A wise, civil, and dignified Jewish email correspondent -- reeking with integrity -- writes to the Jewish Tribal Review the following:

Put this Orwell quote on your web site motherfucker!!!!! (April 5, 2005)

"Anti-Semitism is an irrational thing. The Jews are accused of specific offences which the person speaking feels strongly about, but it is obvious that these accusations merely rationalise some deep-rooted prejudice. To attempt to counter them with facts and statistics is useless, and may sometimes be worse than useless. People can remain antisemitic, or at least anti-Jewish, while being fully aware that their outlook is indefensible. If you dislike somebody, you dislike him and there is an end of it: your feelings are not made any better by a recital of his virtues."

George Orwell
From essay "Anti-Semitism in Britain"

And our humble reply:

Orwell's Example. A Review of Why Orwell Matters,
by Christopher Hitchens. Basic Books, 208 pages, $24.00,
by Cheryl Miller, The Claremont Institute, October 2, 2002
"Hitchens does manage to register some minor arguments with Orwell — he was often anti-Semitic and homophobic; he was too prone to pessimism — but the whole of his argument is mainly devoted to demonstrating Orwell's superlative qualities: his integrity, his intellectual independence, and his honesty."

George Orwell's Lists,
by Timothy Naftali, New York Times (posted here at the Chestnut Tree Cafe), July 29, 1998
"In his crabbed scrawl, and with characteristic acidity, Orwell secretly wrote down the names of prominent figures who he felt were so enamored of the Soviet Union that they had lost their political independence. He sent some names to a propaganda unit of the British Foreign Office, suggesting they were not fit for writing assignments. "It isn't a bad idea," he said, "to have the people who are probably unreliable listed." He was wrong-headed in a number of his listings. Stephen Spender, whom Orwell labeled a "sentimental sympathizer" in 1949, contributed an essay the next year to "The God That Failed," an indictment of Communism. And some comments are simply appalling. The anti-Semitic and anti-homosexual overtones of his notes are clear. Nevertheless, we should resist the temptation to condemn all of these secret scribblings as Orwellian double-think."

The Cold War Controversy,
by Paul Foot, Socialist Review, July/August 2003
"Orwell got a job with Tribune where he wrote a weekly column full of unorthodoxy. All the staff there were supporters of Zionism, but not Orwell. He opposed it for the effect it would have on the people living in Palestine, and of course was denounced then and later for being anti-Semitic."

Orwell's Dirty Secret,
by D. J. Taylor, Guardian (UK), (posted here at Home Planet), June 24, 2000
"My own particular biographer's dilemma started with the discovery, in the files of the publisher Victor Gollancz Ltd, of a letter sent to Gollancz himself in the spring of 1933. The writer, Mr GM Lipsey, had read a copy of George Orwell's newly published Down and Out in Paris and London. He was furious, not only with Orwell but also with his publisher. "On its merits or otherwise I have no desire to comment," he commented. "But I am appalled that a book containing insulting and odious remarks about Jews should be published by a firm bearing the name 'Gollancz'." A spirited correspondence followed. There were threats of legal action, and finally the row fizzled out. Its shadow, though, hangs over much of Orwell's early writings, and indeed his whole attitude towards Jews, Jewishness and, later on, the foundation of a Zionist state. Having read and annotated Down and Out in Paris and London half a dozen times, I was aware of the book's "Jew" references, just as one is aware of them in, to select a random handful of Orwell's 30s contemporaries, the work of Anthony Powell, JB Priestley, TS Eliot and Graham Greene. Reading it again, in the light of the Lipsey remonstrance, I was struck by how oddly gratuitous they are. Barely has the third chapter been reached, for example, before a hard-up Orwell is unloading clothes in a Parisian secondhand shop to "a red-haired Jew, an extraordinarily disagreeable man". Now, one can be disagreeable and a Jew, but the faint hint that the connection has a racial basis is somehow reinforced by the coda. "It would have been a pleasure to have flattened the Jew's nose, if only one could have afforded it." Back in London, Orwell wanders into a coffee shop near Tower Hill where "in a corner by himself a Jew, muzzle down in the plate, was guiltily wolfing bacon." How does Orwell know the bacon-wolfer is a Jew? And how does he know that the emotion he detects in his face is guilt? There is something loaded, too, about the reference to a "muzzle", as if the man is not quite human, and the explanation for this sub-humanity has something to do with being Jewish. One could ignore this, just possibly, if it existed in a single book. And yet for 10 years the abstract figure of "the Jew" makes regular appearances in Orwell's diaries. Out tramping in the early 30s, he falls in with "a little Liverpool Jew, a thorough guttersnipe" with a face that recalls "some low-down carrion bird". Watching the crowds thronging the London underground in October 1940, he decides that what is "bad" about the Jews is that they are not only conspicuous but go out of their way to make themselves so. He is particularly annoyed by "a regular comic-paper cartoon of a Jewess" who literally fights her way on to the train at Oxford Circus. Again, it is perfectly possible that the woman in question resembled an extra from Fiddler On The Roof and that the incident took place exactly as Orwell describes it. Even so, it is a safe bet that no early 21st-century liberal will be able to read Orwell's account without clenching their teeth. It would be idle to classify Orwell as "anti-semitic". He had dozens of Jewish friends and kept a vigilant eye out for evidence of anti-semitism, both on theatre stages and in print. In fact, the complexities of what he thought and wrote about Jews defy easy summary (although it is worth pointing out that in an argument with Aneurin Bevan, he once referred to Zionists as "a gang of Wardour Street Jews" with a controlling interest over the British press.) But having come across these attitudes, what do you do with them? Context, inevitably, is all ... Orwell's fixation with doling out the word "Jew" like a kind of party badge raises fundamental questions about the social milieu he inhabited and the upbringing that put stereotypes of this sort into his head. Above all, perhaps - and this is a man regularly marked down by posterity as a secular saint - it makes him seem human in a way that much of the posthumous embalming of his reputation does not."

