Now Deborah Lipstadt, in her new book Antisemitism: Here and Now has devoted the last section of her opening chapter to a thorough scholarly review of the dispute, coming down on the side of Bauer - and me. Other editors of other journals, including those that publish prose that reminds one of somebody eating soup with a fork, would invoke the high authority of the University of Chicago Manual of Style in favor of “anti-Semitic.” During the decade or more that I wrote regularly for Commentary, I often objected to their hyphenated spelling, but to no avail: “house style” was sacrosanct. Antisemites do not hate Semites they hate Jews.” Bauer prevailed in this matter, and his book became, by the very modest standards of university presses, a best-seller.īut there is little sign that his (irrefutable) argument has won many converts to a more sensible and probably less mischievous spelling.

In fact, the term ‘antisemitism’ was coined in the late seventies of the nineteenth century by individuals who were looking for a pseudoscientific term for ‘Jew-hatred,’ which had come to sound barbaric. After Churchill remarked that “the barbaric fury of the Nazis” put mankind in “the presence of a crime without a name,” Raphael Lemkin coined the term “genocide.”)īauer would not allow publication of the book to proceed unless the word denoting hatred of Jews was spelled “antisemitism,” and not “anti-Semitism.” In fact, he insisted, and got, the following note in his opening chapter: “We prefer the spelling ‘antisemitism’ to ‘anti-Semitism,’ in order to avoid the implication that there is a ‘Semitism’ to which Jew-haters are opposed.

In 1977 I attended a meeting with Yehuda Bauer, the preeminent Israeli Holocaust scholar, and the late Naomi Pascal, then a main editor of the University of Washington Press, to discuss the planned publication of four lectures he had given, to enormous crowds of 500 or more people, on “The Holocaust in Historical Perspective.” In these discussions Bauer was his usual sweet and reasonable self except for one matter: how to spell “antisemitism.” (This was by no means the only dispute over terminology in the history of the Holocaust. Photo: courtesy Campaign Against Antisemitism. Antisemitic placards at a pro-Palestinian demonstration in London.

How to you pronounce antisemitism