Few issues are as vexed today as antisemitism and free speech. There is scarcely an arena 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. In a political crisis, antisemitism has become a point of ideological obsession. None of this is new. 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.
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