1998 Audit of Antisemitic Incidents

We gratefully acknowledge the valuable contribution of the B’nai Brith volunteers and staff who assisted us in gathering and corroborating data for this edition of the Audit of Antisemitic Incidents. We are grateful also for the cooperation of the Hate Crimes Units in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Winnipeg and Vancouver.

This report was compiled by Jesse Katz, Research and Intake Officer, with assistance from Rubin Friedman, Government Relations Director, Robert Libman, Quebec Regional Director, and Jeremy Ronson, Project Assistant. The Audit was edited by Dr. Karen Mock, National Director of the League, with French translation by Ruth Chétrit.

©1999 League for Human Rights
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No part of this work may be produced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

We gratefully acknowledge a generous endowment from the estate of JUDITH LITVACK to enable the preparation of the Audit of Antisemitic Incidents, and the assistance of the LAWRENCE TANENBAUM FAMILY CHARITABLE FOUNDATION in the printing and distribution of this publication.

*Antisemitism

For many years, scholars including Professor Yehuda Bauer and Rabbi Emil Fackenheim, have advocated dropping the hyphen from the term anti-semitism, and in most academic writing, the new spelling has become the norm. Originally, with the hyphen, it was a concept coined by Wilhelm Marr in 1879 to connote jew-hatred. But grammatically it was incorrect, implying that there is such a thing as semitism which it is against, or that it is equally applied to all Semites, neither of which is the case. The League recommends that every effort be made to change the spelling in all documents and publications.

As Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin write in Why the Jews?: The Reasons for Antisemitism, Simon Shuster, New York, 1983, p. 199; in order to avoid any confusion we have adopted the approach that antisemitism be written as one word. Emil Fackenheim, the Jewish philosopher, had also adopted this spelling, explaining the spelling ought to be antisemitism without the hyphen, dispelling the notion that there is an entity Semitism which anti-Semitism opposes. (Emil Fackenheim, Post-Holocaust Anti-Jewishness, Jewish Identity and the Centrality of Israel, in World Jewry and the State of Israel. ed. Moshe David, p.11, n.2.)