Interesting email:

Dear Jonah,

This is a pet peeve of mine. In fact the concept of “Semite” has never been used by intelligent people to refer to a class of people, but rather to a class of languages. The term “anti-Semite” in its modern guise was coined by Wilhelm Marr in 19th C Germany (of course) to soothe the sensibilities of educated Jew-hating Germans;

the previous word was Judenhass, or roughly “Jew hatred.” Due to this sort of linguistic nonsense, I’m in favour of going back to the previous term; it’s so much more honest.