Do legal challenges to hate speech protect Jews or threaten them?

Bess Myerson

     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.

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