After Charlottesville, a historian asks: Did America miss the point?

(RNS) — James Loeffler was a professor of Jewish history at the University of Virginia in 2017 when white supremacists marched through Charlottesville wielding torches and chanting, “Jews will not replace us.”

Yet in the aftermath of the violent and deadly Unite the Right rally — originally planned to protest the removal of the statue of General Robert E. Lee from Charlottesville’s former Lee Park — the university’s focus was on addressing the racist, anti-Black bigotry espoused by the neo-Nazi protesters. The antisemitism so overtly displayed by the marchers was almost entirely sidelined by the university, Loeffler writes. And when the Jewish Leadership Council sought membership in the UVA student-run Minority Rights Coalition, it was denied because of its pro-Israel stance. (UVA didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

Loeffler, who is now a professor of Modern Jewish History at Johns Hopkins University, wondered about that omission and decided to research how Americans approached antisemitism during other pivotal moments. The result was his new book , “Exceptional Hatred: Antisemitism and the Fight over Free Speech in Modern America,” an examination of how the public and…