James Loeffler, "Exceptional Hatred: Antisemitism and the Fight over Free Speech in Modern America" (Metropolitan Books, 2026)
August 15, 2026
AI Summary
5 min readIn 1945, Bess Myerson became the first Jewish Miss America. She was the daughter of immigrants from the Bronx, tall and bookish, and her victory felt like proof that America was moving past its hatreds in the shadow of World War II. But when she went on a national promotional tour, she faced such intense anti-Semitism—and was exposed to such virulent anti-Black racism in the South—that she quit after two months and pivoted to civil rights activism. Historian James Loeffler uses Myerson’s story to open his book Exceptional Hatred: Antisemitism and the Fight over Free Speech in Modern America because it captures a persistent puzzle: American Jews are simultaneously hyper-visible as a successful minority and vulnerable to hatred that can be invisible until it erupts. The book traces the legal and political battles over anti-Semitism and free speech from the 1940s through Charlottesville, recovering forgotten court cases and debates that shaped the strange American position of having no hate speech exception to the First Amendment.
The Terminiello Case and the Postwar Fight Over Group Libel
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What you'll learn
- 1 (03:12) **Why This Book Now** - Loeffler explains how Charlottesville 2017 pulled him from his usual scholarship on Eastern Europe and human rights into the American hate-speech debate
- 2 (06:13) **Bess Myerson as an Emblem of Jewish Ambiguity** - The first Jewish Miss America (1945) illustrates both Jewish success and the persistent, often invisible anti-Semitism that success could not erase
- 3 (11:50) **The Terminiello Case: Private Hatred vs. Public Danger** - Loeffler reads a key passage framing the core tension, then introduces Arthur Terminiello, a renegade Catholic priest whose 1940s white nationalist rally in Chicago became a Supreme Court test
- 4 (18:28) **The Anti-Zionism/Antisemitism Distinction in the 1940s** - Terminiello's rhetoric shows a long prehistory to today's vexed debate, where "anti-Zionism" served as a rhetorical shield for anti-Semitism
- 5 (22:52) **The Group Libel Law: A Progressive Tool for Civil Rights** - Illinois had a 1917 law banning defamation of groups, originally passed after race riots against African Americans, which hovered behind the Terminiello prosecution
- 6 (24:39) **Supreme Court Deliberations: Absolutists vs. Pragmatists** - In 1949 the Court ruled 5-4 for Terminiello, with Justice Douglas and Black arguing the First Amendment protects even offensive political speech
- 7 (27:31) **The 1949 Chicago Pogrom and Joseph Beauharnais** - A young Jewish labor activist who invited Black colleagues to his home triggered a five-day riot in a white Catholic neighborhood, with thousands attacking anyone they thought was Jewish or communist
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Show Notes
A leading historian’s revelatory exploration of antisemitism in the United States—from 1940s anti-Jewish riots until today—showing that it has long served as a frontline in our wars over freedom of speech and the nature of American liberalism Few issues are as vexed today as antisemitism and free speech. There is scarcely an arena—college campuses, congressional hearings, immigration courtrooms, social media platforms—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. At a time of political crisis, antisemitism has become a point of ideological obsession. None of this is new. In a sweeping history of ideas and law, James Loeffler recovers the forgotten roots of our contemporary turmoil. 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: Antisemitism and the Fight over Free Speech in Modern America (Metropolitan Books, 2026) 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.
James Loeffler is an award-winning historian, and Felix Posen Professor of Modern Jewish History at Johns Hopkins University and the author of Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century. Previously he taught at the University of Virginia and served as Dean’s Visiting Scholar at Georgetown University Law Center. Currently a Kogod Senior Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, his writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic.
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