Exceptional Hatred: Antisemitism and the Fight Over Free Speech in Modern America

Description:

A leading historian's revelatory exploration of antisemitism in the United States--from 1940s anti-Jewish riots until today--showing that it has long served as a frontline in our wars over freedom of speech and the nature of American liberalism

Few issues are as vexed today as antisemitism and free speech. There is scarcely an arena--college campuses, congressional hearings, immigration courtrooms, social media platforms--where we are not polarized over what counts as antisemitism, which speech is protected by the First Amendment, and what the law should do about hatred. At a time of political crisis, antisemitism has become a point of ideological obsession.

None of this is new. In a sweeping history of ideas and law, James Loeffler recovers the forgotten roots of our contemporary turmoil. From two antisemitic riots in postwar Chicago to a neo-Nazi march in 1970s Skokie, Illinois, and the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally in our own time, Loeffler explores the ways in which America's courts have grappled with hatred, freedom, and the tensions at the heart of liberal democracy: Are some hatreds more dangerous than others? Is tolerating hate speech the price we must pay for free speech? And can liberalism ever make good on its promise to end hatred through law?

Confronting these questions, Exceptional Hatred restores a missing history of hate speech, antisemitism, and the law, one that points to how we might protect difference without surrendering our principles of equality and freedom.

Brief description: An award-winning historian, James Loeffler is the Felix Posen Professor of Modern Jewish History at Johns Hopkins University and the author of Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century. Previously he taught at the University of Virginia and served as Dean's Visiting Scholar at Georgetown University Law Center. Currently a Kogod Senior Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, his writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his family.

Review Quotes:

"Exceptional Hatred is a revelatory exploration of law's confrontation with antisemitism and the tensions between efforts to curb it and commitments to freedom of expression. Probing, learned, and engrossing, it brilliantly illuminates what Loeffler aptly terms 'a fundamental question before us': how to balance free speech with equal protection when democracy itself stands imperiled.'"
--Randall Kennedy, author of Race, Crime, and the Law

"From the crucible of his encounter with the 2017 antisemitic Charlottesville march, the leading historian of Jews in his generation recounts how pivotal the Jewish experience has been to America's commitment to free speech and struggle with hate speech. No other book shows both the power and limits of American law's confrontation with hatred and the contradictions it exposes at liberalism's core. A masterpiece."
--Samuel Moyn, author of Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times

"James Loeffler cuts through the noise. Deft, judicious, and lucid, he navigates the treacherous intersection of antisemitism and free speech with a scholar's rigor and a storyteller's grace. The result is a book that demolishes the lazy, one-dimensional takes that pass for discourse. Required reading for anyone genuinely interested in the American Jewish experience--and the future of American democracy."
--Shaul Magid, author of The Necessity of Exile