But don't get me started on *that* word, especially its hyphenated variant.

The previous commenter has a point. Although the phenomenon of Jew-hatred is inarguably genuine, "anti-Semitism" is truly a bogus term for it. First, it wasn't a Jew, or someone sympathetic to Jews, who coined the term, but Wilhelm Marr, a nineteenth-century right-wing German political agitator. In his 1879 book, The Way to Victory of Germanicism over Judaism, he created the term Antisemitismus in order to provide a pseudo-scientific, "racial" basis for hatred of Jews, this being all the rage at the time, and as is well known, an eventual theoretical basis for Nazism. Should we Jews use a word coined by one of our enemies, and resting on an obsolete, unscientific concept?

Second, the term "Semitic" is primarily a linguistic category. Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic, as well as the ancient languages Akkadian, Ugaritic, Moabite and others, are all Semitic languages in that they share many cognate words and roots, as well as certain grammatical features. More broadly and inexactly, the term refers to Near Eastern cultures with similar languages and, in some cases, a similar cultural heritage. (Whether they share common genetic characteristics is, as I understand it, an open question.) That's why many refer to Arabs as a "Semitic" people. So, using the term "anti-Semitism" specifically for Jew-hatred confuses the issue. The term "Jew-hatred" (Judenhass in German) is direct and unambiguous. Just as importantly, it lacks the genteel, euphemistic, pseudo-rationalist quality of the term "anti-Semitism," revealing hatred of Jews for the ugly phenomenon it is.