The Legal Record.
Banner image: Eleanor Roosevelt, who chaired the UN commission that drafted it, holds the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted December 10, 1948, one day after the Genocide Convention. Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum, CC BY 2.0Five terms used on this page.
Title VI. The 1964 US civil rights law that forbids discrimination in any school or program that takes federal money.
Resolution agreement. A signed settlement between the government and an institution that ends a civil rights investigation. It is enforceable and public, but it is not a court verdict.
Executive order. A directive from the US president to federal agencies. It directs enforcement but does not create new law.
Working definition. A non-binding description of antisemitism used to identify it. Three are widely used, and they are compared on the Contemporary Antisemitism Chapter.
General Assembly resolution. A vote of all UN member states. It expresses the body’s position but is not binding law.
More terms are in the Glossary.
Protection by grant.
Before the law recorded on the rest of this page, Jews’ protection came from a particular authority: a pope’s bull, a nation’s decree. These two landmarks show how far such protection reached.
Sicut Judaeis, the papal bull of protection.
Around 1120, Pope Calixtus II issued Sicut Judaeis, a bull protecting Jews, and some twenty later popes reissued it. Gregory X’s renewal of 1272 went further: it ordered the release of Jews seized on the “silly pretext” of the ritual-murder charge, and it required that Christian testimony against a Jew be backed by a Jewish witness. The protection was real, and limited. It came from the same tradition that kept medieval Jews legally second-class.
Chapter: The Blood Libel →France makes its Jews citizens.
The French National Assembly granted full citizenship to all French Jews. France was the first European state to do so. Over the next eighty years, emancipation spread state by state, to the Habsburg Empire in 1867 and the unified German Reich in 1871. Each grant was a law of one state, and a state could undo it. In 1935, Nazi Germany’s Reich Citizenship Law stripped German Jews of their citizenship.
Chapter: Moses Mendelssohn → Chapter: The Years Before the Killing →The world writes the crime into law.
After the Holocaust, the question was what the world would do about it. The answers came slowly, as trials, treaties, and statutes. The laws once used against Jews, from medieval expulsion decrees to the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, are traced in The Expulsions, The Years Before the Killing, and The Recurring Cycle. Every entry on this page rests on a document. Where a link appears, it goes to the text itself or to an official or press account of it. Last updated: November 2026.
The London Charter.
Before anyone could stand trial, the Allies had to decide what the crimes were. On August 8, 1945, in London, the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union signed an agreement creating a new court, the International Military Tribunal. Its charter named three crimes: crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. That last charge covered the murder, extermination, enslavement, and deportation of civilians “before or during the war,” and persecution “on political, racial or religious grounds.” It applied whether or not the acts broke the laws of the country where they happened, but only in connection with the court’s other crimes, aggression and war crimes. Two more articles closed the old escapes: high office was no defense, and neither was following orders.
Read the charter · Avalon Project →The Nuremberg verdicts.
The International Military Tribunal tried twenty-two leading Nazis at Nuremberg. Prosecutors built the case largely from Germany’s own documents. On October 1, 1946, the judges delivered their verdicts and sentences: twelve death sentences, three life sentences, four prison terms, and three acquittals. The judges declined to declare the persecution before 1939 a crime against humanity, because its connection with the court’s other crimes had not been proved. The principle outlived the trial: individuals answer for crimes against humanity, even when a state ordered them.
Read the judgment · Avalon Project →The United Nations affirms Nuremberg and names genocide.
Ten weeks after the Nuremberg verdicts, the General Assembly of the new United Nations took up what the trial had established. On December 11, 1946, it unanimously adopted Resolution 95(I), which affirmed the principles of international law recognized in the Nuremberg Tribunal’s charter and judgment. The same day it adopted Resolution 96(I), on genocide. The resolution called genocide “a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups,” declared it a crime under international law, and called for a treaty to prevent and punish it. That treaty became the Genocide Convention two years later.
Resolution 95(I) · UN Office of Legal Affairs → Resolution 96(I) · United Nations →The Genocide Convention.
When the war ended, no treaty made the deliberate destruction of a people a crime. Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer who escaped in 1939 and lost most of his family, had coined a name for it in 1944: genocide. He spent years pressing diplomats, delegation by delegation, to make it law. On December 9, 1948, the United Nations adopted the Genocide Convention. The destruction of a people was now a crime that every nation joining the convention promised to prevent and to punish.
