Bess Myerson, the first and only Jewish Miss America, was crowned on Sept. 8, 1945. In the hazy nostalgia that passes for historical understanding nowadays, people might assume her victory was due to the warm embrace that America gave all things Jewish after the horrors of World War II.
It wasn’t.
James Loeffler starts his new book, “Exceptional Hatred: Antisemitism and the Fight Over Free Speech in Modern America,” with Myerson’s win, noting that old habits die hard. Sponsors who traditionally embraced Miss America got cold feet. The Catalina Swimwear Company, which provided bathing suits for the contestants, withdrew its promised contract and scholarship.
“Several corporate sponsors refused to hire a Jewish spokesmodel,” he writes. “The Ford Motor Company reneged on its pledge of a gift of a new automobile.”
Odd — you’d think that Henry Ford, who’d accepted a decoration from the Nazis, might be eager to put some distance between his company and his former pals. But no.
Such expectations wilt as you read Loeffler’s book, which uses antisemitism to skillfully explore the difficulty of legally squelching haters in a nation whose First Amendment sanctifies free speech.
A significant chunk of Americans sympathized with Hitler before, during and after World War II — 70 new American antisemitic organizations appeared within a year after Myerson’s win.
The first two sections of the book focus on events in Chicago. We think of the city as a liberal bastion. Now, maybe. But not in 1946.
“Chicago,” the American Mercury wrote, “the birthplace of the German American Bund and scene of the greatest wartime seditious activities” — a Lane Tech grad was landed by U-boat during the war with a raft of Nazi spies — was on its way to becoming “the hate center of the nation and the staff headquarters for incipient American fascism.”
Thus in February 1946, notorious antisemite Father Arthur Terminiello, on a coast-to-coast speaking tour promoting Christian Nationalism, held a packed rally on the West Side. Protesters rioted outside and Terminiello was convicted under a Chicago ordinance against disturbing the peace.
“The violence during that final hour would form the centerpiece of the legal trial to come,” Loeffler writes. “Who were the victims and who were the perpetrators? Did the words inside the building stir the mayhem outside?”
Lower courts said yes and fined Terminiello $100. The Supreme Court overturned the conviction, with Justice Robert Jackson warning, in his famous dissent, that the Bill of Rights should not be allowed to become “a suicide pact.”
The year of the ruling, 1949, saw another riot, one Loeffler calls “a postwar pogrom.” Aaron Bindman, a union organizer, made the mistake of inviting Black associates to a party at his apartment in then working class, white Irish Englewood. The neighbors went berserk.
“Bloodied victims crawled along the streets pursued by mobs; journalists and civil rights officials from the ADL and a liberal Catholic group were assaulted. On the main Englewood commercial strip, mobs ransacked Jewish-owned stores, beating the store owners who tried to prevent them. Hundreds of policeman stood by idly. Most of those arrested were victims.”
That’s why I’m not as worked up as some over our current situation; I know my history.
The second section dissects the 1977 attempt by Nazis to march in Skokie. Here the book bogs down a bit, navigating every PR feint and legal twist, often conducted by Jewish ACLU lawyers defending Nazis.
The last section begins in Charlottesville, Virginia, with the torchlit 2017 “Unite the Right” rally, leading to today, when Jews are being cynically played by the Trump administration as a pretext to shred civil rights.
“This hyperbolic assault on the teaching of American history turned anti-discrimination law into a cudgel to suppress critical discussion of racism’s historical legacies,” Loeffler writes. “Trump’s second term delivered the cruelest irony: abusing Jewish fear to dismantle higher education. Without due process or court findings, the administration froze university funding, withdrew support for scientific research, and detained and deported foreign students for statements about Israel. Constitutional protections collapsed. What claimed to be the largest legal reckoning with antisemitism in American history doubled as its supreme trivialization — transforming a real problem into a political cudgel against universities, Palestinians, Muslims and immigrants.”
What’s next? The mainstream media flickers and fades, while “the internet persists as a rage factory where racists self-radicalize in digital echo changers.”
Fair warning — “Exceptional Hatred” is a methodical, detailed legal history, recounting the serpentine court cases that stem from four jarring antisemitic incidents, three in and around Chicago. What hope Loeffler offers is that the law remains, battered and marginalized, but still a weakening guardrail against the president’s bottomless hate-mongering and institution-wrecking. But the bottom line is clear:
“Antisemitic speech poses less danger than authoritarianism itself.”