Organizers Fight Back as Missouri Moves to Crack Down on Speech in Schools
Jewish and Palestinian leaders, rights groups warn HB 2061 will be used to silence criticisms of Israel and attack Missouri teachers.
Paid subscribers make my reporting possible. Consider joining them:
A bill moving through the Missouri legislature threatens to censor public school curricula, lead to attacks on teachers, and chill First Amendment speech.
If passed, HB 2061 would adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism into codes of conduct for Missouri’s public schools and universities. That definition has been the subject of intense critique from dozens of civil society and rights groups since its adoption in 2016, including Jewish organizations and thinkers who warn that legislating a definition of antisemitism singles out Jews in a way that runs counter to the goal of decreasing antisemitism.
Critics of HB 2061 in Missouri include a group of leaders from the Jewish Reform Movement in St. Louis, who issued a statement online and in the St. Louis Jewish Light in January expressing “deep concerns that this particular approach to fighting antisemitism may backfire.” Other opponents include Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) Action, the Council on American-Islamic Relations Action, Amnesty International, and the Missouri Equity Education Partnership.
Max Gill, a St. Louis-based member of JVP, said her organization’s opposition to HB 2061 is rooted not only in concern that the bill will be ineffective at reducing antisemitism, but that it will harm other Missouri communities. “This definition and this bill carve out Jews, but not only does it carve out Jews, it also does so at the expense of Palestinians and entrenches anti-Muslim, anti-Palestinian, and anti-Arab sentiment,” she said.
Historically, pro-Israel activist groups have wielded the IHRA definition and its list of so-called “contemporary examples of antisemitism” to censor criticisms of Israel and Palestine-related speech. Of 11 examples on that list, 7 refer to Israel, including “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”
“That hinders actually addressing antisemitism,” said Gill. “Because when we conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism, then the public is less likely to take actual antisemitism instances seriously because the term has been so overused and misused.”
Sandra Tamari, a St. Louis-based Palestinian organizer and executive director of Adalah Justice Project, said the definition takes “words that are accepted by human rights organizations across the globe, words like displacement, apartheid, and occupation, and turns them into something that is treated as suspect or hateful.”
“Palestinian reality, our experience living under occupation, living through a genocide, should not be treated as hate speech,” Tamari continued. “It’s erasing the language that allows us to talk about our experiences.”
Pro-Israel lobbying groups, including the Missouri Alliance Network and the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM), a dark money group with ties to the Israeli government, have played outsize roles in drafting and securing endorsements for HB 2061, according to records obtained from the office of bill sponsor, Republican State Representative George Hruza, in a public records request.
The Missouri Alliance Network is a political action committee founded in 2024 by former Missouri State Representative Stacey Newman and conservative Jewish leaders to “promot[e] an alliance between elected officials, our Jewish community, and Israel,” according to its founding mission statement.
Recently, the organization has drawn condemnation from the same Jewish Reform Movement leaders who expressed concern about HB 2061’s definition of antisemitism. That group writes that the Missouri Alliance Network has “target[ed] those who disagree with them—including fellow Jews—and question[ed] their loyalty and their motives.” Their statement continues: “Many in our community have felt intimidated into silence. This is not how we build a stronger Jewish community. It is how we tear one apart.”
CAM has faced similar criticism. The Jewish Federations of North America and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs both cut ties with the organization in June 2023 after it posted a video parroting right-wing talking points, blaming progressive politics and “woke ideology” for antisemitism.
Democratic State Representative Wick Thomas said HB 2061 is part of that same regressive agenda. “The Heritage Foundation, the same authors of Project 2025, who also put out Project Esther—this is from that playbook,” they said, referencing blueprints that have guided Donald Trump’s return to office and his administration’s attacks on the progressive movement. Thomas voted against HB 2061 when it came before the House Emerging Issues Committee in January.
CAM has disclosed that it is a partner of Concert and Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, according to reporting in The Guardian. Concert, known as Voices of Israel since 2021, aims to “enhance the image of Israel in the global arena” through a “partnership between philanthropists, organizations, and a joint venture agreement with the State of Israel and the Ministry of Strategic Affairs,” according to its website.
Founded in 2019, CAM has long advocated for institutions and governments to adopt the IHRA definition. It has had success at the state and local levels.
“We’ve found that mayors and states—it’s much easier to work with them and actually make the definition into something real,” Sima Vaknin-Gill, a member of the organization’s global advisory board and former chief military censor for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), said of the group’s efforts at a January 2024 hearing in Israel’s legislature.
Last year, CAM contributed to efforts similar to HB 2061 in at least 7 states, including an earlier iteration of the bill that failed in Missouri. The organization also hosts summits for state and local leaders to encourage them to enshrine the IHRA definition into hate crime legislation alongside a suite of other regressive policies, including mask bans at protests and anti-boycott legislation.
“The involvement of this organization shows [HB 2061] is not a good faith effort to address antisemitism as a part of broader white supremacy and marginalization, but rather it exists to launder the image of the IDF and Israel,” said Gill.
Reached via email, Hruza wrote he was “not aware of any formal relationship between CAM and the Israeli government” and that HB 2061 “has nothing to do with what is happening in the Middle [East].” However, he also referenced the war on Gaza as an impetus for the bill, writing that “Jewish students hid[ing] signs of their Jewish identity for fear of being harassed [is] a new phenomenon since October 7, 2023.”
David Soffer, CAM’s director of state engagement, testified in support of HB 2061 at its first public hearing on January 12, 2026. Behind the scenes, he also helped draft the bill. In one August 2025 email to Hruza, Soffer urged the lawmaker to ensure IHRA’s list of contemporary examples of antisemitism would be included in the bill. “As you know, that’s a huge deal,” Soffer wrote.
Michael Berg, a St. Louis-based member of JVP who testified against the bill at the January 12 hearing, said that Soffer later referenced one of those examples to characterize his testimony as antisemitic. During his comments, Berg cited a 2022 Amnesty International report, which found that Israel is an apartheid state. Other rights groups and the International Court of Justice have made similar determinations.
“We’re talking about codifying into law a definition of antisemitism which would restrict and punish accurate and necessary criticisms of Israel,” Berg said. “It’s an attack on the ability to say things that are objectively true.”
Democratic lawmakers and educators have raised similar concerns about how HB 2061 could be weaponized against teachers. “This bill makes it very scary to be a teacher and to talk about contemporary issues,” Thomas said. “But we have to be able to talk about these things—that’s such an important part of our democracy.”
Jeffrey Abraham, a rabbi at a conservative synagogue in the St. Louis area and a founding member of the Missouri Alliance Network involved in drafting HB 2061, suggested in an interview with Jewish News Syndicate that even a faculty member wearing a keffiyeh at school could constitute intimidation of Jewish students under the bill.
Tamari said she fears that if HB 2061 passes, “the burden on educators is going to be so great that they will run away from this issue rather than trying to educate students.”
Those fears have borne out in other jurisdictions where similar legislation has passed, including California, where educators report being targeted and even sued by pro-Israel legal groups for teaching about Palestine.
HB 2061 passed the House Emerging Issues and Rules committees after its first public hearing. It must be heard and passed on the House floor before it can move to the Senate. That hearing is expected as early as this week.
“We will keep fighting,” Berg said of what’s next for opponents of the bill. “I’m not giving up on a future where Palestinians receive justice, and I’m not giving up on our constitutional rights.”
John Loeppky edited this story, and Katrina Janco fact-checked it.
Marianne Dhenin
Marianne Dhenin
Marianne Dhenin