Washington University’s Department of Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies (JIMES) is planning its Annual Distinguished Jewish Studies Lecture on Tuesday March 1, focusing on “From Skokie to Charlottesville: American Antisemitism in Court.” James Loeffler of the University of Virginia will deliver the lecture, which starts at 6 p.m. and will be offered both online (via Zoom) and in-person (in WashU’s Hillman Hall, Room 70). 

For more information on the event, or for a Zoom link, visit https://bit.ly/JIMES-2022.

Below is a description of the lecture from JIMES: 

“The recent Charlottesville trial of White Supremacists for organizing a violent 2017 rally raised the specter of another famous American court case, the 1977 Skokie Affair, when the U.S. Supreme Court permitted neo-Nazis to march in the town home to the largest American community of Holocaust survivors. Each case raised profound questions about free speech and hate speech, race and religion. In this lecture, historian and author James Loeffler, who covered the Charlottesville trial for The Atlantic, will compare the cases and discuss what they reveal about the role of law in the struggle against antisemitism.”

Loeffler is the Ida and Nathan Kolodiz Director of the Jewish Studies Program and Professor and the Jay Berkowitz Chair in Jewish History in the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia. He teaches courses in Jewish and European history, Russian and East European history, international legal history and the history of human rights. 

In 2020 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research. Loeffler’s publications include: “The Law of Strangers: Jewish Lawyers and International Law in the Twentieth Century” (Cambridge University Press, 2019), “Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century” (Yale University Press, 2018) and “The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire” (Yale University Press, 2010).