USA defines Anti-Semitism

I have noticed that the word anti-semitic is usually used for non-Jews who could be saying almost anything about Jews, whether positive or negative. Examples might be saying that Jews usually vote Democrat and support Israel. But I did not know that the US State Dept defines Anti-Semitism to include things like opposition to Israel, and that the Univ. of California was considering adopting such a definition.

The definition seems to also include mentioning Jewish stereotypes and canards.

From The Atlantic in 2011:

It's become clear to me that the Fox commentator Glenn Beck has something of a Jewish problem. Actually, he has something of a modernity problem, and people with modernity problems tend to have problems with Jews, who more or less invented modernity (Einstein, Marx, Freud, Franz Boas, etc.)

This is not, by the way, a post about Beck's singular obsession with George Soros (read Michelle Goldberg -- not a relative, except in an all-Jews-are-conspiring-against-Glenn-Beck sort of way -- on this subject). This is a post about Beck's recent naming of nine people -- eight of them Jews -- as enemies of America and humanity. He calls these people prime contributors to the -- wait for it -- "era of the big lie." The eight Jews are Sigmund Freud; ...

It would be considered anti-semitic to say that Jews invented modernity, whatever that is, except that the author is Jewish defending Jews.

Speaking of Freud, I just learned that he plagiarized an analogy to Copernicus and Darwin:

The notion that heliocentrism was a blow to humanity’s narcissism is commonly attributed to Freud. But after reading my column, my buddy Gabriel Finkelstein, a historian of science at the University of Colorado, Denver, informed me that Freud got the idea from the 19th-century German physiologist-polymath Emil du Bois-Reymond, about whom Gabriel wrote a terrific biography. ... As Gabriel details below, Freud was well aware of du Bois-Reymond’s work, as were other pioneers of mind-science. ...

I love how Freud narcissistically suggests that his blow to our narcissism is mightier than those delivered by Copernicus and Darwin.

The late Stephen Jay Gould used to love quoting Freud on this stupid analogy. He probably thought that the essence of modernity was knocking man off his pedestal.