(Jewish Group) Removing a Hyphen Won't Stop Anti-Semitism
If you’ve read enough about anti-Jewish bigotry, you’ve probably noticed that no one can agree how to spell it: Is it anti-Semitism or antisemitism? Regular readers of The Atlantic know that this publication uses the hyphenated version. But before I came here, I wrote for a Jewish outlet that removed the hyphen. And just this past week, The New York Times acknowledged that it had quietly revised its style guide to do the same. So does the spelling really matter? Having covered anti-Jewish prejudice for a decade, I’m not convinced that it does.
To be sure, the term anti-Semitism is certainly problematic in a variety of ways. To begin with, the word was popularized by an anti-Jewish bigot named Wilhelm Marr. In 1879, Marr, a German nationalist, founded the League of Antisemites, which sounds like what you’d get if you handed the Marvel Cinematic Universe over to Mel Gibson. Marr wanted to make his anti-Jewish prejudice sound more respectable and used anti-Semitism to suggest that Jews—“Semites”—belonged to an inferior race.
The problem is not just that this word for anti-Jewish prejudice was popularized by a perpetrator rather than the victims, but that it easily lends itself to pedantic objections. Some critics claim that Jews are “not real Semites” and so anti-Semitism doesn’t refer to them. In the Arab world, conversely, others claim that they can’t be anti-Semitic, because Arabs are also Semites. This is not just a Middle Eastern canard. In 2015, the former U.S. presidential candidate Ralph Nader declared that “the Semitic race is Arabs and Jews and the Jews do not own the phrase anti-Semitism,” adding that “the worst anti-Semitism in the world today is against Arabs and Arab-Americans.”
All of this is ahistorical nonsense. The term anti-Semitism was chosen by an anti-Jewish bigot to lend a sophisticated sheen to his hatred of Jews. The term has never popularly referred to Arabs or other “Semites,” which is why the Dictionary.com definition of anti-Semitism reads: “discrimination against or prejudice or hostility toward Jews.” Anyone suggesting otherwise is at best ignorant, or at worst attempting to undermine discussions of anti-Jewish prejudice.
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Some critics of the word Islamophobia have employed similar linguistic gymnastics, contending that their prejudice is not a phobia, because it’s not irrational, or that their objections are to particular Muslims and not to Islam. But Islamophobia, like anti-Semitism, is simply the word adopted by the targeted community to describe its experience of discrimination. That’s reason enough for any decent person who is serious about fighting prejudice to use it. Those who mumble about how Jews aren’t the only Semites, like those who insist their Islamophobia is not a phobia, are simply playing semantic games to avoid confronting obvious prejudice.
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AS if to prove the point, from the comment section...
Many people have been Holocausted in history but only this group has media control.
steven sallie1h
Sad, but true, including textbooks, mags, newspapers, the Net ...
Where is my paragraph length response --the first one providing a high level, but allied, critique? It must have been too powerful to defend against as PR. The Atlantic, as MS, is merely a Jewish and Zionist medium of intellectual terrorism. I dare you to print it MSN.
steven sallie1h
Helps prove the Protocols are real?
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Ghassan Ghraizi
The attempts to erase Semites to limit a hateful diction has one purpose: erase Palestinians, as they can’t possibly suffer hatefulness on account of their ethnicity because they can’t possibly exist as either Semites or as Palestinians.