The response to the events of Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, when white supremacist protestors gathered at the University of Virginia campus following the removal of a Confederate monument, defines the current state of how antisemitism is treated today.
“Something broke in that moment,” said historian James Loeffler, the Felix Posen Professor in Modern Jewish History and director of the Stulman Jewish Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University. “The break not only disclosed the face of hatred, but the contradictions and mythologies of American politics across the spectrum.”
University of Florida students and Gainesville residents gathered Thursday night to hear Loeffler speak at the Chabad UF Jewish Student and Community Center, which hosted “How Charlottesville Changed America.” Loeffler spoke about the Unite the Right protests in Charlottesville in 2017 and said that the responses to the rally revealed patterns in how antisemitism is addressed politically through occlusion, exclusion and extrusion.
“Our crisis, that we often think of as engulfing, didn’t begin on Oct. 7, 2023, or Jan. 6, 2021,” Loeffler said. “It began August 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia.”
Loeffler said the Unite the Right rally was the largest gathering of white supremacists in a decade. He said that the night before the Aug. 12, 2017, protest, a group of people appeared on the University of Virginia's campus grounds with flaming torches, shouting chants such as “They will not replace us.”
During the scheduled protest, Loeffler said the rally turned violent when white supremacist James Alex Fields Jr. rammed his vehicle into a crowd, resulting in numerous injuries and the death of anti-racism protester Heather Heyer. Two Virginia state troopers were killed when their helicopter crashed while returning from surveilling the protests.
Recognizing and looking at the responses to the event are just as important as the event itself, Loeffler said. He said the response to the rally could be categorized into occlusion, exclusion and extrusion.
Occlusion, he said, could be defined as ignoring antisemitism altogether. He said an example of this was when then-University of Virginia President, Teresa Sullivan, responded to the rally. In her statement, Loeffler said antisemitism was never acknowledged, but other hate acts were, such as racism and homophobia.
“In some of the statements of leaders, whether university leaders, local officials or national officials, antisemitism isn’t even mentioned,” Loeffler said. “There’s an erasure of antisemitism.”
Loeffler said exclusion is when antisemitism is acknowledged, but only in specific contexts such as serving an agenda or political narrative. He said an example of this was when the Minority Rights Coalition at the University of Virginia denied the Jewish Leadership Council's request to join the group in 2018.
They were told that they could not join unless they distanced themselves from Zionists, Loeffler said.
Extrusion, he said, occurs when someone takes something and adds pressure to it to push it out of context and weaponize it. Loeffler said President Donald Trump’s response to Charlottesville was an example of extrusion as Trump did not directly condemn antisemitism but reframed the issue.
“He couldn’t bring himself to condemn what happened,” Loeffler said. “Instead, he repeatedly asserted that there were very fine people on both sides.”
Loeffler said Trump extended this pattern of the rally through a 13,000-word report that only acknowledged Charlottesville in two paragraphs, while the rest focused on campus issues.
“So our challenge, I think, has to be to make sense of how we get antisemitism not to be seen as something of an exception,” Loeffler said.
Arlene Bargad, an audience member, said her biggest takeaway from the lecture was the idea to find a way to talk about antisemitism without it being used for political purposes and instead used to educate others.
“I think people need to be open to many ideas,” said Bargad, 86. “What’s happening in Israel right now is making it very difficult, even among Jews, to have conversations.”