Antisemitism vs. anti-Semitism: Which is worse?

Between Kanye West, Doug Mastriano, and Donald Trump, antisemitism is regrettably having a moment in the national conversation.

But those spelling it anti-Semitism, with a hyphen, might be making it worse.

The word anti-Semitic appears in Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary just like that: hyphenated, with a capital S. But many news organizations — including The Inquirer, the Associated Press, the New York Times, and the Washington Post — spell it as one word: antisemitic. Microsoft Word allows both spellings.

That little hyphen is far more consequential than it looks. A quick history lesson explains why.

» READ MORE: Of course, Ye has got to go. But not alone.

The fact that lookups of anti-Semitic (with the hyphen) are trending on merriam-webster.com is understandable, if distressing. In the space of just a couple weeks, Kanye West (who now goes by just “Ye” … oy) has faced only shockingly belated blowback for posting online that he’d go “death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE”; Doug Mastriano, who has made barely veiled antisemitic attacks on Josh Shapiro and has paid for services from Gab, a website founded by an avowed antisemite, appears to have gained slightly in governor’s race polls against Shapiro; and video footage surfaced of Donald Trump making antisemitic comments at his Bedminster, N.J., club in 2021.

Which is to say: All this mishegoss is bad … and getting worse.

Some, such as the Associated Press, haven’t always spelled antisemitic as one word; the change was relatively recent. So why haven’t our standard dictionaries caught up?

The word Semitic predates anti-Semitic by a full half-century, but while antisemitic solely indicates hatred of Jews, Semitic refers to a full family of languages: not just Hebrew, but also Arabic, Aramaic, Ethiopic, and ancient Assyrian. The word Semitic was originally just about language; its association with people who spoke those languages didn’t come until later.

Therefore anti-Semitic, with a hyphen, isn’t as precise as it could be. The hyphenated version suggests someone like Mastriano is intolerant toward not just Jews, but also Arabs, Ethiopians, ancient Syrians, and others.

Granted, he might be, but we don’t have hard evidence of such.

Anti-Semitic, with a hyphen, isn’t as precise as it could be.

What’s more, according to both the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and the Anti-Defamation League (don’t even try to remove that hyphen), the 19th-century emergence of “antisemitism” as referring solely to Jews coincided with the false notion of a Jewish “race” — a misconception that would lead directly to the 20th-century Nazi pseudoscience that called for extermination of that race. Both groups have therefore eliminated the spelling anti-Semitic in favor of antisemitic, and encouraged others to do the same.

“The unhyphenated spelling is favored by many scholars and institutions in order to dispel the idea that there is an entity ‘Semitism’ which ‘anti-Semitism’ opposes,” writes the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. “Antisemitism should be read as a unified term so that the meaning of the generic term for modern Jew-hatred is clear.”

To be certain, deleting a hyphen is a lot easier than deleting antisemitism. But it’s a start — and with Ye, Trump, and Mastriano not likely to go anywhere anytime soon, we need all the help we can get.

The Grammarian, otherwise known as Jeffrey Barg, looks at how language, grammar, and punctuation shape our world, and appears biweekly. Send comments, questions, and prefix prepositions to jeff@theangrygrammarian.com.