This past July, the Great Neck News published an opinion by Great Neck Library Trustee Don Panetta titled “Scheduling a street fair during Rosh Hashanah an insult to Jews.”

In his letter Panetta denounced the Village of New Hyde Park for scheduling a street fair on a Jewish holiday and labeled it “antisemitism.”

Panetta is not merely mistaken. It is he himself who has created the insult.

Here is the background: Panetta phoned the village and learned there had been an obstacle to scheduling the fair: some vendors were unavailable on certain dates.

Despite knowing the reason the fair ended up being calendared on a Jewish holiday, he decided to attack his village in a public letter by invoking the biggest, most lethal accusation in our rhetorical arsenal.

Panetta summoned the specter of “antisemitism,” a word of overarching significance. It is both a rallying cry and a standard bearer, not to be used casually as a substitute for “unacceptable” or “not to my liking.”

Despite the sheer heft of this word, in his letter, it appears in all lowercase letters. Yet Semite is a proper noun referring to an ancient people and their descendants. It is also a word that denotes a family of languages.

If the word Semite can be made common (“antisemitism”), why am I not seeing “anticatholicism”? How about “antiamerican,” “antifrench,” “antirussian,” antiasian? Or maybe all-lower-case is reserved for small groups of lesser importance: “antimagyar,” “antiuyghur,” “antibasque,” “antisemitic”…?

The spell-check in my computer changes “antisemitism” to anti-Semitism. I used to be the owner of seven dictionaries, but now I have five. I gave two, so far, to my granddaughters. Of the ones that remain on my office shelf, three are unabridged. Drop one of them on your foot and your bones will respect its weight even before your brain does.

All my dictionaries list anti-Semite, anti-Semitic, and anti-Semitism. One dictionary even has anti-Semitically.

Perhaps a more relevant reason here, in our community, would be that since the founding of the first synagogue on the Great Neck peninsula in the 1920s, we are a community increasingly and largely populated by Jews. Why here, of all places, would a word about us be lowercase in the local press.

But I digress.

By summoning anti-Semitism, Panetta trivializes a word that for Jews is distinctly our own. By invoking it so casually he wears away at its authority.

We Jews are 2% of the United States population and two-tenths of 1% (.2%) of the world’s population. Each time a street fair occurs on a Jewish holiday it is not an act against Jews. Each time there is a street fair on a Sunday it is not anti-Catholic (23% in the U.S.).

I wonder if the answer to these questions would have helped:

Did the scheduling of the village street fair prevent Jews from attending synagogue?

Is the street fair the most recent in a series of acts to marginalize Jews in that village?

No.

Perhaps he should have asked these questions:

In a suburb where Jews are a noticeable part of the population, is such scheduling thoughtless?

Would scheduling the fair on the Jewish New Year prevent a community-wide turnout and thereby subvert its purpose?

Yes.

In finger-pointing for the wrong reason, by denouncing the perpetrator of the schedule, the mayor, to be an anti-Semite, Panetta reveals that he has not experienced anti-Semitism himself. He has no idea what is wrong, why it is wrong, and when to speak up.

It is interesting that he made no mention of the scheduled date for the event being both Rosh Hashanah and Shabbos. (Shabbos is the word used in my family for the Sabbath. It is a holdover from Yiddish by European Jews. Today it is being replaced by Shabbat, in Hebrew. Both refer to the Jewish Sabbath, Saturday.)

To a knowledgeable Jew the concurrence of two important days in the Jewish calendar bears special attention, especially these two: Rosh Hashanah and Shabbos.

The Sabbath is the holiest of days, holier than Rosh Hashanah, so Panetta’s objection is directed on behalf of the lesser of the two.

By summoning the specter of “antisemitism” he degrades the word itself. At the same time he makes Jews look intellectually small-minded, woe-is-me. With his use of that word he succeeds in writing his very own insult to Jews, portraying us as we would never portray ourselves.

As if this were not troubling enough, in his letter he attacks by name an employee of the village, the person who responds to him on a phone call.

Panetta’s letter belittles anti-Semitism. His letter is irresponsible, and it had the potential to separate Jews from our neighbors for a bogus reason. Meanwhile, as we look where he directs our gaze, whatever requires a principled stand elsewhere will go unnoticed.

As a trustee of our Great Neck Library, Panetta has demonstrated poor thinking and poor judgment.

Rebecca Rosenblatt Gilliar

Great Neck

Editor’s Note: The Associated Press Style Manual, which is the guide followed by most newspapers in the United States, now uses “antisemitism” and “antisemite” as the preferred spelling.