I picked up James Loeffler’s Exceptional Hatred and couldn’t put it down. It’s a much-needed intervention in the contemporary conflicts over antisemitism and free speech. I learned a lot, and it’s got me thinking about some longstanding free expression issues in new ways.
Like all great works of history, it’s filled with fresh anecdotes. For example, I didn’t know anything about the first Jewish Miss America, Bess Myerson, whose 1945 victory was both preceded and followed by overt antisemitic discrimination directed her way. Nor did I know that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) published a dime-store edition of Mein Kampf in 1939, on the theory that sunlight was the best disinfectant.
But the heart of Loeffler’s book is three stories that I was already pretty familiar with—the antisemitic and anti-Communist 1946 speech in Chicago that led to Terminiello v. Chicago (1949); the Skokie affair, which led to multiple court decisions in 1977-78 on the right of Nazis to march through a community of Jewish Holocaust survivors; and the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.
I should say, three stories that I thought I was pretty familiar with. Because Loeffler's telling repeatedly had me writing down new details.
I knew that Arthur Terminiello was a suspended Catholic priest who traveled the country as “the Father Coughlin of the South.” I didn’t know that his bishop in Alabama had suspended him for explicitly calling for Black and Jewish civil rights advocates to be shot on sight. Nor did I know that he was a Pearl Harbor truther. (I didn’t even know that was a thing.) I knew that Terminiello’s speech had toed the line (in true Trump-like fashion) of supporting violence without directly calling for it, but I didn’t appreciate how much he had intentionally orchestrated the violent conflict in the streets outside the Chicago meeting hall where he spoke.
I knew that the Terminiello case and Beauharnais v. Illinois (1952) both emerged from Chicago and signaled a Court struggling to strike the right balance between free speech on the one hand, and equality and public order, on the other. In Beauharnais, the Court upheld what we would today call a hate speech law. The leaflets in question were anti-Black, but the defendant, Joseph Beauharnais, was involved in multiple instances of antisemitic violence as well. I didn’t know that he had first been arrested for his role in inciting the “Peoria Street pogrom” against a Jewish homeowner who hosted a housewarming party attended by a multi-racial group of fellow ILWU members. Nor did I know that Thurgood Marshall took leave from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to work on the case, on the side of Beauharnais.
The component of the Terminiello affair that I’m most familiar with is Justice Robert Jackson’s dissenting opinion. (I’ve written about it in my forthcoming book on free speech and democratic backsliding, and also in this review essay.) Even here, Loeffler’s account was fresh. I was particularly struck by his observation that Justice Jackson was one of the few participants at the Court who recognized that “there were real victims of violence who would pay the price for blind fealty to absolutist principle” (92). For me, this passage immediately called to mind Heather Heyer.
Part II of the book is devoted to the late-1970s Skokie affair. Again, the basic outlines of the story were familiar, but I didn’t know that Frank Collins, the key Nazi provocateur in question, was the child of a Jewish Holocaust survivor. Nor did I remember that he launched his plan to march through a community of Holocaust survivors in Skokie only after Chicago officials had used permitting and insurance requirements to put a stop to his frequent violent rallies targeting African Americans in and around Marquette Park. Nor that the Skokie affair concluded in part because Collins won a First Amendment challenge that allowed him to return to Marquette Park.
This part of the book dragged a bit for me, at least compared to the gripping accounts in the rest of the volume. The thrust of the story is that American Jews were sharply divided as to whether allowing Nazis to march through Skokie was a confirmation or betrayal of fundamental democratic principles. The Nazis won all the court cases, but the march in Skokie never happened, and the story wanders a bit as a result.
Not so for Part III, which begins with a chilling account of the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally. Together with chapter one of P.E. Moskowitz’s The Case Against Free Speech, part III of Loeffler’s book is one of my favorite accounts of Charlottesville 2017. I followed the events in question only from afar, but they remain seared in my memory, and I regularly do my small part in class to make sure they are not forgotten. Loeffler’s account will help.
