79 Fall 2026 n 1991, the historian Robert Wistrich called antisemitism the world’s “longest hatred,” stretching back to the pagan Greco-Roman world. I have long called it the most plastic hatred, moldable, form-fitting, artificial, and often toxic – and the Swiss-knife hatred, useful to so many different regimes and haters in so many ways. James Loeffler has now labeled antisemitism “the exceptional hatred” -- and makes a convincing case for its uniqueness, especially in America. “This is a book about exceptions,” writes Loeffler, the Felix Posen Professor of Modern Jewish History at Johns Hopkins University, and the author of the superb Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century. It is a book about antisemitism, a puzzlingly old species of hatred that does not conform to the standard rules of racism and religious bigotry. It is a book about free speech, the principle we herald as democracy’s bedrock, and hate speech, the specter that haunts it. And it is about American exceptionalism, the myth that our nation’s singular political experiment can embrace absolutist free speech while escaping its consequences. This is also an exceptional book: wise, judicious, timely, thoughtful, and thought-provoking. Despite the difficult subject matter, it is a pleasure to read. It should trigger and sharpen the debates we need about what kind of America we seek and what kind of liberalism will work best – at this critical juncture. The book pivots around the ongoing tension between Americans’ legal and moral commitment to ensuring free speech as foundational to democracy and Americans’ legal and moral commitment to fighting bigotry – as equally foundational. America has long been obsessed with race. As a result, much of the legal infrastructure for fighting discrimination emerged thanks to the civil rights movement. But America’s “separation of church and state” rhetoric obscures just how central religion – and religious discrimination, especially against Catholics – has been in American history too, especially before the 1960s. Admittedly Jews confuse. The mix of religion, peoplehood, ethnicity and culture befuddles Jews, let alone legislators and jurists trying to create categories to fight discrimination consistently. But along with the categorical ambiguities, two other obstacles to fighting American antisemitism emerge. The hatred itself shapeshifts and masquerades, while too many American Jews have preferred to fight hate generically rather than Jew-hatred itself, boldly, specifically. “Understanding antisemitism requires grappling with both its distinctiveness and its profound entanglement with American ideas of race and religion,” Loeffler insists. The book has three major sections, analyzing free-speech fights in Chicago following anti-Jewish riots in the 1940s and 1950s; the Neo-Nazi attempt to march in Skokie in the 1970s; and, more recently, the Charlottesville march and campus antisemitism. It begins, however, with Bess Myerson, the first Jewish Miss America, crowned in 1945. With this story, Loeffler captures Jews’ anomalous state in America: deemed “white” enough to bypass racial restrictions yet not American “enough” to avoid bigotry, while prone to champion equality universally. Coronating a Miss America who grew up in the Bronx as Basya represented post-World War II America at its best – and anticipated the mind-blowing achievements of so many American Jews over the next eight decades. Yet Myerson ultimately abandoned her “triumphant” post-victory tour when she overheard someone say just before she made a grand entrance in the South, “This is a restricted country club. We do not have Blacks and we do not have Jews.” “Myerson was eligible to compete in a segregated beauty contest, even suitable in the eyes of some to embody Reviewed by Gil Troy I Exceptional Hatred: Antisemitism and the Fight over Free Speech in Modern America By James Loeffler (New York: Metropolitan Books / Henry Holt, 2026, 384 pp.)
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