EXCEPTIONAL HATRED

Analyzing failed legal attempts to curb antisemitism in the U.S.

In his latest book, Johns Hopkins University historian Loeffler (Rooted Cosmopolitans, 2018) unfolds a nuanced history of past (and inadequate) attempts to protect American Jews and ends with a proposal for future interventions. In his animated retelling, race riots in late 1940s Chicago exposed not only the nexus of anti-Jewish and anti-Black hatred, but also the helplessness of legal experts in addressing hate speech. Findings against antisemitic agitators were either overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court (Terminiello v. City of Chicago, 1949) or ended with a fine (Beauharnais v. Illinois, 1952). In National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie (1977), the court decided that the unsavory neo-Nazi Frank Collin’s constitutional right to march in Skokie trumped the rights of Holocaust survivors. Having made his point, Collin switched his venue to Chicago. Finally, the civil trial of the organizers of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virgina (Sines v. Kessler, 2021) yielded “incomplete” accountability and only symbolic fines for the perpetrators. The inability of U.S. law to confront hatred of Jews fully has made Americans unprepared to assess current conflations of antisemitism and anti-Zionism, Loeffler argues. Contending that “Jews have become the screen onto which Americans project their fears and fantasies about the very meaning of pluralism in our society,” he presents a compelling solution: Don’t isolate antisemitism from “other hatreds”; never treat freedom of speech as an absolute; always link free speech concerns with a consideration of equal rights. A consummate stylist, Loeffler is able to combine sympathy and subtle irony in the same sentence: “Even the most thundering judicial rebuke loses something of its potency when the accompanying penalty consists of a modest fine.” The narrative skill with which he handles legal minutiae as if they were plots twists in a novel makes the book, notwithstanding its somber subject, a pleasure to read.

Brilliantly argues that antisemitic hatred needs to be better addressed.