When historian James Loeffler set out to write a history of antisemitism and free speech in America, he kept running into the same complaint from opposite ends of the political spectrum: that antisemitism is somehow different — either too readily dismissed, or too easily weaponized.

“I wanted to capture and play with a sentiment that is widely held all across American society, that there’s something distinctive about antisemitism, that it doesn’t follow the rules,” Loeffler said in an interview about his new book, “Exceptional Hatred: Antisemitism and the Fight Over Free Speech in Modern America.”

The consequences, he found, are seen across the political spectrum.

“I hear it from deep inside the Jewish community, even more toward the Jewish right. They’ll say, ‘Every other kind of hatred gets its due, is recognized, but somehow antisemitism gets a pass.'” On the progressive left, when it comes to Israel and the Palestinians, he hears the inverse: “When you advocate for Palestinians, free speech becomes the exception, and it gets labeled antisemitism.” 

The right purports to champion free speech, defending far-right, nationalist and extremist voices, while clamping down on the boycott Israel movement and pro-Palestinian activism in the name of fighting antisemitism.

The left, meanwhile, downplays Jewish vulnerability, associating Jews with wealth, status and white privilege. 

The book’s argument, and its title, are a rebuke to such tendencies. Loeffler’s throughline, developed across three flashpoints in postwar American history — the Chicago race riots of the late 1940s, the neo-Nazi march on Skokie, Illinois, in the 1970s, and the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 — is that Jewish civil rights should be defended using the same legal and moral standards applied to any other group, no more and no less. 

“The goal of the book is to take something that too often is turned into an exception and say, okay, we want it to be treated firmly in a uniform manner by law,” said Loeffler, 52, the Felix Posen professor in Modern Jewish History at Johns Hopkins University.

Loeffler’s account begins in a period when many assume, in the wake of the Holocaust, antisemitism was on the wane. “There’s a perception we have that when Americans are shocked by the Nazis and by the Holocaust, the hatred against Jews dies down. It’s not really the case,” he said. “There’s a lot of antisemitic violence in the streets. There are some........

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