Reach-Me-Down Romantic,
by Terry Eagleton, London Review of Books, June 19, 2003
"Orwell was a self-mythologising romantic toff who went in for the odd spot of sentimental slumming, sometimes adopting a ludicrous Cockney accent in the process, and ended up in political defeatism and despair. A second-rate novelist and a furtively fabricating social commentator, he was homophobic, anti-feminist, unsociable, anti-intellectual, authoritarian and latently violent. He was also an anti-semitic, sexually promiscuous, self-pitying Little Englander, whose later fantasies about Big Brother and pigs running farms (they don't have the trotters for it) bequeathed a set of lurid stereotypes and convenient caricatures to the Right. In this sense, Orwell, like Freud but unlike Marx, has passed into the common language."

Orwell in Perspective,
by Herb Greer, Commentary, March 1983
"[H]he knew well enough (as Fyvel must) that a casual anti-Semitism was normal among his class and generation and, as Crick makes very clear, Orwell was anti-Semitic in this way himself..."

Down and Out in Paris and London, [Full Review]
Epinions, November 16, 2004
"Orwell is a hero to many people nowadays because of his writing. Both his journalism and his creative work are an open attack on the political and economic systems which exploited the poor and deprived them of their liberty. It is a bit of a shock therefore to see that he was not free from the anti-Semitism so common in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. The Jews are the villains of many of the anectodes from Paris and when describing a coffee-shop in Tower Hill, London he says: "In a corner by himself a Jew, muzzle down in the plate, was guiltily wolfing bacon (133)". No other group is written about in this fashion."

Down and Out in Paris and London,
by George Orwell, [Sample excerpt from Chapter 6]
"On some mornings Boris collapsed in the most utter despair. He would lie in bed almost weeping, cursing the Jew with whom he lived. Of late the Jew had become restive about paying the daily two francs, and, what was worse, had begun putting on intolerable airs of patronage. Boris said that I, as an Englishman, could not conceive what torture it was to a Russian of family to be at the mercy of a Jew. 'A Jew, mon ami, a veritable Jew! And he hasn’t even the decency to be ashamed of it. To think that I, a captain in the Russian Army—have I ever told you, mon ami, that I was a captain in the Second Siberian Rifles? Yes, a captain, and my father was a colonel. And here I am, eating the bread of a Jew. A Jew . . . 'I will tell you what Jews are like. Once, in the early months of the war, we were on the march, and we had halted at a village for the night. A horrible old Jew, with a red beard like Judas Iscariot, came sneaking up to my billet. I asked him what he wanted. “Your honour,” he said, “I have brought a girl for you, a beautiful young girl only seventeen. It will only be fifty francs.” “Thank you,” I said, “you can take her away again. I don’t want to catch any diseases.” “Diseases!” cried the Jew, “mais, monsieur le capitaine, there’s no fear of that. It’s my own daughter!” That is the Jewish national character for you."

George Orwell at 100: Revisiting a Life Steeped in Contradictions,
by Glenn Frankel, Washington Post, June 23, 2003
"[Orwell] couldn't quite remove the anti-Semitism as well. [Frederic] Mullally recalls complaining one day, when they were having pints at the pub near the Tribune offices, about the difficulties he was having turning German Jewish writer Ricky Loewenthal's tortuous prose into readable English. "What do you expect," Orwell replied, "with all these Middle European Jews practically running the paper's politics?" Mullally says he waited for the grin that would signal Orwell was joking. It never came."

Orwell offered writers' blacklist to anti-Soviet propaganda unit,
by Richard Norton-Taylor and Seumas Milne, The Guardian (UK), (posted here at Net Charles), July 11, 1996
"George Orwell's letter to Celia Kirwan of Whitehall's secret Information Research Department (6-4-1949):
I read the enclosed article with interest, but it seems to me anti-religious rather than anti-semitic. For what my opinion is worth, I don't think anti-anti-semitism is a strong card to play in anti-Russian propaganda. The USSR must in practice be somewhat anti-semitic, as it is opposed both to Zionism within its own borders and on the other hand to the liberalism and internationalism of the non-Zionist Jews, but a polyglot state of that kind can never be officially anti-semitic, in the Nazi manner, just as the British Empire cannot. If you try to tie up Communism with anti-semitism, it is always possible in reply to point to people like Kaganovich or Anna Pauleer, also to the large number of Jews in the Communist parties everywhere. I also think it is bad policy to try to curry favour with your enemies. The Zionist Jews everywhere hate us and regard Britain as the enemy, more even than Germany. Of course this is based on misunderstanding, but as long as it is so I do not think we do ourselves any good by denouncing anti-semitism in other nations. I am sorry I can't write a better letter, but I really have felt so lousy the last few days. Perhaps a bit later I'll get some ideas.
With love,
George"

Virtually anybody who was anybody has been called an "anti-Semite," sooner or later. Including Orwell.