glossary

Glossary

We define each term as we use it in collecting and coding the plans on antisemitism issued by cities and other local governments. An underlined term on any other page links to its definition.

Plan

A plan is a document issued or adopted by a local government that gives its own account of the problem it addresses, in its own prose, and states the government's own intentions, as goals or as specific measures. A council motion whose background is about a page or less counts as a directive and not as a plan.

Plan on antisemitism

A plan on antisemitism is a plan written about antisemitism, such as Munich's Aktionsplan gegen Antisemitismus.

Wider plan

A wider plan is a plan against racism, discrimination or hate that names antisemitism in its own text, such as Copenhagen's Handleplan mod racisme. We count a wider plan as a plan. Wider plans differ in how much they say about antisemitism, and the coder recorded the amount for each.

Version

A version is a draft, amended or republished text of the same plan. We kept each version and linked it to its plan, and we count the plan once.

Directive

A directive is a council motion, resolution or decision that orders action but gives only a short background, about a page or less. We treat a directive as a related document and not as a plan.

National and regional plans

National and regional plans are the plans issued by the national government, and by the region or state, of a place with a local plan that we collected. We show them for comparison and code them the same way, but we do not count them among the local plans.

Measure

A measure is one action that a plan lists or states as a commitment: a row of an action table, a numbered or bulleted item, or one activity described in prose.

Strategy

A strategy is the broad kind of a measure, such as education in schools, policing or Holocaust commemoration. One measure can belong to several strategies.

Proposal

A proposal is a narrower group of measures, at the level of detail a person searching the plans would use, such as stronger hate-crime law or security funding for synagogues. An AI agent drafted the list of proposals as a reading aid, and the list is not part of the codebook.

Whom a measure is about

The coder recorded whether a measure names antisemitism or Jews (specific), names them beside other groups (shared), names other groups only, or names no group (general).

Illustrative measure

An illustrative measure is a measure that a plan gives as an example of what may be done, and not as a commitment.

New or continuing

The coder recorded whether the plan presents a measure as new, as continuing existing work, as expanded, or as proposed.

Coder

A coder is the reader who applies the codebook to a plan. An AI agent working from the codebook coded every plan we collected once. A second agent also coded the twenty documents of the two pilot rounds, so that we could measure agreement between the two.

Coded features

Coded features are the ten marks under each plan. A filled mark means yes and an empty mark means no, and each mark gives the coder's answer to one question from the coding, such as whether the plan consults the police.

IHRA definition

The IHRA definition is the working definition of antisemitism adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in 2016: a two-sentence core text and eleven examples. A council may adopt the core text alone, the core text with the examples, or either with caveats.

Council record

A council record is the government's own record of a decision, such as minutes, a resolution or a decision notice, as distinct from an advocacy list or a press report.

Community membership count

A community membership count is the number of registered members of the local Jewish community, and it is the only figure that Germany and Denmark publish. A membership count is generally lower than a census count of everyone who would call themselves Jewish.

Per 1,000 words

A rate per 1,000 words is the number of times a plan uses the words of a topic, divided by the plan's length, so that long and short plans can be compared. A script counted the words, and the rates do not come from the coding.

The city's own past

A plan refers to the city's own past in passages on the history of its own city, such as the deportation of its Jews or the arrival of its first Jewish families.

a project of

This site is a team project of the Lab for the Global Study of Antisemitism, housed in the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto.

Ron Levi and Sol Goldberg
ron.levi@utoronto.ca

Research Team: Cypress Chernik, Lir Josefsohn, and Arianna Seijts, all of whom are undergraduate interns at the Lab for the Global Study of Antisemitism.

This is a work in progress. Corrections and missing plans, with their dates, are welcome.