"Exceptional Hatred": Antisemitism & Free Speech in America and Germany

James Loeffler is Felix Posen Professor of Modern Jewish History at Johns Hopkins University, and Kogod Senior Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. He writes widely on modern Jewish history from antisemitism to Zionism, with a focus on the overlooked ties between the Jewish past and the global present in politics, law, and culture.

Anna-Bettina Kaiser holds a chair in Public Law and the Foundations of Law at the Law Faculty at Humboldt University Berlin. She earned both her doctorate and her habilitation from the University of Freiburg/Breisgau. She has been co-director of Humboldt University’s Integrative Research Institute ‘Law & Society’ since 2019. In 2023–24, she was a Fulbright Scholar and a Senior Emile Noël Global Fellow at New York University. Her areas of expertise include constitutional law (constitutions in times of crisis, freedom of speech), comparative constitutional law, and constitutional theory. Her monograph “Ausnahmeverfassungsrecht” (“The German Emergency Constitution”) was on the best non-fiction list of the German newspaper DIE ZEIT in July/August 2020. Kaiser’s most recent publications include contributions on “The State” in The Cambridge Handbook of Constitutional Theory (2025) and on “Freedom of Assembly and Freedom of Association” in The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Constitutional Law (forthcoming).

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