When majorities threaten to become tyrannical, as Tocqueville warned they would a century before the rise of fascism, how can discrete minorities be best protected? When neo-Nazis march into Jewish neighborhoods in the United States, how should law enforcement react? These are questions that historian James Loeffler seeks to answer in his remarkable book about hate speech and its effects on law, politics, and the evolution of Jewish communal life. The Constitutional conflict that the activation of bigotry presents is plain: The First Amendment protects freedom of speech (and assembly), even when bad actors shock, offend, and perhaps even intimidate their victims. Yet the Fourteenth Amendment also guarantees the equal protection of laws — even for those whom, say, the white majority despises, and even for those whom millions of Christians dislike. How the two parcels of the nation’s framing document can both be honored has baffled even the most fair-minded jurists.
Exceptional Hatred illumines this democratic dilemma by looking at how it played out in two American cities. Curiously, Chicago and its surroundings were the sites of the most important cases of virulently antisemitic speech (Terminiello v. Chicago in 1949 and Beauharnais v. Illinois in 1952), plus the most notorious effort to revive the trauma of Holocaust survivors in Skokie in the late 1970s. Four decades later, antisemitism showed its persistence in Charlottesville (where Loeffler was then teaching at the University of Virginia). There the provocative marches of the cranks and conspirators sought to protect a statue of Robert E. Lee, which proved lethal. Unlike the midcentury cases in the Midwest, the cries of “Jews will not replace us” did not become a problem for the Supreme Court. But an ingenious civil case against leading instigators of Unite the Right, drawing upon the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, brought some measure of justice to victims of the violence.
The depth of Loeffler’s research and the elegance of his prose makes his book engrossing as well as pertinent. Loeffler is also wise, distilling the arguments of lawyers, judges, and Jewish organizations without taking an explicit or emphatic position on the most effective response to the cruelest rhetoric that antisemites mustered. At the very least, readers may conclude that no reaction to this menace is entirely satisfactory. The clash between the liberties to which all citizens are entitled and the special defenses that historically vulnerable minorities may require cannot be reconciled. But this book also reveals the manifold failures of the police as well as figures of authority — whether in city halls or in universities — to protect Jewish interests when subjected to clear and present danger.
A paradox therefore emerges. The right-wing extremists imagine Jewish power to be not only sinister but omnicompetent, determining the fate of the republic and even of the white race. And yet Jews in Skokie and Charlottesville found themselves at the mercy of people who have yet to display a capacity to move beyond spasmodic ugliness into the formidable political force they ascribe to “international Jewry.”
Stephen Whitfield is Professor of American Studies (Emeritus) at Brandeis University. He is the author of Learning on the Left: Political Profiles of Brandeis University (2020).