The convention text · UN Human Rights Office →The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
One day later, the same assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the first worldwide declaration of rights belonging to every person everywhere. Among its principal authors was René Cassin, a French Jewish jurist whose own relatives had been deported and murdered. Its preamble refers to “barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind.”
The declaration · United Nations →The Luxembourg Agreement.
West Germany offered compensation for the crimes of the Nazi state, and Israelis were bitterly divided over whether to accept money for them. The Knesset debate drew thousands of protesters, and the vote to negotiate passed only 61 to 50. The agreement West Germany then signed pledged about DM 3 billion to Israel. It pledged DM 450 million more to the Claims Conference, a body of Jewish organizations representing survivors outside Israel. It was one of the first times a state agreed to compensate the victims of its own crimes. The story, and the argument, continue on the Restitution Chapter.
Chapter: Restitution →Nostra Aetate.
For roughly 1,800 years, a Christian teaching held Jews collectively guilty for the death of Jesus, and that charge helped license persecution across Europe. On October 28, 1965, by a vote of 2,221 to 88, the Second Vatican Council formally set it aside. Its declaration Nostra Aetate (“In Our Time”) states that the Passion “cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive.”
The document · Vatican archive →A resolution and its reversal.
In 1975, led by the Soviet bloc and Arab states, the UN General Assembly declared Zionism, the movement for Jewish self-determination, to be “a form of racism.” Israel’s ambassador tore the text in half at the podium. The resolution stood for sixteen years. Then the same body took it back: Resolution 46/86 is a single sentence revoking the determination in 3379, and it passed 111 to 25.
France tries Klaus Barbie.
Klaus Barbie ran the Gestapo in Lyon. He tortured resistance fighters and sent the forty-four Jewish children hidden at Izieu to Auschwitz. He then lived free in Bolivia for three decades until France won his extradition. At his 1987 trial, survivors testified for weeks, and the court ordered the proceedings filmed for history. Convicted of crimes against humanity, France’s first such verdict, he was sentenced to life on July 4, 1987.
Denial becomes a crime in Europe.
By the 1980s, self-styled “revisionists” were publishing claims that the gas chambers were a hoax, forcing democracies to decide whether denial was opinion or defamation of the dead. Germany (1985) and Israel (1986) acted first. France’s Gayssot Act made it a criminal offense to deny the crimes judged at Nuremberg. Austria amended its Prohibition Act to the same effect in 1992, and Germany strengthened its incitement law in 1994. Free-speech scholars still debate these laws. The laws and the arguments are treated on the Holocaust Denial Chapter.
Chapter: Holocaust Denial →France convicts Maurice Papon.
Barbie was a German officer. Maurice Papon was a French one: a Vichy civil servant who signed deportation orders for over 1,500 Jews from Bordeaux, then rose after the war to become police chief of Paris and a cabinet minister. His trial put before a French court the role of France’s own administration in the deportations. On April 2, 1998 he was convicted of complicity in crimes against humanity.
The Washington Principles.
Half a century after the war, museums across the world still held art the Nazis had confiscated from Jewish families, and heirs had almost no path to recover it. In 1998, forty-four countries agreed on principles for identifying that art and reaching just solutions with the families. The Terezin Declaration extended the commitment to property, insurance, and archives in 2009. Neither is binding law. Both are widely cited by museums and courts.
The principles · US State Department →Irving v. Penguin Books and Lipstadt.
A British writer, David Irving, sued an American historian, Deborah Lipstadt, for calling him a Holocaust denier. English libel law put the burden on the defense, so her lawyers had to prove in court, document by document, that what she had written about him was substantially true. They did. The judgment found that Irving had “persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence.” The full judgment is public.
The trial record · Holocaust Denial on Trial (Emory University) →Memory enters the statute books.
In the new century the questions changed: who returns what was stolen, how antisemitism is defined and measured, what schools must teach, and how courts answer new violence with old principles.
Republic of Austria v. Altmann.
A golden Klimt portrait hanging in Vienna’s national gallery showed Adele Bloch-Bauer, whose family fled Austria in 1938 and lost nearly all they owned. Her niece, Maria Altmann, in her eighties in Los Angeles, asked for the family’s paintings back and was refused. On June 7, 2004 the US Supreme Court ruled that she could sue a foreign government in an American court. Arbitration returned five paintings two years later.
The opinion · Cornell Law (LII) →Boim v. Holy Land Foundation.
