On June 4, 2025, the Federal Association of the Research and Information Centers on Antisemitism (RIAS) presented its 2024 annual report in Berlin at the Federal Press Conference. RIAS is an organization that continuously monitors antisemitic incidents in Germany, on the basis of which government agencies and politicians take measures to combat antisemitism. It emerged from the “antisemitism-critical” contexts of a strongly victim-centered fight against racism in the 2000s, when the Amadeu Antonio Foundation and other so-called “antideutsche” players abandoned power-critical analyses, succumbed to the temptations of state proximity, and began to participate in the state’s instrumentalization of the concept of victimhood.
According to the RIAS 2024 report and statistics, the number of antisemitic incidents in Germany has risen dramatically, as in previous years. No one can doubt that antisemitism, even in its narrowest sense—as hostility toward Jews because they are Jews—has increased and continues to increase. Nothing would be more necessary than careful statistics, a reliable database, and appropriate monitoring to better understand the forms, causes, extent, and locations of contemporary antisemitism, regardless of its political camp, and to combat it more effectively.
However, RIAS works with premises and under conditions that conflict with good scientific practice—and this is not remedied by the president of the German University Rectors’ Conference embracing it. The association uses a definition of antisemitism—the IHRA working definition—that is legally and academically controversial, if not rejected as unsuitable because it conflates things that should be differentiated. Instead of in dubio pro reo, it operates on the principle that a finding of “Israel-related antisemitism” is justified even in cases of strong doubt – in the alleged interest of the actual, supposed, or potential victims. It equates any form of anti-Zionism with antisemitism almost without hesitation, dehistoricizes and essentializes it, and imposes often bizarre interpretations on ambiguous and debatable statements. And it does not reflect on the fact that by deciding who or what is antisemitic, it exercises power and can destroy lives without granting the possibility of appeal.
I will quote here from the 2024 annual report just two passages that, in my view, show how irresponsibly RIAS handles this power and how little it cares about empirical evidence and accuracy:
“RIAS classified just under 7% of all [antisemitic] gatherings as having a left-wing anti-imperialist background. On the occasion of the so-called Nakba Day—a Palestinian and Islamist campaign day against the founding of the State of Israel—the Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany (MLPD) held a rally in Erfurt in May. One speech stated: ‘Israel is no longer the land of persecuted Jews, but a great power […]. Israel has become the perpetrator.’ In the spirit of an antisemitic perpetrator-victim reversal, Jews are denied their status as victims of the Shoah and instead accused of comparable crimes. With reference to the accusation that Israel is committing genocide, the Shoah was relativized: “If you take the definition of genocide so narrowly that the entire people is destroyed, then there was no genocide against the Jews either.” RIAS includes accusations of genocide against Israel as antisemitic incidents according to the IHRA working definition if they deny the Jewish right to self-determination, if they use symbols or images associated with traditional antisemitism, or if they draw comparisons between current Israeli policy and Nazi policy.” (p. 23)
The contradictions and distortions of fact are obvious: 1) Nakba Day may be misused in some contexts, but the Nakba – the expulsion and flight of over 700,000 Arab Palestinians in the wake of the founding of the State of Israel and the Palestine War (1947–1949) – did happen, and it can and should be remembered. 2) It is a fact that Israel as a state, and not just with its current government, is a major power and, since 1967, has also been a “perpetrator” under international law. 3) The incriminated sentence does not relativize the Shoah, it clearly acknowledges it as a genocide. Nor does it rule out that it was more than genocide, that it was singular even. 4) One may not find the statements particularly sensitive, but they neither deny the Jewish right to self-determination, nor do they use traditional antisemitic symbols or images, nor do they compare Israeli policy with National Socialism.
A second example: “Meanwhile, German politics seems to respond to the outlined increase in antisemitic incidents in particularly political contexts in 2024 with increasing habituation to antisemitic incidents and their normalization. For example, it took over a year for the Bundestag to pass an antisemitism resolution that was not supported by all democratic factions and groups.” (p. 6)
On the one hand, the criticism of the Bundestag’s antisemitism resolution had well-considered, substantive reasons that RIAS fails to mention. There was an alternative resolution drafted by a group of renowned professors that the Bundestag did not admit to the vote and that some members of parliament would have liked to support, who then abstained from voting. On the other hand, the fact that the Bundestag resolution—passed, unfortunately, by an overwhelming majority—received two handfuls of abstentions and not 100 percent approval, indicates above all that there is a normalization of authoritarian discourse and a growing acceptance of authoritarian politics. 100 percent approval in votes and elections may have been the norm in the totalitarian GDR, but it should not be expected from a free parliament.
