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(RNS) — James Loeffler was a professor of Jewish history at the University of Virginia in 2017 when white supremacists marched through Charlottesville wielding torches and chanting, “Jews will not replace us.”<\/p>\n
Yet in the aftermath of the violent and deadly Unite the Right rally — originally planned to protest the removal of the statue of General Robert E. Lee from Charlottesville’s former Lee Park — the university’s focus was on addressing the racist, anti-Black bigotry espoused by the neo-Nazi protesters. The antisemitism so overtly displayed by the marchers was almost entirely sidelined by the university, Loeffler writes. And when the Jewish Leadership Council sought membership in the UVA student-run Minority Rights Coalition, it was denied<\/a> because of its pro-Israel stance. (UVA didn’t respond to a request for comment.)<\/p>\n Loeffler, who is now a professor of Modern Jewish History at Johns Hopkins University, wondered about that omission and decided to research how Americans approached antisemitism during other pivotal moments. The result was his new book<\/a>, “Exceptional Hatred: Antisemitism and the Fight over Free Speech in Modern America,” an examination of how the public and the courts have dealt with anti Jewish hate speech since the end of World War II.<\/p>\n From two antisemitic riots in 1940s Chicago to the battle over a proposed neo-Nazi march in 1970s Skokie, Illinois, and the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally, the book looks at how Americans dealt with the tension between free speech as enshrined in the First Amendment and protecting the civil rights of a minority group. <\/p>\n In nearly every Supreme Court case, justices ruled in favor of First Amendment protections over antisemitic speech. Victims of physical antisemitic assaults have more recently been able to secure monetary damages from individual antisemitic offenders through state and federal hate crime laws. Loeffler argues this is an incomplete remedy that does not do justice to the actual harm suffered by victims. <\/p>\n The issue has become ever more urgent. Hate crimes against Jews are rising. Just Monday (Aug. 3), a report<\/a> on crime from the New York Police Department showed anti-Jewish hate crimes have climbed 8.5% in New York City this year. <\/p>\n And yet, Loeffer, who is Jewish, argues Americans have a hard time talking clearly about antisemitism. In part, he argues, it’s because antisemitism intersects with overlapping identities of race, religion and national origin. It doesn’t fit conventional categories.<\/p>\n RNS spoke to Loeffler about this perilous moment, Americans’ confusion about antisemitism and his years teaching at the University of Virginia during the Unite the Right rally. The interview was edited for length and clarity. <\/p>\n I felt, as a historian, that we were really getting much of our conversation about antisemitism in America wrong — not simply where it comes from or what to do about it, but what it is and how it relates to other hatreds. That concept of exceptional hatred is something that comes up a lot. We often hear Jewish Americans say this is a unique kind of hatred, different from other kinds of hatreds because of the long history of antisemitism or because of the Holocaust, and we should treat it differently.<\/p>\n I am of the conviction that when we treat things differently, we miss the chance to really mobilize society to address it. We need to deexceptionalize it. We have to stop treating it as something which is so outside the bounds of history that we can’t deal with it. A lot of that comes down to our inability to understand it in relation to things like color-based racism. So what I wanted to do was recognize its unique features, but then say, we’re going to have to look at it inside the context of what is happening with religion and race across the centuries in America. <\/p>\n We have an image of our past, where we say that after World War II, strains of antisemitism disappeared. They didn’t actually disappear right away. There was a lot of fear, and there was street violence and there were dangerous, extremist forces on the march in American society. So looking back at that moment of the post-war 1940s, right up to the early 1950s, I think can remind us that there have been other moments when people were really terrified, both about what might happen to democracy and what might happen to Jews in America.<\/p>\n It’s not to minimize the problems today, or the seriousness of them, but it can help us put it in perspective. There is a through-line of challenges that American Jews face, and yet there’s also a cyclical element. At moments of great division and great stress and polarization, antisemitism explodes into the public sphere and becomes a real problem.