Race is the wound America sees. Anti-Semitism is the one it doesn’t.
If you want to defend the South and Western civilization from the Jew and his dark-skinned allies, be at Charlottesville on 12 August.” Nine years ago, that message spread across the internet. The call was answered by several hundred white supremacists, who marched through the University of Virginia. The rage-filled men carried torches, chanting, “Jews will not replace us.” They swarmed around the historic rotunda, arriving at a statue of the school’s founder, Thomas Jefferson. There they met a tiny band of student counterprotesters who responded with their own chant: “Black lives matter.” That evening turned violent, the first act in a deadly weekend. Most Americans remember the torches, the rage, the death. But those clashing chants also revealed a gap between the targets of hatred and the words available to name it.