In 1996, two Hamas gunmen killed David Boim, an American teenager living in Israel. His parents sued organizations in the United States that had raised money for Hamas, under the Anti-Terrorism Act, and in 2004 they won a judgment of 156 million dollars. On December 3, 2008 the full federal appeals court in Chicago upheld the judgment against two of the organizations, ruling that knowingly giving money to a terrorist group can make a donor liable for its killings. It reversed the judgment against one individual defendant and sent the claim against the Holy Land Foundation back to the trial court.
The case history · U.S. District Court, govinfo.gov → Chapter: The Terror Record →The IHRA working definition.
In 2016 the thirty-one member countries of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), an intergovernmental body, adopted a working definition of antisemitism, deliberately non-binding, meant as a practical tool. Dozens of governments and institutions have adopted it since. It is also the most debated of the three working definitions, mainly over its examples touching Israel. The definition, its two rivals, and the debate itself are treated on the Contemporary Antisemitism Chapter.
Chapter: Contemporary Antisemitism →The HEAR Act.
Families seeking Nazi-confiscated art kept losing in American courts before any judge examined the merits: too much time had passed, said the statutes of limitations, for losses their grandparents suffered in 1938. Congress answered with the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act: a uniform national rule of six years, counted from the moment the family actually discovers where the work is. The 2016 law was written to expire at the start of 2027. In April 2026 Congress made it permanent, and the new law, signed on April 13, 2026, also expanded the courts’ authority under it.
The law · Congress.gov → The 2026 law · White House →The Taylor Force Act.
Taylor Force was an American, a West Point graduate and Army veteran, murdered in a stabbing attack in Tel Aviv in 2016 while visiting Israel with a university program. His killer’s family became eligible for a monthly stipend under the Palestinian Authority’s payment program for attackers and their families. In response, Congress wrote the program into United States law: the Taylor Force Act, signed March 23, 2018, cuts most American aid to the Palestinian Authority for as long as the payments continue.
The bill and its history · Congress.gov →The JUST Act.
The Terezin promises of 2009 came with no enforcement, and in much of Europe restitution had stalled. The Justice for Uncompensated Survivors Today Act ordered the State Department to report publicly, country by country, on how forty-six governments were keeping their commitments. The report, published in 2020, assesses each country by name.
The law · Congress.gov →Executive Order 13899.
Title VI protects students from discrimination at any school taking federal money. It names race, color, and national origin, not religion, so for years agencies debated whether Jewish students were covered at all. Since 2004, Education Department policy had treated discrimination against Jews as national-origin discrimination under Title VI. Executive Order 13899 (2019) directed agencies to consider the IHRA working definition when enforcing it. Most of the campus cases in the next section were brought under Title VI.
The order · Federal Register →The Never Again Education Act.
A 2018 national survey had found that 22 percent of American millennials had not heard of the Holocaust or were not sure they had. Congress answered with the Never Again Education Act, funding Holocaust education nationwide through the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, by a nearly unanimous vote.
The law · Congress.gov →Germany sentences the Halle attacker.
On Yom Kippur 2019, a gunman tried to shoot his way into the synagogue in Halle, Germany, with more than fifty worshippers inside. The locked door held. He murdered two people nearby and broadcast it all live. A German court gave him the maximum in its law, life imprisonment with subsequent preventive detention, and named the antisemitic motive plainly in the verdict.
The Halimi ruling, and the law that answered it.
Sarah Halimi, a Jewish physician in Paris, was beaten and thrown from her window in 2017 by a neighbor shouting about God. The courts recognized the antisemitic motive. Then France’s highest court ruled he could not stand trial at all: his drug-induced psychosis had abolished criminal responsibility. Tens of thousands protested under the banner “justice for Sarah.” Nine months later parliament narrowed the defense. A person who takes drugs or alcohol in order to commit a crime can no longer claim the loss of judgment that follows. Taking them while knowing they could make one dangerous to others, and then killing in that state, became a separate crime.
Sines v. Kessler.
At the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, torch-carrying marchers chanted “Jews will not replace us,” as the judge in the later civil trial described them. The next day a rally participant drove his car into counterprotesters and killed Heather Heyer. On November 23, 2021 a federal jury found the defendants, among them the rally’s lead organizers and five of the groups that took part, liable under Virginia law for a civil conspiracy. It found six of them liable for racial, religious, or ethnic harassment or violence. The court entered judgment on January 9, 2023.
The judgment · courtlistener.com → Chapter: Contemporary Antisemitism →The Pittsburgh verdict.