One cannot help but get the impression that such passages in the RIAS reports are not solely attributable to intellectual weakness and institutional irresponsibility. Rather, a straw man is being constructed. The “Israel-related antisemitism” that RIAS has declared war on is largely an insinuation and primarily serves to stigmatize the growing protests against Israeli actions in Gaza and the West Bank, and to justify authoritarian policies in Germany. The straw man argument works all the better as indeed genuine Israel-related antisemitism does exist.
That is why it is important to insist on differentiation: it is not antisemitic to address the problematic genesis of the State of Israel – and thus also the problems of its “existence”; rather, the crimes of the current right-wing extremist government in Israel cannot be understood without knowledge of the State’s fundamental problems. On the other hand, it is very much antisemitic to shift the blame for this problematic genesis onto “others” – onto the Israeli citizens alone, not to speak shifting it onto the Jews. Instead, it must be recognized how our state system as a whole bears responsibility––and especially Germany. It is equally antisemitic to reduce Jews to an exclusive and expansive state defined by ethnicity and religion; yet this is precisely what the RIAS report suggests.
At least RIAS seemed to be adapting to the small changes in discourse and the shift in sentiment that the German government showed temporarily in the first half of June. At its press conference on June 4, RIAS moved away from categorizing it as antisemitic without further ado when Israel’s occupation is described as “apartheid” or Israel’s warfare in Gaza as “genocide.” Now, it says, context should be the determining factor. However, the 2024 report shows that talking about “Israeli apartheid” was included in the statistics without taking into account the context. The slogan “No Pride for Apartheid” was counted as an antisemitic incident, even though it explicitly referred to repression in the West Bank and Gaza. One can only speculate whether in the 2025 annual report, accusations of “apartheid” and “genocide” will still appear as antisemitic incidents or not. However, rather than inconsistently and tacitly abandoning untenable positions, it would be better to abandon the IHRA definition’s short-sightedness altogether or to open up a balanced discussion of different definitions and ensure transparency in monitoring. RIAS should also apologize to those who have been and continue to be defamed as antisemitic without justification, especially Palestinians and “left-wing” Jews.
A few days before the presentation of the RIAS report, probably not by chance, the Jewish organization Diaspora Alliance published a counter-report by Israeli journalist and data analyst Iltay Mashiach. It is the only systematic investigation and critique of RIAS as an institution, and of its reports to date, but only covers the years up to 2022, as it was completed in September 2023. The massacre of October 7, with all its consequences, which also affected Iltay Mashiach personally, made it impossible to publish it earlier. The fact that the German discourse is unable to criticize RIAS and once again leaves the criticism to outsiders, may also have contributed to the long delay in publication.
The counter-report shares the RIAS reports’ diagnosis of growing, threatening antisemitism and supports the basic aim of the monitoring. However, it criticizes RIAS’s methods, in particular the decontextualization of “incidents,” the lack of transparency in data collection, and what it calls an “eternalist” understanding of antisemitism. This refers to the essentializing and ahistorical assumption that antisemitism is always the same everywhere—and potentially equally dangerous—and that intention plays no role. As an example of the absurd results of this approach, Mashiach reconstructs in the introduction an “incident” classified as antisemitic by RIAS, namely a speech given by Israeli-Jewish historian Moshe Zimmermann on Holocaust Remembrance Day 2020 before the state parliament of Saxony-Anhalt:
“Zimmermann’s lecture to German parliamentarians that day examined the 200 years of what he termed ‘the twisted road to Auschwitz.’ It aimed to show that it is the early moments of looming atrocities––those moments that are hard to discern in real time because developments are too slow and their accumulation too gradual––that should really alarm us. ‘Never again Auschwitz? This is too obvious,’ Zimmermann said. It is rather, he continued, the modest beginnings that could eventually lead to Auschwitz that deserve the warning never again.’ He further emphasized that his speech, being about ‘ubiquitous human behavior and universal history,’ applied to the entire world, including Israelis––and, in their case, ‘not only from a victim perspective.’” (p. 9)
In the RIAS Report 2020, this speech was anonymized as an incident because it suggested an equation of “Israeli policy toward the Palestinians with the antisemitic policy of National Socialism.” RIAS spokesman Daniel Poensgen recently confirmed in an interview with the taz that this misinterpretation was not a slip-up: “Here, in a German parliament, only Israelis were mentioned as a group that must be careful not to repeat German crimes. We gave particular weight to the context of the statement [made before a German parliament] and included this situation in the statistics as an incident.”
