For decades, the American political establishment has treated antisemitism as a moral absolute—something that must be confronted wherever it appears. It should be. But what happens when the language meant to combat hatred is itself turned into a political weapon?
In this edition of Scheer Intelligence, Robert Scheer speaks with James Loeffler, a Johns Hopkins professor of modern Jewish history and author of Exceptional Hatred: Antisemitism and the Fight Over Free Speech in Modern America, about the increasingly toxic battle over who gets to define antisemitism, Jewish identity, Zionism and the boundaries of permissible speech.
Loeffler’s central warning is that complexity has become almost impossible to sustain. Antisemitism is real, including on the right and in forms that cannot be neatly assigned to either political camp. Islamophobia is real. Jewish students who identify with Israel can feel threatened, while Jewish students who oppose Israel and Palestinian students can also feel targeted or silenced. Yet instead of applying constitutional principles consistently, universities and governments have often responded to political pressure, panic and competing ideological demands.
The result is a dangerous inversion: a concept rooted in the protection of a vulnerable minority can become a weapon in political combat, while genuine antisemitism risks being obscured by the very polarization supposedly aimed at fighting it.
At the heart of the conversation is a deceptively simple question: Who gets to define a religion—and what happens when the government claims the authority to do so? Scheer and Loeffler return repeatedly to the First and Fourteenth Amendments, academic freedom, due process and the American history of antisemitism to examine what is being lost when political loyalty becomes a test of identity.
As Loeffler puts it, Jews have never agreed about Israel, and they never will. The answer, he argues, cannot be ideological litmus tests, selective enforcement or abandoning free expression. It has to begin with rules that protect everyone—even when the speech is uncomfortable, controversial or politically inconvenient.
That is a much harder standard than simply deciding which side is guilty. And it is precisely why this conversation matters.
Loeffler shows how antisemitism in America has always been shaped by the anxieties of the moment, and how the current weaponization of the term—by both political parties—has collapsed legitimate debate about Israel, Zionism, and Jewish identity into a series of loyalty tests. Scheer presses him on the constitutional stakes: police at classroom doors, governors declaring criticism of a foreign state off‑limits, and faculty threatened for doing the work their scholarship demands. Together they map a crisis not of “campus chaos,” but of a democracy losing its tolerance for complexity at the exact moment complexity is required.
Editor’s Note: At a moment when the once vaunted model of responsible journalism is overwhelmingly the play thing of self-serving billionaires and their corporate scribes, alternatives of integrity are desperately needed, and ScheerPost is one of them. Please support our independent journalism by contributing to our online donation platform, Network for Good, or send a check to our new PO Box. We can’t thank you enough, and promise to keep bringing you this kind of vital news.
You can also make a donation to our PayPal or subscribe to our Patreon.