It was getting so hard to talk in Boulder that Hilary Kalisman, a university professor, worried that vitriol over Gaza would end in violence.
City Council meetings had become heated, and chants, to some, felt threatening. Professor Kalisman, who teaches Jewish history at the University of Colorado Boulder, had felt the blowback herself. A practicing Jew, she has been called an antisemite for allowing words like “genocide” and “apartheid” in discussions.
On Sunday, at the beginning of the Jewish holiday Shavuot, Dr. Kalisman prepared to participate in a synagogue panel aimed to defuse the tension. The session – “Building a New Language for Israel/Palestine After Oct. 7” – never happened.
Why We Wrote This
Some 80% of Americans agree at least slightly with the statement that “Words can be violence,” and a growing number believe that violence can be justified to silence ideas they find dangerous. What will that mean for freedom of speech?
Instead, the gathering turned into a vigil after a man disguised as a gardener used Molotov cocktails and a weed sprayer filled with gasoline to attack a peaceful gathering of Jews in support of freeing Gaza hostages. Authorities say the man, an Egyptian national, shouted “Free Palestine,” and that he confessed that he planned the attack against Zionists for over a year.
“What concerns me is that rhetoric [will be blamed] for this violence … even though the person doing it is not the same as the people who are [peacefully] protesting for Palestine,” says Professor Kalisman, author of “Teachers as State-Builders: Education and the Making of the Modern Middle East.” “I worry that conflating that is an excuse to shut down conversations about this issue of any kind.”
From the shooting of a Jewish couple outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, to the attempted murder of Gov. Josh Shapiro and his family during the burning of the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion, to what the FBI is investigating as a terrorist attack in Boulder, antisemitism in the United States is reaching generational highs. And beyond the attacks on people of the Jewish faith, researchers have noted with alarm growing waves of public support for violence aimed at those who espouse ideas seen by some as dangerous. The attempted assassination of President Donald Trump during the 2024 election also can be seen as part of a disturbing trend, they say.
What’s coming into focus is a shifting definition among Americans more broadly of what free speech means. Many have grown suspicious of language, increasingly conflating words with bullets. Some 80% of Americans agreed at least slightly with the statement that “Words can be violence,” according to the National Speech Index by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. And about 30% of U.S. college students said violence could be justified to shut down speech.
Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/ZUMA Press Wire/Reuters
As that notion grows, protecting free speech is crucial because it helps to moderate the effects of heated rhetoric, says Nadine Strossen, a constitutional law professor at New York Law School.
“There’s an emerging paradigm: Words are violence, but actual violence is expression,” says Professor Strossen, author of “HATE: Why We Should Resist It With Free Speech, not Censorship.”
The founders used the First Amendment to cement free speech as a civic badge in a country where the government served the will of the people. In the 20th century, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that curtailing citizen speech could empower a majority to suppress unpopular ideas.
“Punishing people for their speech is not going to change their attitudes nor deter them from engaging in violent or discriminatory conduct,” says Professor Strossen. “To the contrary, in many cases it may well be actually counterproductive. One person’s hate speech is someone else’s loving speech.”
Before he was elected again, President Trump positioned himself as a champion of the First Amendment. He signed an executive order on his first day back in the White House titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.”
But his administration has arrested and is seeking to deport international students who protested Israel’s war against Hamas. It is also seeking to comb through the social media feeds of students before granting or revoking visas. And Mr. Trump has pledged to outlaw flag-burning, which the Supreme Court has ruled is an action protected by the First Amendment.
“Serious acts of violence are still, mercifully, uncommon,” writes Max Horder, a senior fellow at the Network Contagion Research Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, in The Spectator, a British magazine. “But the response to such acts is significant – surface tremors that signal powerful tectonic shifts in the civic ground on which Americans have walked, confidently, for centuries.”
Lee Jussim, who leads the Social Perception Laboratory at Rutgers in Newark, New Jersey, found in a survey that 43% of respondents, especially younger ones, believed that the December slaying of a health care CEO was justified, even though he had not been charged with any crime.
In Colorado, authorities have charged 40-something Mohamed Sabry Soliman with federal hate-crime charges and state charges of attempted murder. A dozen people were injured in the attack on a group known as Run for Their Lives that gathered regularly at the Pearl Street Mall to demonstrate for the return of Israeli hostages.
The Trump administration has held up Mr. Soliman, whose visa had expired, as an example of the danger of unchecked immigration. On Wednesday a judge temporarily blocked the deportation of his wife and children.
Some Jewish leaders, however, blame the power of partisan rhetoric to inflame passions to the point of violence.
The Boulder attack is part of “an increase in people who think that violence is a proper response to either speech or political stances that they don’t like,” says Rabbi Jack Moline, president emeritus of Interfaith Alliance, a pro-democracy faith movement in Washington.
And that sentiment comes amid growing concern that shouting “Free Palestine” provides political cover for attacking people of the Jewish faith.
“America has an amazing ability to decide to hear and not to hear what it wants,” says Rabbi Nolan Lebovitz, senior rabbi of Valley Beth Shalom in California and a member of the executive board of the Zionist Rabbinic Coalition. “There can be no misunderstanding anymore about this kind of coded language … [that] has been used now for 18 months in the public square, marched down Main Street, and now we’re finally seeing the repercussions.”
Pro-Palestinian groups say Mr. Soliman is an “outsider” whose acts shouldn’t be conflated with efforts to help the Palestinian people, more than 50,000 of whom have been killed. But they fear the attack will be used to justify a shutdown of pro-Palestinian speech. Last year, the University of Colorado Boulder shut down a Palestinian campus group amid protests.
“As we speak out against this unacceptable crime in Boulder, we also reject the cynical attempts by anti-Palestinian racists and anti-Muslim extremists who seek to use this attack to justify their own bigotry and their war on free speech in America,” said a statement from the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
The struggle is emblematic of what Sean Stevens, chief research adviser at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression in Philadelphia, says is “a constant feedback loop where people of all political ilks and beliefs engage in this behavior, and it keeps ratcheting up the problems. It’s like a biological system that’s broken down and never gets back to equilibrium.”
In Boulder, Professor Kalisman has witnessed heartening attempts by students to engage in debates with others with whom they profoundly disagree. At the same time, she, as a teacher, navigates a sensitive public square where she has at times been seen as the villain.
“I faced a lot of vitriol without [participating in protests],” she says. “But I really believe people should be able to say those things, right? I think people should be able to talk about colonialism, about genocide, and … to march down the street and say, ‘I’m a Zionist.’ People don’t have to like it, and you should be ready for people to criticize you. But you should be able to do it without … legal consequences.”
Instead of the attack in Boulder hardening divides, Rabbi Moline hopes it will push Americans toward a more spiritual response.
“People need to maintain hope, and they need to maintain respect for humanity,” he says. “Hope that we will live up to our better inclinations, and respect that we not imitate the ways we condemn.”
