The Hatred That Broke American Politics

“If you want to defend the South and Western civilization from the Jew and his dark-skinned allies, be at Charlottesville on 12 August.” Nine years ago, that message spread across the internet. The call was answered by several hundred white supremacists, who marched through the University of Virginia. The rage-filled men carried torches, chanting, “Jews will not replace us.” They swarmed around the historic rotunda, arriving at a statue of the school’s founder, Thomas Jefferson. There they met a tiny band of student counterprotesters who responded with their own chant: “Black lives matter.” That evening turned violent, the first act in a deadly weekend. Most Americans remember the torches, the rage, the death. But those clashing chants also revealed a gap between the targets of hatred and the words available to name it.

Race is the wound America sees. Anti-Semitism is the one it doesn’t. Jews have frequently been imagined as a colorless minority whose great persecution took place elsewhere, or as a group whose Christian-adjacent faith flourished with the religious freedom they found in the United States. But their in-betweenness has always been part of the danger: Jews have never fit neatly into America’s frameworks of identity, and that failure to fit has marked them as suspect, out of place, or impossible to categorize. Depending on the audience, Jews are dismissed as beneficiaries of white privilege or treated as not quite white at all—too assimilated and not assimilated enough, too powerful and too marginal. That ambiguity has placed them, again and again, at the center of America’s battles over free speech and equal protection. When hatred does not fit existing categories, we tend either to ignore it or to overcorrect—both responses that distort the boundaries of free expression.

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Our failure to reckon with the anti-Semitism of Charlottesville—on the right and the left—was not merely a missed opportunity. It helped create the opening into which illiberalism has since rushed.

[David Frum: Anti-Semitism is becoming mainstream]

August 2017 marked a turning point, not just for racial populism but for American democracy. That crisis seeded a surge in anti-Semitism. It also helped produce a government campaign against such bigotry that has become a tool for undermining freedom, championed by the Trump administration only when it serves the White House’s purposes. Meanwhile, the progressive left has struggled to sustain its critique of Israel’s war with Palestine—and of American responsibility for a moral catastrophe—without letting that critique curdle into conspiracism.

Americans appear to face an impossible choice between protecting free speech and safeguarding equal rights. But that is a false dichotomy. Honoring both will, however, require de-exceptionalizing anti-Semitism. And that, in turn, necessitates returning to Charlottesville, and reckoning with how both the left and the right failed in its aftermath.

Over the course of 2017, three separate racist rallies took place in Charlottesville. In May, the alt-right provocateur Richard Spencer led a small rally in downtown Charlottesville to protest a city-council decision to remove two century-old Confederate monuments. A University of Virginia alum with a passion for Wagnerian opera, Spencer dressed old hatred in new clothes. He spoke grandly of restoring white supremacy, and of defeating liberal conspiracies to change America beyond recognition. President Trump’s election gave him cause for hope that Black Lives Matter and antifa would be crushed. “We will not be replaced from this world,” Spencer screamed as plumes of green and gray smoke from flares rose into the sky. “Whites have a future! We have a future of power!”

Two months later, the Ku Klux Klan paraded through town. Although they had come to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, they held banners denouncing Jewish communism and the satanic Talmud. They were met with a massive, raucous counterprotest, inspired in part by a newly formed Black Lives Matter chapter in town, staged by citizens determined to oppose the hatred.

This article was adapted from James Loeffler’s forthcoming book, Exceptional Hatred: Antisemitism and the Fight over Free Speech in Modern American

August brought round three: Spencer returned to town, accompanied by a who’s who of the far right, answering the call to join what they labeled the “Battle of Charlottesville.”

Officially, Unite the Right was a free-speech march in defense of the monument. But several organizers had ties to violent extremist groups and online they made their intentions clear. “Next stop: Charlottesville, VA. Final stop: Auschwitz,” wrote Andrew Anglin of The Daily Stormer. The planners fantasized about mowing down protesters with cars, and repeating the Holocaust—even as they denied it happened. They wrapped retrograde hatred in constitutional pretense. Free speech became both shield and sword.

The weekend brought mayhem: dozens of injuries, the murder of Heather Heyer, the death of two state troopers. Yet it also exposed the entanglement of race and religion in the racist imagination, which conceived of Jews as invisible power brokers, racial chameleons, white imposters, and anti-Christian infidels.

Charlottesville shocked the country. Yet in its aftermath, America had no vocabulary for describing anti-Semitism in relation to other hatreds—let alone for responding to it. Then–UVA President Teresa Sullivan denounced the violence and “racist, anti-immigrant, homophobic and misogynistic chants,” but made no mention of Jews. The great majority of other statements issued by Virginia-college presidents repeated the same failure. The local school superintendent discarded her back-to-school speech and instead spoke of the need to name “the hate that had visited our city,” which had targeted “our Latino, Muslim, bisexual, transgender, Christian, and Black students.” Jews, again, went unmentioned.

These educators were not anti-Semites. They were well-meaning liberals for whom other forms of hatred eclipsed anti-Semitism; anti-Black racism, for one, loomed larger. But anti-Semitism was hardly new to Charlottesville. The poet Karl Shapiro wrote of his time at UVA in the 1930s: “To hurt the Negro and avoid the Jew is the curriculum.” The dean once tracked applicants in three categories: “Virginians, non-Virginians, and Hebrews.”