On a Shabbat morning in 2018, a gunman entered the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and murdered eleven worshippers, the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history. A federal jury convicted the gunman on all sixty-three counts, including hate crimes resulting in death, and on August 3, 2023, he was sentenced to death. The hate-crime convictions placed on the federal record that the worshippers were attacked because they were Jews.
The case record · US Department of Justice →The record continues.
After the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023 and the war that followed, antisemitic incidents rose sharply worldwide. The Contemporary Antisemitism Chapter documents that record. On American campuses, Jewish students at many universities reported harassment and filed federal complaints and private lawsuits under Title VI, the civil rights law explained at the top of this page. What follows lists what has concluded: laws enacted, cases decided, agreements signed. One federal bill, reintroduced in 2025 and still before Congress, closes the section.
One day in Washington: the hearing and the vote.
On a single day, the campus story reached Congress twice. The presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT testified before a House committee about antisemitism at their universities. Asked whether calling for genocide of Jews would violate campus rules, two answered that it would depend on context, and the third answered in the terms of harassment policy. The same day, the House passed Resolution 894, condemning the rise of antisemitism in the United States and around the world and declaring that anti-Zionism is antisemitism, 311 to 14, with 92 members voting present, many over that equation. Penn’s president resigned four days later, and Harvard’s within a month. The committee held further hearings, campus by campus, through 2025.
The resolution and the vote · Congress.gov →A New York district orders an outside review.
In October 2023, about 450 community members in Chappaqua, New York petitioned their school district over lessons drawn from the Choices Program, a Middle East curriculum then published at Brown University. A December 2023 report by CAMERA, a media-monitoring group, called the curriculum a “platform for an anti-Zionist narrative.” It noted that the Qatar Foundation International had co-sponsored some of its teacher workshops and paid for teachers’ copies of its Middle East units. Brown defended the curriculum, calling claims against it “blatantly and egregiously false.” Brown also said the foundation, a U.S. nonprofit, had never given money to the program itself. In December the district committed, on the record, to an independent review of the lesson plans by the Institute for Curriculum Services, a redesign of its Israeli-Palestinian lessons, and adoption of the IHRA working definition. The program itself closed in June 2025, a decision Brown attributed to finances.
The district’s commitments · The Examiner → · The CAMERA report → · Brown’s statement →States begin writing definitions into law.
Definitions moved from frameworks into statutes. Georgia wrote the IHRA working definition of antisemitism into state law, the first of several states to legislate a definition after October 7, for use when courts and agencies weigh whether a crime or a complaint was antisemitic. Wisconsin followed in March 2026, adding the definition and its eleven examples to the law its agencies use to judge whether unlawful conduct was antisemitic. The education mandates that run alongside them are tracked on the Standards & Mandates page.
The signing announcement · Georgia Governor’s Office → Wisconsin’s law · Wisconsin Examiner →Brown University signs a resolution agreement.
A federal civil rights complaint, filed by the editor of an online news outlet, alleged that Brown had mishandled antisemitism on its campus after October 7. On July 8, 2024, Brown signed a voluntary resolution agreement with the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. It agreed to clarify and strengthen its policies and complaint procedures, with federal monitoring under Title VI. Brown denied that it had violated the law.
The announcement · Brown University →The resolution agreements multiply.
Brown’s agreement was one of a series. SUNY New Paltz had resolved a complaint in December 2023. The University of Michigan and the City University of New York signed in June 2024, and Drexel in August. A cluster from December 2024 to January 2025 added Muhlenberg, Johns Hopkins, Lafayette, the University of Cincinnati, and five University of California campuses. Each agreement is a signed public document on the Education Department’s civil-rights case site: policy changes, training, reporting, and federal monitoring, entered without an admission and enforceable as written.
One agreement, announced · Drexel University →Cornell: the threats, and the sentence.
In late October 2023 a Cornell student posted anonymous online threats to kill Jewish students, naming the kosher dining hall. He pleaded guilty in April 2024 to posting threats in interstate commerce. In August a federal court sentenced him to 21 months in prison and three years of supervised release, finding that the offense was motivated by hate and had substantially disrupted the campus. The record is the Justice Department’s.
The sentencing release · US Department of Justice →Amsterdam: the first convictions.
After a soccer match in Amsterdam on the night of November 7–8, 2024, organized groups chased, beat, and kicked Israeli fans through the city’s streets. The attackers coordinated over chat groups, and in court Dutch prosecutors cited messages from a suspect’s phone that described a “Jew hunt.” The prosecution moved quickly: within seven weeks a court convicted five men, with sentences from community service to six months in prison, and further prosecutions followed. The night before the attacks, some Maccabi Tel Aviv fans had torn Palestinian flags from buildings and chanted anti-Arab slogans. The judgments sit in the record of the Dutch courts.
