It has become at least a little easier - after anti-war marches filled with Nazi imagery, world-wide calls for the destruction of Israel, and the Durbin 'anti-racism' hate-fest - to argue that anti-Semitism is often legitimized through disingenuous claims that it is anti-Zionism. But these are grand political movements deeply marked by anti-Semitism, and the seething hatred and resentment that drives them often explodes into easily identified, open anti-Semitism. It is much harder to identify and describe more quotidian anti-Semitism - the kind that is always beneath the surface of otherwise legitimate political discourse, waiting to be called upon to serve political ends. That kind of anti-Semitism is far more subtle. It is often little more than a combination of resonant phrases ('shadowy cabal') and suggestive images ('bearded Jew') - none of which amount to much individually, but when taken together, do rhetorical work by drawing on anti-Semitic tropes.
The problem then becomes how to carefully identify when an advocacy that's not vulgarly anti-Semitic is still nonetheless either motivated by anti-Semitism or is gaining rhetorical power by appealing to anti-Semitic imagery. To pick out motives it's often enough to check whether Jews or the Jewish State are being consistently and unfairly singled out for criticism. When Israel is the subject of literally tens of UN human rights resolutions while Sudan, Saudi Arabia, China and Iran are not only being ignored but are leading the charge, it's not too much to suspect strong anti-Semitic motives. Similarly, when facts are ignored so as to paint an unnecessarily suggestive picture - such as when 'Israel's security' is singled out as the reason the US went to war in Iraq - anti-Semitism is almost always at least partly at work.
Identifying anti-Semitic rhetorical tropes is a more complicated task. Here, the question is not whether something was excluded (other, far more serious human rights violators or other, more plausible motives for war), but whether what was included is persuasive in part because it calls on anti-Semitic imagery. A recent Washington Post article by Susan Schmidt and James Grimaldi can serve as an example. The article is an attack (justified or not) on lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Schmidt and Grimaldi paint a picture of out of control avarice, of a reckless but pathetic schemer utilizing money for petty psychological and political gain.
The bad way to criticize this piece (but one that is unfortunately common) is to accuse Schmidt and Grimaldi of anti-Semitism simply because they called a particular Jew greedy. That method is unhelpful for the same reason that calling out any criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic is unhelpful: just as sometimes Israel deserves criticism, so sometimes there are Jews - just as there are Christians and Muslims - who really are shamelessly greedy. But just as some criticism of Israel really is anti-Semitic, so some images of needlessly greedy Jews draw on anti-Jewish tropes.
This WaPo article turns out to be filled with unnecessary references to Abramoff's Judaism, and it places those references suspiciously close to blatant anti-Semitic stereotypes. There is a seemingly random and almost completely irrelevant drop-in about Abramoff's wife converting to Judaism - literally right above a one-two punch of 'he's always been a shady character' and 'he's a lying thief'. There is a weird riff about Abramoff sporting "a beard and a yarmulke" in the middle of two paragraphs about his ruthless financial dealings. There are no legitimate news-related or narrative-related reasons to include those statements - unless one is trying to smuggle in stereotypes under the banner of "details". Of course, anything can be justified as 'just details', but the question remains: why choose those details as the salient characteristics in a story about financial misdealing?
Rhetoric can be anti-Semitic either by leaving things out that would indicate a mitigating non-Jewish dimension or by including facts that misleadingly provide a Jewish connotation. Both tactics should be called out for what they are, and this Schmidt and Grimaldi article probably crossed the line.