When the Heritage Foundation released Project Esther last year — billed as a major counter-antisemitism strategy by the conservative think tank — the document was largely met with silence from the mainstream Jewish community, who opted not to participate in a project that was seen by many as highly partisan. The document did not refer at all to antisemitism on the right; it only addressed pro-Hamas, left-wing antisemitism. 

Now, the Nexus Project, a Jewish organization focused on combating antisemitism using a more liberal lens than the approach taken by the largest Jewish organizations, has released its own antisemitism strategy as a an equal-but-opposite response to the polarizing Heritage Foundation effort. Called the “Shofar Report,” it features essays and policy proposals written by several well-known liberal Jewish activists, including Jewish Council for Public Affairs’ Amy Spitalnick, J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami, NYU professor Lila Corwin Berman and UCLA professor David Myers. 

Where Project Esther took aim at progressives, the Shofar Report directs its sharpest criticism at the Trump administration. Jonathan Jacoby, Nexus’ president and national director, said he could not think of anything positive or effective President Donald Trump has done when it comes to combating antisemitism.

“No, I think that an administration that harbors or that includes people who engage in antisemitic rhetoric and promote antisemitic myths and tropes is not eligible for being considered a protector of Jewish rights and Jewish safety,” Jacoby told eJewishPhilanthropy this week in an interview about the Shofar Report. 

The Shofar Report describes Trump’s antisemitism policies as authoritarian in nature, in particular his targeting of universities and efforts to revoke visas from foreign students accused of supporting Hamas. It argues that the best way for Americans to counter antisemitism is to resist authoritarianism and support democracy.

“The message of this to other Jewish organizations is to make protecting democracy a number one priority for the sake of Jewish safety, and don’t engage in activities or initiatives that undermine or weaken that democracy,” Jacoby said. “Protecting democracy seems like the most important thing for fighting antisemitism, and so our plan focuses on that and very specifically on what can be done to protect democracy and to counter the attempts to undermine democratic institutions.”

The Shofar Report is more a statement of principles than a concrete guide to combating antisemitism, with policy recommendations like “provide resources for institutions to combat genuine harassment while maintaining open intellectual environments” and “focus enforcement on clear discrimination and harassment while protecting political expression and academic freedom.” 

“We don’t see it as ideological. It is true that the recommendations sync very much with recommendations that liberals and progressive make,” said Jacoby. “But we’re not trying to promote a liberal ideology. We’re trying to promote things that specifically are designed to protect democracy, and we believe that the left should be focusing on those things as much as the right should be focusing on those things.”

The Nexus Project is best known for authoring its own definition of antisemitism as a rebuttal to the far more widely used International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism, which has been implemented by the U.S. government and dozens of others. IHRA has faced pushback from the left and, increasingly, the right for tagging some criticism of Israel as antisemitic, and Nexus’ own definition is slower to claim that anti-Zionist rhetoric crosses a line into antisemitism. A peak of this debate over the different antisemitism designations came as the Biden administration was formulating its national strategy to combat antisemitism, which ultimately did not endorse either of them but mentioned both IHRA’s and Nexus’ definitions.

The debate over anti-Zionism and antisemitism is “not the purpose of this,” Jacoby said of the Shofar Report, though he takes issue with what he views as Project Esther’s unnecessary conflation of the two.

“I think it’s pretty clear from the document that conflating anti-Zionism and antisemitism, which weaponizes antisemitism and undermines democracy, is not the way to protect Jews,” said Jacoby. 

Project Esther was specifically designed with an incoming Republican administration in mind, and some of its proposals have been enacted by the Trump administration. The Shofar Report’s authors do not have a particular government or institution that they hope will adopt its tenets, though they would be happy to see that happen. 

“We are very much interested in policymakers and community leaders seeing this as a blueprint and as the beginning of a process of reinvigorating a strategy against antisemitism that really focuses on those things that are most important to protecting Jews,” said Jacoby. 

Nexus focuses on federal policy, not municipal or state. But Jacoby hopes New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani will consider Nexus’ recommendations.

“I would be very happy if the incoming administration were to look at some of these things and see how they can be applied in New York,” said Jacoby, who this week criticized the Anti-Defamation League for what he called its “divisive and overheated” reaction to Mamdani’s election. The ADL, for instance, launched a so-called “Mamdani Monitor” to track the incoming mayor’s hiring and policy decisions.

“We are not going to win the battle against antisemitism in isolation,” said Jacoby. “‘This is a time to engage and to think ahead about what we need. It is not a time to reinforce trauma or sensationalize or allow for these critical issues to be weaponized politically in a way that undermines and weakens democracy and civil rights and civil liberties, and, in turn, weakens our relationships with other Americans.”