And that was not true of just Virginia. Americans have long been accustomed to seeing Jews as a model minority whose success proved their belonging, and to dismissing anti-Jewish hatred as something that happened elsewhere. Without having reckoned with their nation’s own long history of anti-Semitism, Americans met it in 2017 with confusion and silence.

The centrist liberal response constituted a form of occlusion. White supremacy was understood strictly in racial terms, and anti-Semitism was blocked from view. The chants in Charlottesville fixated on Jews. The response did not.

What liberals failed to see, the populist right first denied, then exploited. Trump could not condemn the marchers without asserting there were “very fine people on both sides.” For two years, his administration shrugged off any serious response.

Then the strategy shifted. Trump seized on anti-Semitism—but only anti-Semitism from the left. A 2019 executive order focused on college campuses, targeting anti-Zionist expression while lifting anti-Semitism out of the broader landscape of hatred for special treatment. This marked the first moment in which Trump threatened to defund American universities without even a proper investigation. Anti-Semitism became a cudgel for the administration to wield against political enemies and liberal institutions, not a hatred to be fought on equal, consistent terms.

The same pattern played out in Virginia. Glenn Youngkin tried to ignore Charlottesville entirely while running for governor in 2021. On his first day in office, he issued several executive orders. One of them banned “inherently divisive concepts” such as critical race theory from classrooms in the name of free speech. Another announced a commission on anti-Semitism whose final report reduced Charlottesville to two paragraphs out of 13,000 words.

Many Republican politicians chose to attack civil-rights protections for most minorities while selectively championing them in the Jewish case. Genuine anti-Semitism was met with a sledgehammer instead of a scalpel, violating other rights in the process. UVA faced a wholesale attack as part of the wave of disproportionate punishments inflicted on institutions of higher education in the aftermath of October 7, 2023. But the institution’s vulnerability had deeper roots. The progressive left had its own failure to reckon with—one that played out on campus and left universities unable to articulate a coherent defense when the attacks came.

The progressive left failed by exclusion. After the weekend of terror in 2017, UVA’s Jewish Leadership Council worked with the Minority Rights Coalition on repair and renewal. Yet when they applied to join as a member organization, they were rejected on account of their pro-Israel affiliate group. Remove that Zionist organization, they were told, and they could join. After objections that Jews had been prime victims, a compromise was floated: Jewish students could join as an honorary minority group without voting rights. Jewish student leaders, among them a young woman who had fled fearing her life on August 11, denounced the moral myopia.

As this conflict escalated in spring 2018, pro-Palestinian protesters stormed a Hillel event featuring Israeli Druze and Jewish reserve soldiers. Shouting slogans through a megaphone, they denounced Zionists as fascists and refused “dialogue with racists.” Their heckler’s veto muddled their critique of Israeli military propaganda. Jewish students claimed the rhetoric threatened them; protesters said the soldiers’ presence did the same to Palestinian students.

Everyone claimed the mantle of free speech while denouncing the other side as perpetrators of hate speech. The progressive left, for all of its commitment to confronting hatred, rarely turned that lens inward. The question of where anti-Zionism ended and anti-Semitism began was dismissed, not deliberated.

That moment was a rehearsal for every debate we’ve lived through since. How do you balance free speech and equal rights when competing groups on campus have political and personal ties to a live conflict? Where does legitimate critique end and hatred begin? All of it was there, seven years ago, before October 7, before the campus protests of 2024. When war erupted again, Americans were unprepared. Each side had made its cause exceptional—anti-Semitism a unique hatred, Zionism a unique evil—and that rhetorical brinksmanship left no room for the harder work of ensuring uniform equality and pluralism for all. From silence to chaos, we found ourselves without a coherent language to combat hatred.

The past several years have illustrated an old Yiddish saying: Lekh mikh nisht, un lakh mikh nisht. Literally: “Don’t beat me, and don’t lick me.” But in effect: Don’t demonize us, but don’t fetishize us, either. Since Charlottesville, Jews have been both demonized and tokenized across the political spectrum. Building a way forward requires de-exceptionalizing anti-Semitism—not erasing its distinct features, but treating it as one hatred among others, deserving the same protections, no more and no less.

[Yair Rosenberg: The anti-Semitic revolution on the American right]

This wisdom extends beyond Jews. Every group deserves protection from hatred without becoming a political football. Every group deserves to be seen clearly—neither as villain nor as mascot. That includes Palestinian Americans, who have watched their own dehumanization dismissed while anti-Semitism is used against their speech.

This is why we need a new model—one that treats no group’s claim to protection as special, one that recognizes free speech and equal protection as complementary values enabling all citizens to participate fully in democratic life. Building that model will require Jewish communal leaders to resist the politicization of Jewish fear—and progressive coalitions to make room for Jewish particularity without imposing a litmus test on Jews alone.

What would this look like in practice? Rejecting the warping of anti-Semitism for partisan ends. Acknowledging anti-Semitism from all directions rather than only the versions that serve our politics. Building democratic coalitions across differences rather than demanding ideological purity as the price of admission.

Nine years after Charlottesville, we have seen the stumbles and overcorrections, the cynicism and despair. What we haven’t done is imagine a better future in which fighting anti-Semitism strengthens civil rights for all.

That work begins with honesty about how we got here. The bigots who marched in Charlottesville were real. So is our capacity to build something better. In 2017, two chants collided in the dark. We can still answer them together.

This article was adapted from James Loeffler’s forthcoming book, Exceptional Hatred: Antisemitism and the Fight over Free Speech in Modern America

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