Exceptional Hatred

“A consummate stylist, Loeffler is able to combine sympathy and subtle irony in the same sentence. The narrative skill with which he handles legal minutiae as if they were plots twists in a novel makes the book, notwithstanding its somber subject, a pleasure to read… . A nuanced history … brilliantly argues that antisemitic hatred needs to be better addressed.”
–Kirkus

“Exceptional Hatred is the platonic ideal of history–technicolor storytelling and level-headed analysis brought to bear on the question that tends to make hypocrites of us all. Loeffler has written the book America’s broken public square desperately needs.”
–Franklin Foer, author of The Last Politician

“A revelatory exploration of law’s confrontation with antisemitism and the tensions between efforts to curb it and commitments to freedom of expression. Probing, learned, and engrossing, Exceptional Hatred brilliantly illuminates what Loeffler aptly terms ‘a fundamental question before us: how to balance free speech with equal protection when democracy itself stands imperiled.’”
–Randall Kennedy, author of Say It Loud! On Race, Law, History and Culture

“With this brilliant book, James Loeffler launches himself at the heart of legal and constitutional questions about free speech–probing whether and how law has provided protection against hatred; how partisan actors have treated Jews as means rather than ends; and why myths of American exceptionalism have skewed the conversation. Noting that ‘we must historicize rather than pathologize this debate, ’ Loeffler imagines a path toward a more just and inclusive future for all.”
–Dahlia Lithwick, author of Lady Justice

“Original and timely, Exceptional Hatred shows that the histories of free speech and antisemitism in America turn out to be profoundly intertwined. Deeply researched and powerfully argued, it should be required reading for anyone who cares about the current challenge of antisemitism–and what works and doesn’t work to fight it.”
–Noah Feldman, author of The Broken Constitution

“James Loeffler cuts through the noise. Deft, judicious, and lucid, he navigates the treacherous intersection of antisemitism and free speech with a scholar’s rigor and a storyteller’s grace. The result is a book that demolishes the lazy, one-dimensional takes that pass for discourse. Required reading for anyone genuinely interested in the American Jewish experience–and the future of American democracy.”
–Shaul Magid, author of The Necessity of Exile

“From the crucible of his encounter with the 2017 antisemitic Charlottesville march, the leading historian of Jews in his generation recounts how pivotal the Jewish experience has been to America’s commitment to free speech and struggle with hate speech. No other book shows both the power and limits of law’s confrontation with hatred and the contradictions it exposes at liberalism’s core. A masterpiece.”
–Samuel Moyn, author of Liberalism Against Itself

James Loeffler is the author of Rooted Cosmopolitans, winner of the 2018 American Historical Association Rosenberg Prize and the 2018 Association for Jewish Studies Schnitzer Prize, and The Most Musical Nation.

A professor of modern Jewish history at Johns Hopkins University and a Senior Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, he previously taught at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where he covered the trial of Charlottesville White Supremacists for The Atlantic.

His writing and commentary have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, and Newsweek, among other places.

He lives in Washington, DC.

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