Defending My Enemy: Skokie and the Legacy of Free Speech in America

With a foreword by Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton and an afterword by Nadine StrossenA new edition of the most important free speech book of the past half-century, with a new essay by the author on some of the top First Amendment controversies of today“If Aryeh Neier had done nothing else in his absolutely towering human rights, civil liberties career other than write Defending My Enemy, that still would have made him a hero and a giant.”-Nadine Strossen, former president, American Civil Liberties UnionWhen Nazis wanted to express their right to free speech in 1977 by marching through Skokie, Illinois-a town with a large population of Holocaust survivors-Aryeh Neier, then the national director of the ACLU and himself a Holocaust survivor, came to the Nazis’ defense.Explaining what many saw as a despicable bridge too far for the First Amendment, Neier spelled out his thoughts about free speech in his 1979 book Defending My Enemy. Nearly fifty years later, Neier revisits the topic o