The prosecutors’ case · NL Times, December 12, 2024 →Harvard settles, and adopts a definition.
Jewish students had sued Harvard under Title VI, describing harassment the university had failed to address. Rather than continue to trial, Harvard settled: it agreed to apply the IHRA working definition in its anti-discrimination policies, among other commitments. A settlement is an agreement between the parties, not a court verdict.
The joint announcement · Harvard University →Executive Order 14188.
A second executive order, Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism, reaffirmed the 2019 order and directed federal agencies to use their existing civil rights authorities in campus enforcement. An order directs agencies. The entries that follow record what agencies and universities then did.
The order · Federal Register →Santa Ana pauses three ethnic studies courses.
In 2023, a school district in Santa Ana, California adopted new ethnic studies courses that, a lawsuit alleged, were developed out of public view, in violation of California’s open meetings law, and contained antisemitic content. Jewish organizations sued. On February 20, 2025 the district settled. It agreed to stop teaching three of the courses until they are redesigned with public input. It agreed to remove content the plaintiffs identified as antisemitic from one of them, World Histories, so that course could finish the school year. It also agreed to disband the committee that had drafted the courses.
The settlement · ADL announcement →The Columbia resolution agreement.
Federal agencies had found that Columbia acted with “deliberate indifference” toward harassment of Jewish students after October 7. On July 23, 2025 Columbia signed a resolution agreement with the federal government: $200 million paid over three years, another $21 million settling related employment claims, adoption of the IHRA definition, and oversight commitments. The agreement followed heavy government pressure on the university, and the lawfulness of that pressure was itself publicly contested.
The agreement · Columbia University →UCLA settles the Frankel case.
During the 2024 encampment period at UCLA, checkpoints on parts of the campus turned away students identified as Jewish, and Jewish students and a professor sued. On July 29, 2025 UCLA settled, with policy commitments to keep campus spaces open to all students.
Australia: the law after Bondi.
On December 14, 2025, gunmen opened fire on a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney and killed fifteen people. Five weeks later, Australia’s Parliament passed what its government called the strongest hate laws in the country’s history. The law lets the government list hate groups on the advice of the national intelligence agency, raises penalties for hate crimes, and makes it easier to cancel the visas of people tied to listed groups. A proposed offense of inciting racial hatred was dropped after parties objected on free-speech grounds.
What the law does · ABC News →Britain: the memorial beside Parliament.
The Holocaust Memorial Act received Royal Assent, removing a legal barrier to building a national Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre in Victoria Tower Gardens, beside Parliament in London. The memorial will honor the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust.
The Act · GOV.UK →Missouri: the definition in the schools.
Missouri’s law, in force from late August, requires public schools, charter schools, and universities to describe prohibited antisemitic conduct in their codes of conduct, using the IHRA definition, and to report cases to the state. Its limits are written into it. It applies only to harassment and intimidation. Criticism of Israel like criticism of any other country is not to be treated as antisemitic. It may not be applied in ways that infringe rights protected by the First Amendment.
The law and its limits · St. Louis Public Radio →Canada: the Combatting Hate Act.
Canada’s Combatting Hate Act received Royal Assent and took effect on July 18. It makes it a crime to intimidate or obstruct people entering places of worship, schools, and community centers. It makes hate-motivated crime a specific offense, and makes it a crime to promote hatred by publicly displaying certain hate symbols, among them two Nazi symbols. The government listed what the law does not do: criminalize religious teaching, peaceful protest, or criticism.
The law · Department of Justice Canada →California: safe entry, and a place in the data.
California’s governor signed a law creating 100-foot protective zones around the entrances of houses of worship. He signed it at Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles, which protesters had vandalized the year before. Five days later he signed a law that news reports described as making California the first state to list “Jewish” as an ethnic category in its demographic data. It applies to state forms from 2029, and the governor noted his concern about how agencies would carry it out.
The signing · Governor of California →The Antisemitism Awareness Act.
The Antisemitism Awareness Act would write the IHRA definition into federal education law. An earlier version passed the Senate in December 2016 but not the House. The 2024 bill passed the House 320 to 91 on May 1, 2024, and expired with that Congress without a Senate vote. The measure was reintroduced in 2025 and remains pending.
The 2024 bill · Congress.gov → The 2025 Senate bill · Congress.gov →