Is Antisemitism an ‘Exceptional Hatred?’

(RNS) — Let me take you back — almost fifty years ago.

In 1977, a man named Frank Collin announced that he planned to march his fellow neo-Nazis through Skokie, Illinois, a Chicago suburb where roughly one in ten residents had survived the death camps. Chicago had already blocked him from marching there, and his history of violence and property damage offered the city an easy “no.”

P.S. Frank Collin was the son of a German Jewish Holocaust survivor.

The ACLU took his case anyway, on First Amendment grounds, and Skokie became the defining American test of whether even the most hateful speech deserves protection.

That fight did not end in 1978. It resurfaced in Charlottesville in 2017, where marchers carrying torches chanted “Jews will not replace us” under the same constitutional canopy that had once shielded Collin.

And it has resurfaced again, right now, on college campuses, where students and administrators are still arguing over what speech the law should protect and what speech should count as harassment.

Skokie did not settle anything. It just wrote the opening chapter.

I learned about Collin, and much more, from James Loeffler, a historian at Johns Hopkins and…