Let us be Humane

 I just caught up on some of the US chaos from the week I was gone-- and anyone who knows me will know where I stand on most of it-- but I feel compelled to add one set of insight on antisemitism.

Yes. Antisemitism. One word. No dash.

I've said before and will say again that for all this administration's claims to be combatting "anti-Semitism" (sic), they are actually quite antisemitic.

Well, I just read the April 23 official White House statement on Yom HaShoah and "anti-Semitism" (sic) and want to point out that this misspelling shows so much more than meets the eye.

You see, there is no such thing as "Semitism". Yes, there are "Semitic languages"-- that is the branch of Afroasiatic languages including Arabic, Amharic, Maltese, Aramaic and more. Typically, these languages have similar roots with three letters, and these roots spread through a wide range of meaning. For example. K-T-B/V is used for writing, books, contracts, reports, spelling, and the like. Many of these languages are written without their vowels, so these triliteral roots are all the more apparent.

The term "Semitic" for these languages was based on the biblical figure "Shem", one of Noah's sons. It came about in the 1700s and was not unique to Jewish languages, religion, or cultures.

In the late 1800s, however, the idea of anti-semitism came about, focusing on being against Jewish people. It was at a time when the concept of race was growing, and one of the so-called "scholars" who popularized the spread of "semitism" as a problem is the same historian who coined the phrase later adopted by Nazis about Jews being "our misfortune". I shudder just writing that down.

Yes, scholars adopted the notion and propagated it for years. But we know better now. The New York Times was one of the last journalism outlets to remove "semitism" from its stylebook, and it has already been several years since that change. You can do a google search comparing the two terms and you'll see that the debate was big a few years ago but it has been settled and the hyphen is out.

Unfortunately, the concept is NOT gone. A rose by any other name may be as sweet, but hatred by any name is painfully sour. A wolf in sheep's clothing is still a wolf. Claims that a "heil hitler" pose are simple inaugurative exuberance do not hold for me. And pretending to support Jewish people for political gain is loathesome and will only go so far.

At some point, the world will see through the Emperor's new clothes. The hatred he has unleashed remains, though. The evidence is mounting and incontrovertible, and this is just one piece of it.

Please, if you want to speak out against hatred, do so-- against all the hatreds out there. Speak out with love, and act against the Islamophobes, the antisemites, the homophobes, the ableists, the sexists, the bigots of all sorts. And yes...omit the hyphen. It's a construct, just as race is a construct. We are all human. Let's be humane.