Exceptional Hatred

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, what is protected by the First Amendment, and what the law should do about hatred in America. The stakes in this fight are high. Lives are upended. Jobs are lost. Dissent is criminalized. At a time of crisis for American liberalism, antisemitism has become a point of ideological obsession.

We’ve been here before. From anti-Jewish riots of the 1940s to Charlottesville’s 2017 Unite the Right rally, historian James Loeffler shows that antisemitism has long served as a key battleground in modern America’s struggle to secure liberal freedoms. In the postwar years, an antisemitic rampage in Chicago sparked two critical Supreme Court cases, opening the door to a constitutional ban on hate speech; in the late 1970s, a moment of reckoning over civil rights, a neo-Nazi march in Skokie, Illinois, tested the limits of the First Amendment; and in our own time, the Charlottesville hate crimes trial—where Loeffler served as an expert witness—revealed how our struggle over positions on Israel/Palestine and free speech stems from deep and unresolved challenges to liberal democracy: How should the law treat discrimination? How do we calculate the harm in hatred? And what of liberalism’s promise to end hatred through law?

To answer these questions, Exceptional Hatred restores the missing history of how we arrived at this moment and offers a guide for how we can think differently about the law’s role in protecting all differences without surrendering our principles of equality and freedom.