Trump is right on anti-Semitism

(JNS) — With all of the controversies surrounding President Donald Trump, it’s astonishing that something as trivial as a hyphen in “anti-Semitism” has caused umbrage. Yet some Jewish leaders, including Deborah Lipstadt, former President Joe Biden’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, have found the change in spelling from “antisemitism” concerning.

Lipstadt, a leading proponent of removing the hyphen, expressed dismay: “This decision makes no sense. I cannot fathom why there would be this reversal.”

For those whose memories don’t go beyond the last few years, the synonym for Jew-hatred was almost universally spelled in English with the hyphen before Lipstadt, and others insisted this created confusion. In her response to the administration’s use, she essentially contradicted herself and undermined the reasoning for eliminating it.

“The only people who push for the hyphen are those who wish to create a racial category of ‘Semitism,’” she wrote. “They do this in an effort to declare themselves ‘Semites’ and therefore incapable of being anti-their own group.”

This claim addresses a long-debunked argument made by figures like Ralph Nader, who once asserted, “The Semitic race is Arabs and Jews, and Jews do not own the phrase anti-Semitism.” He even went so far as to claim that “the worst anti-Semitism in the world today is against Arabs and Arab-Americans.”

Lipstadt correctly dismissed this as ludicrous, pointing out: “First, one can be ‘of’ a group and hostile to it. Second, there is, of course, no such thing as Semitic peoples—only speakers of Semitic languages.”

If this argument is as absurd as Lipstadt admits, then why change the spelling?

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency also solicited the opinion of the secretary-general of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, who similarly advocated the hyphen-less spelling “to emphasize that the term specifically refers to opposition and hatred toward Jews.”

However, as Lipstadt correctly explained, the man who coined the word “intended it to mean one thing and one thing only: Jew-hatred.” For more than a century, the hyphenated English version carried no confusion.

If the concern is misunderstanding, the simplest solution would be to replace the word “antisemitism.” As James Murray, the founding editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, noted in 1900: “‘The man in the street would have said Anti-Jewish.’”

The only merit to Lipstadt’s argument for removing the hyphen is that it was originally spelled Antisemitismus in German. Few people who were not experts in the field would know this—or care—since they only knew the hyphenated version.

The “Arabs are Semites” propaganda line was never taken seriously; nevertheless, Lipstadt and others decided changing the spelling was a way of sidestepping this nonsensical argument. The Anti-Defamation League joined the bandwagon, and most of the Jewish community and media (including JNS, though it held out for much longer) followed.

Ken Jacobson, the ADL’s deputy national director, contradicted his organization and cut through the absurdity of the debate, telling The Times of Israel that the discussion is “largely divorced from reality.” He noted that the push to remove the hyphen is an “overreaction to Arab claims that they can’t be anti-Semites because they are a Semitic people” and warned that eliminating the hyphen “could even undermine a word that aptly conveys the power of this evil.”

Writing the word and spelling it all in lowercase is certainly easier. If others want to spell it that way, it makes no more difference than spelling the word “toward” with or without an “s” at the end.

With or without a hyphen, the rise of anti-Semitism is a crisis. Removing it didn’t make the Biden administration effective in stemming the post-Oct. 7 surge in Jew-hatred. The administration’s national strategy avoided defining anti-Semitism entirely, fearing backlash from the anti-Israel factions within the Democratic Party. Worse, Biden’s approach to combating anti-Semitism included partnering with the anti-Semitic Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and refusing to penalize universities for their failure to combat campus Jew-hatred.

While Trump’s administration aggressively pursues policies to counter anti-Semitism—particularly, in academia—Biden’s administration was weak and ineffective. Lipstadt, formally responsible for combating anti-Semitism abroad, should focus less on punctuation and more on why anti-Semitism surged on her watch. Instead of nitpicking spelling, she should applaud the Trump administration for taking real action where hers failed.

Mitchell Bard the executive director of the nonprofit American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise and a foreign policy analyst.