#HOW TO YOU PRONOUNCE ANTISEMITISM SERIES#

Aalongside these overt attacks, Freeman has also experience more subtle but no less insidious forms abuse. Only a few days ago, Hilary Freeman, a 49-year-old journalist living in London, shared in Glamour the abuse she has faced as a Jewish woman, including being chased down the street. Despite many people believing it is a thing of the past, statistics show that there were 122 violent anti-Semitic attacks reported in the United Kingdom last year. In 2016, Jeremy Corbyn launched an independent inquiry into anti-Semitism and other forms of racism in the Labour Party, and findings reported an ' occasionally toxic atmosphere.' However, in 2018, the BBC reported that MP Luciana Berger said anti-Semitism had become 'more commonplace, conspicuous, and corrosive.' As recently as June this year, Labour leader Keir Starmer dismissed Shadow Secretary for Education Rebecca Long-Bailey after she shared a story that was said to contain an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.Īnti-semitism is one of the oldest and most complex forms of discrimination in existence. However, this incident isn't the only time that anti-Semitism in Britain has hit the headlines in recent years. Various MPs, musicians, and journalists, among others, have since spoken out to address the impact of Wiley’s posts and he has reportedly been dropped by his management team and is under police investigation for his comments. However, when his account was reactivated a day later, he continued his to post tweets that compared Jewish communities to the Ku Klux Klan and described Jewish people as “cowards” and “snakes,' perpetuating anti-Semitic tropes that have been used for centuries.

#HOW TO YOU PRONOUNCE ANTISEMITISM SERIES#

At a time of increased violence and rhetoric aimed towards Jews, it is urgent that there is clarity and no room for confusion or obfuscation when dealing with antisemitism.On July 24, British grime artist Wiley posted a series of offensive, anti-Semitic tweets, leading to a suspension of his account. Antisemitism should be read as a unified term so that the meaning of the generic term for modern Jew-hatred is clear. 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. In German, French, Spanish and many other languages, the term was never hyphenated. Although the historically new word only came into common usage in the nineteenth century, the term antisemitism is today used to describe and analyze past and present forms of opposition or hatred towards Jews. The modern term gained popularity in Germany and Europe incorporating traditional Christian anti-Judaism, political, social and economic anti-Jewish manifestations that arose during the Enlightenment in Europe, and a pseudo-scientific racial theory that culminated in Nazi ideology in the twentieth century. At the same time the neologism ‘antisemitism’, coined by German journalist Wilhelm Marr in 1879 to designate anti-Jewish campaigns, was spread through use by anti-Jewish political movements and the general public. In the mid-nineteenth century, the derived construct ‘Semite’ provided a category to classify humans based on racialist pseudo-science. The term has, however, since its inception referred to prejudice against Jews alone.

Following this semantic logic, the conjunction of the prefix ‘anti’ with ‘Semitism’ indicates antisemitism as referring to all people who speak Semitic languages or to all those classified as ‘Semites’. The philological term ‘Semitic’ referred to a family of languages originating in the Middle East whose descendant languages today are spoken by millions of people mostly across Western Asia and North Africa. The IHRA’s concern is that the hyphenated spelling allows for the possibility of something called ‘Semitism’, which not only legitimizes a form of pseudo-scientific racial classification that was thoroughly discredited by association with Nazi ideology, but also divides the term, stripping it from its meaning of opposition and hatred toward Jews. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) would like to address the spelling of the term 'antisemitism', often rendered as ‘anti-Semitism’.

How to you pronounce antisemitism