PHILADELPHIA – February 18, 2026 – A Middle East Forum investigation (click here) released today reveals that the Nexus Project, a New Israel Fund-backed initiative that rewrote the rules for identifying antisemitism, functions as a strategic operation designed to shield anti-Zionist actors from accountability. The report, “The Antisemitism Laundromat: Nexus Project’s Mission to Sanitize Anti-Zionist Hate,” documents how the project achieved insertion into the Biden administration’s National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, created systematic loopholes in antisemitism definitions by prioritizing intent over impact, and operationalized defenses for anti-Israel slogans on college campuses—all while being funded and staffed by a dense network of New Israel Fund affiliates.
The Nexus Project’s leadership and task force members share overlapping ties to the New Israel Fund, J Street, and academic centers dedicated to challenging Zionist narratives.
The investigation traces the Nexus Project’s personnel, finding that its leadership and task force members share overlapping ties to the New Israel Fund, J Street, and academic centers dedicated to challenging Zionist narratives. Nexus founder Jonathan Jacoby served as NIF’s founding executive director. UCLA’s David Myers served simultaneously as NIF president and Nexus Task Force member. Former NIF CEO Norman Rosenberg participates in the Task Force, while additional members serve on NIF advisory councils and are legacy NIF donors.
The report’s textual analysis of the Nexus Document exposes what critics call “interpretive escape hatches”—repeated qualifiers such as “not necessarily,” “per se,” and “not prima facie”—that shift the burden of proof from victims of hostile rhetoric to accusers who must demonstrate a speaker’s inner intent. The Nexus Document explicitly inverts a core provision of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Working Definition by declaring that “paying disproportionate attention to Israel and treating Israel differently than other countries is not prima facie proof of antisemitism.” The document omits any provision addressing Nazi analogies and is silent on apartheid and settler-colonial frameworks applied to Israel.
MEF’s investigation further documents how Nexus operationalized these loopholes through its September 2024 “Campus Guide to Identifying Antisemitism in a Time of Perplexity,” which provided frameworks for defending slogans such as “From the River to the Sea,” “Intifada,” and “By Any Means Necessary”—phrases that Jewish students overwhelmingly experience as threatening. The guide concluded that accusations of Israeli apartheid and genocide, “even if false,” are “not necessarily antisemitic.”
“The Nexus Project has not made Jews safer. It has made antisemitism harder to identify, harder to prosecute, and harder to combat,” said Gregg Roman, executive director of the Middle East Forum and the report’s author. “Our forensic audit reveals that Nexus is not a neutral scholarly initiative—it is the intellectual defense ministry for a political faction that needs to ensure anti-Zionist rhetoric remains beyond the reach of antisemitism enforcement. The same loopholes designed to protect progressive critics of Israel also shield sophisticated far-right antisemites who code their hatred as political commentary. This is not a bug of its design—it is the feature.”
“The Nexus Project has not made Jews safer. It has made antisemitism harder to identify, harder to prosecute, and harder to combat.”
The investigation documents Nexus’s central strategic victory: its inclusion in the Biden administration’s May 2023 National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, which stated “the Administration welcomes and appreciates the Nexus Document.” Progressive organizations celebrated the inclusion as a defeat for mainstream Jewish advocacy, with Palestine Legal declaring the strategy vindicated its view that the IHRA definition is “wrong, useless, and clearly unconstitutional.”
Mainstream Jewish organizations have condemned the Nexus framework. B’nai B’rith International said it “allows the more invidious of Israel’s nemeses to hide their animus behind ‘strident’ criticism of Israel.” The American Jewish Committee argued it “prioritizes intention over impact, enabling purveyors of antisemitism to say ‘Sorry, not sorry.’” The Zionist Organization of America called it “dangerous” and “appalling.” The Jewish Federations of North America stated it “has been accepted by nobody and is not being used anywhere.”
The full report is available at: https://www.meforum.org/mef-reports/the-antisemitism-laundromat
The Middle East Forum, a non-profit organization, promotes American interests in the Middle East and protects Western civilization from Islamism. It does so through a combination of original ideas, focused activism, and funding allies.
For more information, visit www.meforum.org.
For immediate release
For more information, contact:
Gregg Roman
Roman@MEForum.org
+1 (215) 546 5406
@GreggRoman - Twitter
