The Hatred That Broke American Politics
The Atlantic · LC · trust 31/100
Race is the wound America sees. Anti-Semitism is the one it doesn’t.
Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Joe Sohm / Visions of America / Universal Images Group / Getty; Shay Horse / NurPhoto / Getty. August 23, 2026, 7 AM ET Share Save “If you want to defend the South and Western civilization from the Jew and his dark-skinned allies, be at Charlottesville on 12 August.” Nine years ago, that message spread across the internet. The call was answered by several hundred white supremacists, who marched through the University of Virginia. The rage-filled men carried torches, chanting, “Jews will not replace us.” They swarmed around the historic rotunda, arriving at a statue of the school’s founder, Thomas Jefferson. There they met a tiny band of student counterprotesters who responded with their own chant: “Black lives matter.” That evening turned violent, the first act in a deadly weekend. Most Americans remember the torches, the rage, the death. But those clashing chants also revealed a gap between the targets of hatred and the words available to name it.
Race is the wound America sees. Anti-Semitism is the one it doesn’t. Jews have frequently been imagined as a colorless minority whose great persecution took place elsewhere, or as a group whose Christian-adjacent faith flourished with the religious freedom they found in the United States. But their in-betweenness has always been part of the danger: Jews have never fit neatly into America’s frameworks of identity, and that failure to fit has marked them as suspect, out of place, or impossible to categorize. Depending on the audience, Jews are dismissed as beneficiaries of white privilege or treated as not quite white at all—too assimilated and not assimilated enough, too powerful and too marginal. That ambiguity has placed them, again and again, at the center of America’s battles over free speech and equal protection. When hatred does not fit existing categories, we tend either to ignore it or to overcorrect—both responses that distort the boundaries of free expression.
Our failure to reckon with the anti-Semitism of Charlottesville—on the right and the left—was not merely a missed opportunity. It helped create the opening into which illiberalism has since rushed.
August 2017 marked a turning point, not just for racial populism but for American democracy. That crisis seeded a surge in anti-Semitism. It also helped produce a government campaign against such bigotry that has become a tool for undermining freedom, championed by the Trump administration only when it serves the White House’s purposes. Meanwhile, the progressive left has struggled to sustain its critique of Israel’s war with Palestine—and of American responsibility for a moral catastrophe—without letting that critique curdle into conspiracism.
Americans appear to face an impossible choice between protecting free speech and safeguarding equal rights. But that is a false dichotomy. Honoring both will, however, require de-exceptionalizing anti-Semitism. And that, in turn, necessitates returning to Charlottesville, and reckoning with how both the left and the right failed in its aftermath.
Over the course of 2017 , three separate racist rallies took place in Charlottesville. In May, the alt-right provocateur Richard Spencer led a small rally in downtown Charlottesville to protest a city-council decision to remove two century-old Confederate monuments. A University of Virginia alum with a passion for Wagnerian opera, Spencer dressed old hatred in new clothes. He spoke grandly of restoring white supremacy, and of defeating liberal conspiracies to change America beyond recognition. President Trump’s election gave him cause for hope that Black Lives Matter and antifa would be crushed. “We will not be replaced from this world,” Spencer screamed as plumes of green and gray smoke from flares rose into the sky. “Whites have a future! We have a future of power!”
Two months later, the Ku Klux Klan paraded through town. Although they had come to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, they held banners denouncing Jewish communism and the satanic Talmud. They were met with a massive, raucous counterprotest, inspired in part by a newly formed Black Lives Matter chapter in town, staged by citizens determined to oppose the hatred.
This article was adapted from James Loeffler’s forthcoming book, Exceptional Hatred: Antisemitism and the Fight over Free Speech in Modern America n August brought round three: Spencer returned to town, accompanied by a who’s who of the far right, answering the call to join what they labeled the “Battle of Charlottesville.”
Officially, Unite the Right was a free-speech march in defense of the monument. But several organizers had ties to violent extremist groups and online they made their intentions clear. “Next stop: Charlottesville, VA. Final stop: Auschwitz,” wrote Andrew Anglin of The Daily Stormer . The planners fantasized about mowing down protesters with cars, and repeating the Holocaust—even as they denied it happened. They wrapped retrograde hatred in constitutional pretense. Free speech became both shield and sword.
The weekend brought mayhem: dozens of injuries, the murder of Heather Heyer, the death of two state troopers. Yet it also exposed the entanglement of race and religion in the racist imagination, which conceived of Jews as invisible power brokers, racial chameleons, white imposters, and anti-Christian infidels.
Charlottesville shocked the country. Yet in its aftermath, America had no vocabulary for describing anti-Semitism in relation to other hatreds—let alone for responding to it. Then–UVA President Teresa Sullivan denounced the violence and “racist, anti-immigrant, homophobic and misogynistic chants,” but made no mention of Jews. The great majority of other statements issued by Virginia-college presidents repeated the same failure. The local school superintendent discarded her back-to-school speech and instead spoke of the…
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