RIAS claims that Zimmermann referred “exclusively to Israelis,” even though he explicitly had addressed his speech to the “whole world” and had applied his conclusions “also to Israelis”, as part of the world. The mechanism that makes such disregard for evidence possible is a victimization that has been made compatible with state and power interests. RIAS wants to strengthen the “perspective of Jews,” and reduced it to a victim’s perspective. The perspectives of Jews who do not share RIAS’s premises—Moshe Zimmermann, the Diaspora Alliance, Iltay Mashiach, and many others—are not only ignored, but are inadvertently placed on the other side, the side of the perpetrators. Moshe Zimmermann’s speech became an “antisemitic incident” because its universalization of the lessons of Auschwitz, before a German parliament, questioned the victim’s perspective as the only possible perspective for Jews. With this understanding, even non-Jews who defend this mono-perspectivism can become “victims” of antisemitism. The fact that Moshe Zimmermann, as a universalist and, incidentally, a descendant of Holocaust survivors, is certainly not an antisemite was irrelevant to RIAS: “In principle, the intention behind antisemitic statements does not play a major role in our assessment,” Poensgen said in the interview.
From there, we can also explain the discrepancy that, according to RIAS, German universities are allegedly a hotbed of antisemitism, with a disproportionate number of “antisemitic incidents”; although a study by the University of Konstanz in April 2025 came to the opposite conclusion that “antisemitic attitudes are less pronounced among students than in the general population.” According to the Konstanz study, 20 percent of the population exhibits “general antisemitism,” but only six percent of students do. The proportion of “Israel-related antisemitism,” as defined by the IHRA, is 10 percent of the population and seven percent of students. However, RIAS does not care whether the students are actually antisemitic or not. It suffices to count a high number of red triangles and Intifada slogans, and to combine them with the serious assault on Lahav Shapira by a fellow student, to create a murderous scenario that is seemingly highly dangerous for all Jewish students.
Mashiach works through all the methodological problems of RIAS’s reports and their consequences: the disregard for intentions and the “eternity argument”; the “overemphasis on Israel-related antisemitism in external communication”, without that emphasis being supported by the data; the bias in the interpretation of Israel-related statements or symbols; the thin and one-sided justifications; the decontextualization and lack of transparency; the unresolved question of how the power of interpretation in “decoding antisemitic codes” can actually be legitimized and made accountable; the discrediting and stigmatization of Palestinian narratives and the general suspicion against them; and, as the flip side of this, the strengthening of the nationalist Israeli settler narrative and the concealment of political and propagandistic objectives by branding protests against it as antisemitic; and finally, the promotion of anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian racism.
RIAS has not yet commented on the content of the Diaspora Alliance’s counter-report, but has merely defamed it as a baseless and malicious attempt to discredit its findings. It is apparently unable to respond to the points of criticism in a factual and substantive manner. Indeed, it is not even able to spot the minor inaccuracies in the counter-report that it could exploit. At one point, the counter-report refers to a foreword by Josef Schuster, President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, in the 2021 annual report of RIAS Bavaria, which allegedly contained anti-Arab or anti-Muslim statements. However, Schuster’s statement, which was slightly misquoted, came from an interview in 2015.
But instead of burdening a freelance Israeli journalist with the hard work and responsibility, researchers in Germany should take on the job, critically examine the work of RIAS and ensure that a viable data set is finally created using open, debatable definitions of racism and antisemitism. We must put an end to an understanding of antisemitism that uncritically and indiscriminately subsumes anti-Zionism under antisemitism and denounces criticism—even fundamental criticism—of Israel as inherently antisemitic. Above all, transparency must be established, and intransparency must not be justified with alleged victim protection: 80 percent of the “incidents” recorded by RIAS in 2024 were not directed against individuals; there is therefore no reason not to publish them. Fears that criticism of pro-Zionist institutions––be it Israel, the Central Council of Jews in Germany, RIAS, or the antisemitism commissioner Felix Klein––might negatively affect the protection of Jews must be addressed in ways other than authoritarian, reality-distorting assertions. For while human rights violations and serious war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank are taking on genocidal proportions, but continue to be supported by Germany with weapons and propagandistic justification, antisemitic conspiracy theories are indeed also proliferating. The dubious methods employed by RIAS feed these theories, rather than combat them.