I oppose the way the accusation of "antisemitism" is deployed as a semantic weapon — a preemptive label that substitutes for evidence, shuts down examination, and protects specific individuals from accountability. Once the word is spoken, the actual record often becomes irrelevant. The label does the work. The inquiry stops.
This is not a theoretical complaint. It happened to me.
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| Sorensen & Hoberman Semantic bigots |
The Accusation
In 2020, Michael Hoberman — a Jewish studies scholar at Fitchburg State University — publicly accused me of antisemitism on a public street with no evidence, no quote, no documented incident. This is a man whose entire scholarly identity is built around knowing what antisemitism is, what evidence is required to establish it, and how communities polarize around unverified accusations. He has published with university presses. He has lectured publicly on the subject. And on June 14, 2023, on a public sidewalk on Conway Street in Buckland, he looked at a man he had never spoken a single word to in his life and said: "You are an antisemite." No quote. No witness. No documented incident. He said it while pulling his partner away from me after she had rushed me with her fists clenched from ten feet away.
Janice Sorenson, who is Jewish, had already decided years earlier — around 2012, by her own account — that "Jewish people were my target of choice." She held that private categorization for roughly eight years and then inserted it into the June 2020 comment threads where I was simultaneously being called a Grand Wizard, a Nazi, and a racist. The accusation did not arrive freshly formed in response to anything I had done in 2020. It arrived as a held belief, deployed at the moment it would do the most damage.
Joan Livingston, who is Jewish and was then editor of the Greenfield Recorder, oversaw the original articles that helped launch the 2020 campaign. Those articles ran without seeking my comment. They have never been retracted or corrected. The newspaper republished them in 2025 with no contextual update, resetting their visibility on search results for my name.
These are specific, named individuals, each with a specific documented action or failure to act. Each had multiple opportunities, across years, to examine the evidence, walk back the claim, or simply withdraw from actively sustaining it. Most chose silence instead. The silence itself became part of the harm — not a neutral absence, but the mechanism by which an unexamined accusation hardens into settled fact.
The Cold Cruel Sidestep, Applied
This is the Cold Cruel Sidestep in action: a false accusation is made, the target is designated, and then the machinery of retraction and correction is quietly disabled. The label "antisemitism" functions as a semantic shield with a specific structural property that most accusations don't have — once applied, any demand for evidence or correction can itself be reframed as further proof of the original charge. Ask for evidence, and the request looks like deflection. Point to your record, and the record looks like cover. It is a nearly perfect closed loop, and it is precisely the kind of loop that should concern anyone who actually cares about the integrity of the charge, because a weapon that cannot be challenged is also a weapon that cannot be trusted.
Why False Accusations Work Against the People They Claim to Protect
A false accusation of antisemitism does not only harm the person falsely accused. It harms the credibility of the charge itself, and that harm falls hardest on the people who have the greatest stake in the charge being taken seriously.
This is not a hypothetical concern. In 2024, a German-Israeli singer publicly accused a hotel of turning him away because he wore a Star of David. The accusation went viral and was widely believed. Two years later, under the pressure of a defamation trial, he admitted he had fabricated the entire story. Germany's Central Council of Jews did not defend him for raising awareness of antisemitism. They condemned him, stating plainly that his fabrication had caused great harm to all those who are actually affected by antisemitism. The Council understood something precise: every false accusation that later collapses gives the next genuine accusation a harder road. It teaches observers to discount the charge, to wonder whether this one might also be exaggerated, to hesitate before believing the next person who comes forward with something real.
This is not a marginal effect. The word "antisemitism" only retains its force if it reliably points to actual antisemitism. Every time it is deployed against someone with no evidence — as it was deployed against me — and the deployment goes unexamined and uncorrected, the word's reliability erodes a little further. That erosion does not punish the false accuser, who has usually moved on by the time anyone checks the record. It punishes the next person with a genuine claim, who now has to work harder to be believed, because the charge has been spent carelessly by someone else.
This is why my objection to what happened to me is not, and has never been, an objection to taking antisemitism seriously. It is the opposite. An accusation made without evidence, against a man with a documented record that directly contradicts it, who has built memorials for Jewish families and carved sacred symbols for Jewish clients, does measurable damage to the seriousness with which the next accusation will be received. Michael Hoberman's unretracted accusation against me is not a private matter between two individuals. It is a small, specific instance of the exact erosion that genuinely concerned people — Jewish and non-Jewish alike — should want stopped, corrected, and accounted for, precisely because the charge matters and deserves to be protected from carelessness.
The Correction That Never Came
I have offered multiple chances for correction. I sent a civil demand letter with a settlement offer of one hundred thousand dollars, with an explicit willingness to accept a published apology in lieu of damages. I sent communications to Fitchburg State University. I made the full documented record public, including the counter-evidence that should have ended the inquiry on its own terms: the Garfield Wright memorial bench built for a Jewish family in the Buckland cemetery, the Kabbalistic Tree of Life carved for a Jewish client, a lifelong closest friendship with a Jewish man, and thirty-five years of public art practice with no other comparable accusation in the entire record.
In June 2026, I sent formal letters documenting the Hoberman accusation and the broader six-year record to named religious leaders in the region, including Rev. Kate Stevens. Each recipient had direct access to the documented evidence laid out plainly: the demand letter, the settlement offer, the counter-evidence, and the more than a year of silence from Hoberman and his university. As of this writing, none of them have responded.
This is Distributed Maintenance, precisely as I defined it in the Cold Cruel Sidestep framework: specific, named individuals with documented proximity to the facts, given a direct and personal opportunity to engage, who have chosen non-response instead. Stevens in particular has a public record that makes her silence here a matter of documentation rather than plausible unawareness — a 2018 newspaper profile detailing a personal pilgrimage she undertook specifically to study how communities fail to reckon honestly with documented harm. The same capacity for moral attention she described cultivating on that pilgrimage has not, as of this writing, been extended to a case placed directly and formally in front of her.
The Discipline This Requires
I will continue to name the specific individuals and their specific actions. Michael Hoberman. Janice Sorenson. Joan Livingston. Rev. Kate Stevens and the other religious leaders who received formal documentation and have not responded. I will document what each one did or failed to do, on the record, with dates and sources. I will not generalize their conduct into a characteristic of any group they belong to. I will not play the semantic game that turns documented criticism of named individuals into an accusation against an entire ethnicity. That move — substituting the category for the individual — is the same move that was used against me in 2020, and I am not willing to use it against anyone else, including people who have used a version of it against me.
That is what anti-semantic means. It is not a rejection of the concept of antisemitism. It is a rejection of the word's use as a substitute for evidence — a refusal to let any label, including this one, do the work that only a documented record can actually do.
The Black Stones of Africa are still in the pavement on the Bridge of Flowers. They were placed there by the man some of these individuals accused of antisemitism. The Garfield Wright bench is still on the hillside above Buckland. The stones do not require semantic protection. They are simply there — permanent, documented, and visible to anyone willing to look.
The record remains. The semantic shield does not erase it.