemitism. It convenes scholars, publishes guides for universities and advises policymakers on how to respond to anti-Jewish hate. It funds research, lends its name to academic conferences and wraps itself in the language of civil rights. It sounds, on paper, like exactly the kind of institution the moment demands.
 
There is just one problem: It has made antisemitism harder to fight.
 
The Nexus Project, a fiscally sponsored initiative of the New Israel Fund, has spent years constructing an alternative framework for defining antisemitism. The Middle East Forum has published a forensic investigation documenting what that framework does in practice.

The answer is as simple as it is disturbing: Nexus functions as a strategic intervention designed to build a firewall that protects anti-Zionist rhetoric from the stigma—and the consequences—of being classified as antisemitic under the widely adopted International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism.
 
How does an antisemitism laundromat work? The same way any laundering operation works: by running something dirty through a process that makes it look clean.

In this case, the Nexus Project takes conduct that the IHRA definition recognizes as antisemitic—denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, applying double standards to Israel, or using symbols associated with classic antisemitism to target the Jewish state—and reclassifies it as legitimate political speech.
 
Nexus prioritizes intent over outcome. Its language is filled with qualifiers that function as escape hatches: “as such,” “per se,” “not necessarily,” “not prima facie.” Those loopholes create an almost impossible task: proving the inner mind of the actor.
 
The mechanism is the Nexus Campus Guide, distributed to university administrators throughout the country. Our textual analysis reveals that the guide systematically instructs institutions to treat anti-Zionist harassment as protected expression. A Jewish student facing calls for the elimination of the world’s only Jewish state? Not antisemitism, says Nexus; that’s political opinion. A campus group promoting boycotts that single out the Jewish state while ignoring every other nation on earth? Protected advocacy.
 
It argues, for example, that the phrase “From the river to the sea” “does not invoke traditional antisemitic tropes” and so “is not discriminatory toward Jews”; that calls for “intifada” are “not necessarily antisemitic” if aimed at Israelis rather than Jews; and that “apartheid” and “genocide” accusations do “not necessarily” qualify as antisemitism, even if they prove “to be false, or imprecise, or reductionist.”
 
Where IHRA warns that applying double standards to Israel is a form of antisemitism, Nexus insists, “Paying disproportionate attention to Israel and treating Israel differently than other countries is not prima facie proof of antisemitism,” offering preemptive defenses to progressive campus radicals and far-right Groypers alike.
 
The consequences are not hypothetical. Our investigation documents how the Nexus framework has been deployed to weaken Title VI enforcement—the primary federal mechanism for protecting Jewish students from discriminatory campus environments. When the definition of antisemitism is rigged, enforcement fails. When enforcement fails, Jewish students are left without recourse.
 
This is not a fringe assessment. Mainstream Jewish groups—from the largest advocacy organizations to the most established communal institutions—have overwhelmingly rejected the Nexus approach. They recognize what our investigation confirms: that the Nexus framework does not clarify what antisemitism is. It obscures it. It does not protect Jewish students. It protects those who target them.
 
The question of how we define antisemitism is not academic. It determines which students receive federal protection. It determines which incidents trigger institutional response. It determines whether the surge of anti-Jewish hate sweeping American campuses and communities is met with action or indifference. Definitions are the architecture of enforcement, and when that architecture is deliberately weakened, real people pay the price.
 
We followed the money. We traced the networks. We dissected the documents. What we found was not an institution fighting antisemitism, but one that has built a sophisticated system for sanitizing it.
 
The antisemitism laundromat is open for business. It is time to shut it down.

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