DRAFT, not yet for distribution. For inquiries, write to ron.levi@utoronto.ca.
methods
We gathered the corpus in November 2026 from the official websites and council records of cities and other local governments in North America, Europe, Australia, Latin America and elsewhere.
The corpus holds documents that address antisemitism by name and were issued by local governments, whose form differs by country: cities and municipalities in most of Europe and Latin America, borough and city councils in Britain, local councils in Australia (Glen Eira and Waverley among them), and in the United States both cities and counties, such as Miami-Dade County. Four kinds of document qualify: (1) plans and strategies, (2) council decisions that set out measures, (3) mandates for an office, commissioner or task force, and (4) adoptions of a definition of antisemitism, which are kept even where the adoption comes with no other measure. Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen and Vienna are each both a city and a state, and their documents are kept and marked as city-state documents.
State, provincial and national plans fall outside the corpus. We list those we came across, marked as such, so that a city's documents can be compared with the plan of its state or national government; the document list hides them unless that level of government is selected.
With the help of AI agents (Claude, a model made by Anthropic), we searched in two rounds in November 2026.
The entries have not yet been checked by hand, document by document. Titles and dates were copied from the documents, and where a date could not be confirmed from the document itself the entry says so in its notes.
Each document is sorted by its form, with no assessment of its content, into one of eight kinds.
For every saved document with a text layer, we searched the text, in the document's own language, for three definitions of antisemitism by name: the working definition of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism and the Nexus Document. Each document's entry gives the number of mentions of each definition and the first passage that names it. The search records which definitions a document names, and a document may name a definition in order to adopt it, to set it aside or to describe a debate; New York City's 2026 strategy, for instance, names all three. Saved files that are scans without a text layer could not be searched, and their entries say so. Which definition a document adopts is a separate variable in the draft coding framework.
The same search counts how each document spells two words: antisemitism, closed or hyphenated as anti-Semitism or anti-semitism, and anti-Zionism, closed or hyphenated, together with the equivalent forms in French, German, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese. In German, Dutch, Swedish and Danish the closed spelling is the standard form, so the count varies mainly across English and French documents. A word broken across a line in a PDF is not counted.
For each place in the corpus we recorded the size of its Jewish population as context, with the geography, year, source and kind of measure for every figure. The kind of measure differs by country: census counts of religion for local governments in Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Mexico and Chile, and for Brazil from the 2010 census; county estimates from the American Jewish Year Book for the United States, where the census asks no question on religion; registered membership of the Jewish communities in Germany; and metropolitan estimates by Sergio DellaPergola for a few other cities. A membership count or a metropolitan estimate measures something different from a census count, so the figures compare more readily within a country than across countries. Where no figure exists for the place itself, the entry says so and gives no borrowed national figure.
We did not record counts of antisemitic incidents for each place, since what police forces and monitoring bodies record differs from one country and one force to the next. The figures that each plan cites as evidence of the problem are a variable in the coding framework instead.
Many plans have been renewed, and a search for a city's plan often returns an older edition first. We therefore keep each edition as its own entry with its own date. The newest edition we found is marked current, and where we could not establish that no later edition exists the entry is marked unconfirmed. The Hague's plan, for instance, appears twice: the February 2025 edition, which used the IHRA definition, and the June 2025 revision, which uses the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism. In New York City, the documents issued under Mayor Adams and those issued under Mayor Mamdani are listed separately, since Executive Order 1 of 1 January 2026 revoked the earlier orders and Executive Order 2 of the same date re-established the Mayor's Office to Combat Antisemitism.
Some documents could not be saved, because the website showed an automated-access check or refused the download. These entries link to the official address and are marked not saved. Other entries are leads, meaning a document reported in council minutes or the press that we could not retrieve, and they are marked as unconfirmed.
For each place listed, we searched and found no city document on antisemitism. The absence of a place from the corpus means only that the search found nothing, and the notes against each place in the inventory record what was checked.
a project of
This site is a project of the Lab for the Global Study of Antisemitism, housed in the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto.
This is a work in progress. Corrections, missing documents and requests to reuse the data are all welcome.