<\/p>\n One of the striking things about American Jews is that while we think of ourselves as proud, vocal, active people in public life, there’s always been an ambivalence about exactly how to deal with antisemitism. So in the 1940s, the prevailing view among large swaths of the American Jewish establishment was that it is better to simply not draw attention to it. A lot of leaders felt that there is nothing you could do about this hatred, other than educate people about tolerance. If you go out there and announce yourselves as Jews seeking to fight this, let alone demand that everyone focus their attention on it, there’ll be backlash, and you’ll only trigger more resentment. That has been a debate in American Jewish life for over a century, and part of that debate is about the idea of quarantine — that simply, if you show no spotlight, no media attention, no activism, no legal action — we’ll make it go away.<\/p>\n I was teaching at the University of Virginia during the United the Right rally, and the American Jewish establishment basically said, ignore these white supremacists, don’t give them the attention, don’t go to counter protests. I don’t think it worked, obviously, because it turned out to be a terrible turning point for antisemitism.<\/p>\n Now we sort of flip to the other extreme. Many of the same organizations are painting with a very broad brush and trying to alarm people rather than giving us a sense of where antisemitism fits into American society. Those questions go back to what I mentioned earlier: How does this relate to other threats to minority groups? How does this relate to the divisive issues about politics in Israel? If we rush to only spotlight it, we may miss the context we need to make sense of it and figure out what to do about it. <\/p>\n When I think about those lawsuits and trials, some were decided correctly; others were not. In Skokie, there was sufficient evidence of public danger for the Supreme Court to take the case and split the baby — tailoring a ruling that permitted the march with more “time, place, and manner” restrictions, as some Jewish groups advocated, in pursuit of a better balance between free speech and equal protection. That would not have destroyed our constitution.<\/p>\n I think that American society has a blind spot about antisemitism because it combines both racial and religious elements and because Jews are a predominantly white identified minority, and yet we’re living in a heavily Christian country. Many groups simply said, “Wait a second, Jews are white, so what is the issue here?” There was a failure to understand both. Jews face a lot of racialized antisemitism still. There was a reductionist move that color is the only way you define bias. And it was missing the real way in which antisemitism animates so much of the far right’s worldview. I do think that one of the consequences for our current crisis is that we didn’t have a national conversation at that moment. A vacuum emerged.<\/p>\n There’s one thing I hope with this book: that we can have a better conversation about the complexity (of antisemitism), rather than avoiding it until it blows up in our school or our community or our government, and we’re left simply pointing fingers at one another or feeling like there’s no way to have a coherent conversation about addressing discrimination and free speech.<\/p>\n There’s a long-running debate about antisemitism, anti-Zionism and how they’re related. But undoubtedly we’ve entered into a newer period where these things have become incredibly intensified and scaled up because of the war in Gaza and the West Bank. I think it’s really incumbent upon us to take a more sophisticated view about how we define what is actually discrimination and hatred and what is something that some people might find politically offensive.<\/p>\n It’s a complicated matter. In general, though, I think it’s incumbent upon us to demand that if we don’t want to be counted as an appendage or part of Israel, then we have to be prepared for people to treat Israel like any other state and not assume that it’s an attack on U.S. Jews.<\/p>\nWhy do you call antisemitism an “exceptional hatred”?<\/h4>\n
A lot of people are arguing that we’re living through the height of antisemitism in America, reminiscent of 1930s Germany. But from what I read in your book, Chicago in the 1940s was worse than today.<\/h4>\n
Historically, the Jewish establishment didn’t want to call attention to antisemitism. You describe it as “the quarantine strategy.” Explain how that emerged and to what extent it may still be operative.<\/h4>\n
A lot of the historic lawsuits, for example those asking the Supreme Court to halt the Skokie march, failed on free speech and First Amendment grounds. (The court declined to halt the march, which in the end was held in downtown Chicago.) Do you think that those courts ruled correctly?<\/h4>\n
You write about how antisemitism got buried at UVA following the Unite the Right rally. It came to be seen as a racist attack on Black Americans, a battle over Confederate monuments primarily. Why is that?<\/h4>\n
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani issued a video<\/a> recently calling Benjamin Netanyahu a war criminal and explaining why he could not arrest him. It spurred an outcry from some Jewish groups, who called it antisemitic. What is your view? <\/strong><\/h4>\n