Margolis Lecture: Antisemitism and Free Speech in Modern America

Save the Date: February 13, 2025, 5:30p
Annual Sylvia and Irving Margolis Lecture on the Jewish Experience

A Pogrom in Chicago: Antisemitism and Free Speech in Modern America

with James Loeffler, Johns Hopkins University

Can we stop antisemitic hate speech before it turns violent? In 1949 a five-day pogrom rocked Chicago and led to a revolutionary First Amendment ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court. In this lecture, historian James Loeffler explores this forgotten episode and its meaning for the questions of public protest, civil rights, and violence that we face today.

James Loeffler is 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.