EP 1000 Antisemitism Re-emerges Just as America’s Democracy Withers

 In a moment of crisis for American democracy and liberalism, antisemitism has become a point of ideological obsession.  Now we’re questioning where free speech ends and hateful discrimination begins.  Is it possible that law can check antisemitic impulses which have generally been below the surface, yet never extinguished, while avoiding the tendency to censor political speech? History should remind us of the trapdoor we’re opening unless we find the balance.  In his brilliant book, ‘Exceptional Hatred: Antisemitism and the Fight Over Free Speech in Modern America,” Johns Hopkins Professor Jewish Studies, James Loeffler, unpacks the historical precedents and contemporary dangers as both the right and the left test those boundaries.  In all of this can we dissent from policies in Israel at the hands of the Netanyahu government and still want the best for two ‘righteous victims, as Golda Meir once called the Jews and Palestinians.  Our own delicate political moment in America creates many fault lines.  Antisemitism certainly seems to be one of them in this moment.

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