In this seminar, historian James Loeffler will discuss how American Jews have historically grappled with free speech and hate speech in modern American life.

James Loeffler is the Felix Posen Professor of Jewish History at Johns Hopkins University, and Kogod Senior Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. His writings include two award-winning books Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century and The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire, and two edited volumes, The Law of Strangers: Jewish Lawyers and International Law in the Twentieth Century and A Jew in the Street: New Views on European Jewish History. He is current writing a book about antisemitism and free speech in postwar America, which grew out of his Atlantic magazine article about his coverage of the trial of the White Supremacist organizers of the 2017 attack on Charlottesville.