The book’s cover image features the infamous Friday evening “tiki torch” march that started the weekend of violence (with the white supremacists using their torches to attack a group of students on the center of UVA’s campus). The Charlottesville events clearly shaped Loeffler’s own assessment of the difficult balancing act required to decide whether, when, and how to regulate antisemitic speech. He opens the book with his own expert testimony in one of the criminal trials that (eventually) sought to hold some of the white supremacist protesters accountable. And the broader lessons he draws at the book’s close clearly emerged in part from his own involvement, as director of UVA’s Jewish Studies Program, in the on-campus aftermath of the Unite the Right rally.
Loeffler makes a compelling case that in the wake of Charlottesville 2017, left-wing campus organizing too often had a blind spot for antisemitism, effectively writing the “Jews will not replace us” chants out of the collective memory of August 11-12. Some activists and lawyers made a concerted effort to maintain the links between racism and antisemitism in a civil suit filed against those responsible for the violence, but mostly unsuccessfully in the end.
This failure created the space for conservatives “to pry antisemitism away from racism, exceptionalizing it in the guise of acting on it” (274). In the now-familiar story, the Glenn Youngkin administration in Virginia and then the Trump 2.0 administration nationally have tried to dismantle the civil rights state for people of color while doubling down on its protections for Jews.
I say “doubling down,” but “weaponizing” is probably more accurate. As Loeffler shows again and again, “[i]n the eyes of the Right, only antisemitism from the Left deserved attention” (274). Neither Youngkin nor Trump 2.0 offered anything in the way of concrete protection from the sort of antisemitism that pervaded Charlottesville in August 2017 or Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue shooting one year later.
This weaponizing of civil rights law is truly infuriating, but a mirror image response from the left—devoting attention only to antisemitism on the right—is not likely to work. And this is where the rest of Loeffler’s book is so valuable. The history of political extremism in the United States includes abundant evidence that racism and antisemitism are linked. From Arthur Terminiello and Joseph Beauharnais in 1940s Chicago through Clarence Brandenburg’s rally in 1960s Ohio and Frank Collins’s marches in 1970s Chicago and Skokie, right up to the many white nationalists in Trump’s orbit today, purveyors of right-wing hatred have regularly linked Jews and African Americans in their sights.
On campus at UVA (and throughout U.S. higher ed), “[y]ears of avoiding the subject of antisemitism left university leaders struggling to frame a coherent narrative for how protest and debate vis-a-vis the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should take place…. The unresolved tensions on display in Charlottesville had hardened into national paralysis” (285-6). Trump’s coalition has adopted the fight against antisemitism as its own, but Trump himself famously opined that there were “very fine people” on both sides of the Charlottesville violence (229). And a participant in that day’s Unite the Right rally is now running as the Republican nominee for a state legislative seat in Florida.
All of this is infuriating, but identifying the Trump administration’s hypocrisy on this front gets us only so far. In Loeffler’s words, “illiberal authoritarianism will not be defeated by nostalgic invocations of lost golden eras of free speech, nor by tallying hypocrisies on right or left” (288).
University leaders nationwide are still struggling to articulate rules that protect Jews and students of color from unacceptable hatred in the places where they live and study, while maintaining a commitment to free expression. Loeffler quotes the UVA free speech statement adopted in 2021, which seems pretty good as such campus statements go. But the statement doesn’t mention Jews or antisemitism, and on Loeffler’s account, it fails to really grapple with “two competing ideals: free speech as an unlimited enterprise, and the promise of equality and respect” (256).
These questions are genuinely hard. It’s not for nothing that all three conflicts traced by Loeffler included Jews on both sides—those who emphasized that preserving free speech as robustly as possible is the safest bet for democracy in general and vulnerable minorities in particular v. those who recognized that violent extremism can endanger democracy and minority rights every bit as much as state censorship can.
And hard questions have a tendency to persist. We might shove them under the rug for a time, but they creep back out. Perhaps only in America do we convince ourselves otherwise. American exceptionalism, for Loeffler, is “the myth that our nation’s singular political experiment can embrace absolutist free speech while escaping its consequences” (4). We can double down on free expression, on campus and elsewhere, while ignoring the threats of violent extremism. We can weaponize antidiscrimination law against some hateful speech, as the Trump administration is doing, while inflaming hatreds of our own. Or the targets of violent extremism, across racial, religious, and gender categories, can come together to “revise liberalism for the world we actually inhabit” (287).