Michael Chabon came to the defense of Barack Obama in a blog post Tuesday, arguing Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen was trying to scare readers into thinking Obama was anti-semite.

“Barack Obama knows that black people and Jews need to come together to fight for all the important issues and values they share,” Chabon wrote in a blog posting at The Huffington Post. “He knows that we need to start talking from the center of our communities, and stop whispering or shouting at the extremes.”

In Cohen’s column, also published Tuesday, the op-ed writer castigated Obama for not speaking out against an award presented to Louis Farrakhan by a magazine affiliated with the Democratic presidential candidate’s church in Chicago. Farrakhan, Cohen says, “epitomizes racism, particularly in the form of anti-Semitism. Over the years, he has compiled an awesome record of offensive statements, even denigrating the Holocaust by falsely attributing it to Jewish cooperation with Hitler.”

Chabon criticizes the column, and says Cohen is working to wrongly create fear among readers. “Let’s all choose, Jews and African-Americans, to set fear aside, and work for a return to the days, whose memory Cohen’s fear-mongering so grievously tarnishes, when we set aside everything that separated us to join together in the service of our common American good,” he says.