James Loeffler Discusses America's Response to Antisemitism Following Charlottesville 2017
Last week, James Loeffler, the Felix Posen Professor of Modern Jewish History at Johns Hopkins University, presented the 2026 Paul and Dorothy Grob Memorial Lecture entitled, "Charlottesville 2017: Antisemitism at the Crossroads of American Hatred," to a large audience of students, faculty, and community members.
Drawing on his upcoming book Exceptional Hatred: Antisemitism and the Fight Over Free Speech in Modern America, the former UVA Jay Berkowitz Professor of Jewish History discussed his research on the 2017 Charlottesville "Unite the Right" rally that shook the nation. Professor Loeffler argued that this event was the beginning of a national reckoning about American identity. What initially seemed to be a protest against the removal of Confederate statues prominently featured antisemitism, encapsulated in the protestors’ chant: "Jews will not replace us." The rally, he explained, was a protest against non-white and also non-Christian Americans, in response to the diminishing population of America's former majority.
In the aftermath of Charlottesville, institutional leaders and politicians largely responded to the rally's antisemitism in three misguided ways. Some began occluding antisemitism from broader discussions about civil rights and race-based hatred, emphasizing the anti-black hate speech of the rally without considering the antisemitism that had also been centrally present. Conversely, some extruded antisemitism, promoting it to a place of inflated significance in ways that inhibited free speech, often equating criticism of Israel with violent antisemitism. Finally, some began excluding Jews from the public square and groups of various kinds. Ultimately, whether over or under emphasized, antisemitism was made into a kind of exceptional form of hatred by the broader American public.
Professor Loeffler argued that antisemitism must be viewed as equal with other forms of discrimination, not above or beneath them. Only by refusing to demonize Jews or place them on a pedestal of special privilege, he claimed, would antisemitism then be properly combatted.
A lively Q&A followed, during which audience members — many of whom had been present in Charlottesville at the time of the rally — reflected on their experiences and inquired further about subjects like hate speech laws, the motivations for antisemitism, and the complexities of writing a history of an event one had personally experienced.