Skokie, and Lessons for Today

Sar Shalom
In 1977 and 1978, the National Socialist Party of America (NSPA) attempted to march through the Chicago suburb of Skokie, home to numerous survivors of the Holocaust. Acting much like today's university administrators presented with proposals for controversial presentations, the village government refused the NSPA permission to march. The NSPA responded by suing the village, the proceedings of which, both in court and in public, became the subject of the 1981 film Skokie.
If there is any group which is deserving of safe space, it would be the survivors of the Holocaust who traveled thousands of miles from the horrors they experienced, and sought nothing more than to rebuild their lives. Yet, the courts ruled that the neo-Nazis' right to free speech overrode the Holocaust survivors' right to a safe space. The message for today's activists on campus is that there is no right to a safe space on campus that overrides otherwise protected free speech. If someone does not trespass an accepted limit for free speech, then such speech's violating a "safe space" cannot serve as a basis to prohibit it.
A final point is the message delivered by Aryeh Neier to an audience in the synagogue about the difference between the NPSA's planned march through Skokie and the Nazis' original marches through Germany. Neier's point was that the Nazis' ability to march was not what enabled them to grow, rather, it was their ability to restrain anyone who would speak or act against them, and the inability or unwillingness of the Weimar government to protect the rights of those who opposed the Nazis. Such is the case today with Students for Justice for Palestine (SJP) and allied groups on campus today. They freely disrupt presentations by pro-Israel speakers, denying them their right to peacably conduct their talks. The university administrations, as did the Weimar goverment 86 years ago, allows SJP to do so. That is where we must push for a change.