Some really important words tend to become more vague and generalized to the point where they don’t mean what they used to. A lot of times that’s fine – doesn’t create a lot of problems. Other times, it makes it hard for us to know what each of us is talking about. Or it makes it easy to use a word as a tool, on the assumption that people will not know that it doesn’t mean what it used to.
I showed how that is true of the terms “consciousness,” and “socialism” in the previous post. Now I turn to a term that is far more fraught on a number of levels: “antisemitism.”
It’s a term that once had, can have, and should have, a specific meaning, and most people don’t know it. When used with precision, the term does not refer to opposition to Jews for their religious practices and culture, to Judaism as a whole, to the modern state of Israel, or to the policies and practices of any particular Israeli government and military. All these things themselves of course ARE opposed by many people, and the conflicts engendered by the antagonism can and has led to very serious – often completely horrific – problems.
But they aren’t the same thing as antisemitism and if we don’t use our terms precisely we end up creating more problems for ourselves and others.
Antisemitism (in its technical meaning) did not and could not
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