Moshe Koppel drafted an early version of the bill before the Knesset that would grant constitutional status to Israel’s identity as the “nation-state of the Jewish people.” Arguments against the bill, he writes, boil down to the complaint that it is “too Jewish.” They are wrong:

[T]he state should serve as a framework in which the majority of citizens already committed to some form of Jewish identity are able to manifest that identity in the public sphere. Specifically, what the bill demands is that this Jewish identity be given expression in Israel’s choice of language, symbols, calendar, immigration policy, and so on. . . . All these are sufficiently fundamental that they should be anchored in a basic law. In fact, I suspect that most innocent observers of Israel would be surprised to hear that they aren’t already anchored in a basic law. . . .

Just as judges must adjudicate between conflicting civil and human rights—say, my right to free speech versus your right to privacy, or your freedom of movement versus my property rights—so too they must adjudicate between the collective right of the majority to self-definition and other rights that might conflict with this collective right. This does not mean that being a Jewish nation-state is incompatible with being a democracy any more than that free speech is incompatible with the right to privacy; rights and values bump up against each other and from time to time they need to be adjudicated. . . .

In short, the law is necessary for restoring a lost balance between national rights and individual rights in Israeli law. It is necessary also for the purpose of clarifying to ourselves and to others what we mean — and, no less significantly, what we do not mean—when we assert our right to a Jewish nation-state.

In October, a young Mauritanian national murdered an Orthodox Jewish man on his way to synagogue in Chicago. This alone should be sufficient sign of the rising dangers of anti-Semitism. Nathan Diament explains how the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act (AAA) can, if passed, make American Jews safer:

We were off to a promising start when the AAA sailed through the House of Representatives in the spring by a generous vote of 320 to 91, and 30 senators from both sides of the aisle jumped to sponsor the Senate version. Then the bill ground to a halt.

Fearful of antagonizing their left-wing activist base and putting vulnerable senators on the record, especially right before the November election, Democrats delayed bringing the AAA to the Senate floor for a vote. Now, the election is over, but the political games continue.

You can’t combat anti-Semitism if you can’t—or won’t—define it. Modern anti-Semites hide their hate behind virulent anti-Zionism. . . . The Anti-Semitism Awareness Act targets this loophole by codifying that the Department of Education must use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of anti-Semitism in its application of Title VI.