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Today  on Tablet, James Kirchick on Jakob Augstein

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January 22, 2013
Left to right: Louis Farrakhan, Mohamed Morsi, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Jakob Augstein.(Left to right: Bill Pugliano/Getty Images, Mario Tama/Getty Images, Atta Kenare/AFP/GettyImages, and re:publica 2012/Flickr)
Left to right: Louis Farrakhan, Mohamed Morsi, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Jakob Augstein.(Left to right: Bill Pugliano/Getty Images, Mario Tama/Getty Images, Atta Kenare/AFP/GettyImages, and re:publica 2012/Flickr)

What does it take to make it on the list of the world’s Top 10 Worst Anti-Semites? And how did an obscure German publisher make the list? Today on Tablet, our Continental Drift columnist James Kirchick takes a look:

For Augstein, his inclusion on the list only confirmed his own previously stated claim that Jews tend to use the label promiscuously, as a smear against legitimate criticism of the Jewish state. Last April, when Günther Grass published his now infamous poem “What Must Be Said,” alleging that a “general silence” had descended over Germans on the subject of Israel because “the verdict ‘Anti-semitism’ falls easily,” Augstein was, aside from neo-Nazis, one of his few defenders in the country. “Grass knew that he would be chided as an anti-Semite, a risk taken by any German critic of Israel,” Augstein wrote at the time.

Check out the rest of this important piece here.

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