It was supposed to be settled: Strike the hyphen from “anti-Semitism” and use “antisemitism” instead.
Public debate heated up in 2020, and by 2024, nearly everyone had made the switch: Jews and gentiles, academics and journalists, government officials and private citizens, right-wingers and left-wingers.
Then Trump took office and made “anti-Semitism” hyphenated again.
It’s the spelling the government is using in official statements, including in Trump’s Jan. 29 executive order, “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism” and in the title of the new “Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism.”
What’s the intention behind bringing back the hyphen? The White House didn’t respond to an inquiry from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
But the question is perplexing to the person perhaps most responsible for the shift to the unhyphenated form of the word — Deborah Lipstadt, the Holocaust scholar who served as special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism in the Biden administration.
“This decision makes no sense,” Lipstadt told JTA in an email. “I cannot fathom why there would be this reversal.”
Arguments against the hyphen
Lipstadt is seasoned at outlining the arguments against the hyphen. “The only people who push for the hyphen are those who wish to create a racial category of “Semitism,” she said in her email. “They do this in an effort to declare themselves ‘Semites’ and therefore incapable of being anti-their own group.”
She continued, “This claim is ludicrous on a number of levels. First, one can be ‘of’ a group and hostile to it. Second, there is, of course, no such thing as Semitic peoples. There are peoples who speak Semitic languages. Finally, the word has its origins in the unhyphenated German Antisemitismus. The man who coined it intended it to mean one thing and one thing only: Jew-hatred.”
However, Lipstadt’s arguments appear to hold no water in the Trump administration, which is on an overarching quest to undo the legacy of his predecessor piece by piece. Spelling it the old way creates continuity with Trump’s previous presidential term, when the hyphenated spelling was still the consensus; his new executive order on antisemitism is billed as an expansion of an executive order he signed in 2019.
Does the spelling matter? For many advocates, including the authors of the definition of antisemitism that the Trump administration committed to using, it does.
Michaela Küchler is secretary general of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which authored the definition and helped popularize the unhyphenated form.
“The IHRA advocates for the spelling of antisemitism without a hyphen to emphasise that the term specifically refers to opposition and hatred toward Jews,” she wrote in an email to JTA. “By using the unhyphenated form, the IHRA aims to provide clarity in addressing and combating antisemitism in all its forms, especially at a time when we are witnessing increased violence and rhetoric aimed against Jews worldwide.”
The term was first popularized in the late 1880s by a German nationalist named Wilhelm Marr. He wanted to make his hatred for Jews sound intellectual. He also thought the term would help cast Jews as members of an inferior race — Semites — rather than just followers of a minority faith.
Jews eventually came to use the term to describe the prejudice they faced, but it came with various problems. Intentionally or not, some people missed the point, fixating on whether Jews could accurately be called Semites or insisting that Arabs were also Semites — given that Arabic, like Hebrew, is a Semitic language — and therefore couldn’t be considered antisemitic.
By the 21st century, Jewish academics like Lipstadt were calling to drop the hyphen, saying the new spelling would help dispel confusion about what the term meant. Her 2019 book “Antisemitism: Here and Now” turned out to be particularly influential in that regard. By 2020, Jewish organizations had started making the switch, eventually including the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, World Jewish Congress and Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum.
Most of the news industry soon followed suit, led by the Associated Press and its ubiquitous style guide as well as The New York Times. Right-wing outlets like Fox News and Breitbart also started using “antisemitism.” So did the entire Jewish press, including JTA.
The Biden administration’s preference for “antisemitism” could have pegged it as the “liberal” style, but that didn’t happen. The right adopted the new spelling just the same. Case in point: The Heritage Foundation, the influential right-wing think tank, last year released “Project Esther: A National Strategy to Combat Antisemitism.”
The whole transition could be seen in the work of Bari Weiss, the iconoclastic Jewish journalist who rose to prominence by crusading against antisemitism at Columbia University and the New York Times. Her 2019 book was titled “How to Fight Anti-Semitism.” The Free Press, the media outlet she founded in 2021, spells the word sans hyphen.
Even as the new consensus was emerging, some argued that the debate was sucking up unwarranted attention.
“Users of social media love fights over style rather than substance, and language is far easier to police than actions, so it’s understandable that those looking for a win against a seemingly intractable prejudice such as anti-Semitism would gravitate toward this issue,” wrote Yair Rosenberg, staff writer for the Atlantic, which never dropped the hyphen. “But the time and energy spent on this subject would be much better spent on combating anti-Semites and educating allies.”
When the ADL adopted the new spelling in 2021, the group’s reputation as the world’s most prominent organization fighting antisemitism helped turn the tide. It wrote at the time, “While removing a hyphen by itself won’t defeat antisemitism, we believe this slight alteration will help to clarify understanding of this age-old hatred.”
Asked to comment on Trump's bringing back the hyphen, the ADL deemphasized the significance of how the term is spelled.
“The Jewish community continues to face unprecedented levels of antisemitism in the wake of 10/7,” the group said in a statement. “It doesn’t matter how you spell it — antisemitism, AntiSemitism or anti-Semitism — it’s still the same problem, and the solution requires a whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach.”
