Antisemitism Awareness Act on hold after fiery Senate hearing

“Brandenburg was a Nazi and an antisemite, and he said horrible things,” Paul said. “The First Amendment, the Constitution, the Supreme Court, ruled that you can say terrible things.”

“That's unique about our country. In Europe, you can't say anything,” he went on. “You say something about the Holocaust in Europe, you can go to jail. This is what we're doing. We're codifying what Europe did to speech. It's a terrible idea.”

The bipartisan act has long been supported by Jewish groups, including the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish Federations of North America.

It largely replicates an executive order that US President Donald Trump signed in 2019, but the bill has lost the support of some Democrats and Republicans who object to aspects of the IHRA definition being codified into law.

Committee chairman Senator Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican, amended the legislation at the start of Wednesday’s hearing to include stronger language affirming that it would not infringe or diminish the rights to free speech or the free exercise of religion.

He did so after some members of his party, including Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (who previously suggested that California wildfires may have been the result of “lasers” connected to “Rothschild Inc”), voted against its companion bill in the House in 2024 because they argued that it would limit the ability of Christians to say that Jews killed Jesus.

Paul repeated that charge on Wednesday arguing that, while he personally thought that the belief that all Jews were responsible for killing Jesus is antisemitic, it should not be criminalised.

He also submitted into the record the names of 400 Jewish-American comedians, whom he claimed had used stereotypical language about Jews that might fall afoul of the legislation.

“This one's from Joan Rivers. She says, ‘I’m Jewish. I don't work out. If God had wanted us to bend over, he would have put diamonds on the floor,’” Paul said.

“That's obviously very negative, that Jewish people think only of money and stuff, but she's Jewish, and it's funny or it’s not funny, and it’s just her right to make a joke,” he went on.

Paul ultimately voted to help Democrats pass four amendments to the bill, at least two of which could act as poison pills and threaten Republican support.

The first of those amendments, proposed by independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, includes casualty figures from Gaza, which match those supplied by the Hamas-run Health Ministry, in the legislation.

“No person shall be considered antisemitic for using their rights of free speech or protest under the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States to oppose Benjamin Netanyau’s war effort, which has killed more than 50,000 and wounded more than 113,000, 60 per cent of whom are women and children,” the amendment reads.

It goes on to describe “the Israeli government’s devastation of Gaza” and “tens of thousands of children facing malnutrition and starvation”.

Another amendment from Massachusetts Democrat Ed Markey implicitly criticized the Trump administration’s policy of seeking to deport anti-Israel campus protest leaders as unconstitutional.

The administration has alleged that some non-citizen protest leaders, including Mahmoud Khalil, are supporters of Hamas who threaten US national security. Many Democrats argue that they are being deported for protected speech.

“Antisemitism is wrong. Authoritarianism is not the answer,” Markey said. “When a young person writes an op-ed in a student newspaper and gets whisked off the street in New Jersey to a prison in Louisiana with no charges [referring to Rumeysa Ozturk], that is what we are debating today.”

The committee chair repeatedly expressed exasperation at the number of amendments and the requests from Paul and the Democrats for more debate, saying that the time limits that he was procedurally forced to work under had been imposed by the Democratic leadership under the so-called two-hour rule.

“If you’re truly interested in having a fulsome debate and not just using this as a way to kill the bill, then I would ask you to call your floor leader and ask not to put the two-hour debate on us,” Cassidy said.

As the ranking member on the committee, Sanders objected to Cassidy’s request for unanimous consent to waive the two-hour limitation.

“I think that speaks volumes,” Cassidy responded.

The second bill under consideration on Wednesday, the Protecting Students on Campus Act, does not explicitly mention Jews or antisemitism but aims to bolster the civil rights investigation process at the Department of Education through a public awareness campaign and audits of the department’s civil rights investigations.

Maine’s Republican senator, Susan Collins, and the Democrats passed an amendment to the bill that would also require an audit of the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency, which could likewise undermine Republican support for the legislation’s final passage.

After saying that the votes on both bills would go forward during the meeting, Cassidy called a recess and then announced that the votes would be deferred until at least Thursday.