An eye-opening reckoning with the most mythologized free-speech case in American history—a legend that has shaped politics for half a century.

In 1977, neo-Nazis announced plans to demonstrate in Skokie, Illinois—a Chicago suburb home to hundreds of Holocaust survivors. The American Civil Liberties Union took the Nazis’ case, defended their First Amendment rights all the way to the Supreme Court, and won. On its fiftieth anniversary, 'Skokie' is a symbol of free-speech absolutism and a bygone liberal era. But almost everything people believe about the case is wrong. Sometimes the story is a lesson in tolerance. But it has also been twisted to defend the platforming and promotion of bigotry, and to attack those who believe free speech should protect everyone, not just the belligerent and powerful.

In The Legend of Skokie, award-winning journalist Jonathan M. Katz uncovers the deeper story: the survivors who fought their own government to stop the fascists, the militant rabbi whose cadres promised blood, and the Nazi leader with dark secrets and a shocking family history. Digging through archives and in probing interviews, Katz traces the case from courtroom to street, from the set of a famous scene in The Blues Brothers, to Charlottesville, the Capitol on January 6, and the “free-speech” rhetoric used to suppress dissent. The Legend of Skokie is a reckoning with a case you thought you knew, and what it means for the future of our democracy.