Defending My Enemy — Aryeh Neier

Full Title: Defending My Enemy: American Nazis, the Skokie Case, and the Risks of Freedom
Aryeh Neier
E. P. Dutton · New York · 1979
First Edition · First Printing · Publisher Review Copy

The Book:
The First Edition · First Printing of Aryeh Neier’s contemporary account of the Skokie free-speech controversy and the ACLU’s decision to defend the constitutional rights of American Nazis. Neier, then the ACLU’s national executive director and himself a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, used the book to explain why civil liberties must protect even speakers whose ideas are hostile to liberty itself. 182 pp. Original red cloth with gilt spine lettering and original unclipped $9.95 dust jacket retained. An original E. P. Dutton publisher review slip, dated February 28, 1979, is laid in.

Condition:
Fine book in a Fine original dust jacket. Original red cloth remains exceptionally clean and bright, with sharp gilt spine lettering and no significant wear observed. Interior is fresh and unmarked. The original pictorial jacket is unclipped at $9.95 and remains virtually without material wear. Publisher review slip retained. No evidence of rebinding, restoration, facsimile jacket, or book-club manufacture observed.

Story Of The Book

Aryeh Neier defended Nazis because he believed freedom meant almost nothing if it protected only people we liked.

When the National Socialist Party of America sought to march in Skokie, Illinois—a community with a large Jewish population that included Holocaust survivors—the ACLU’s decision to defend the demonstrators’ constitutional rights provoked outrage.

For Neier, the issue was painfully personal.

Born to Jewish parents in Berlin in 1937, he escaped Nazi Germany as a child while much of his extended family was later killed in the Holocaust. Yet as the ACLU’s national executive director, he argued that constitutional rights could not depend on the decency of the speaker.

That is what makes Defending My Enemy so difficult—and so important. Neier was not asking readers to excuse Nazi ideas. He was arguing that a free society proves its commitment to liberty precisely when the speaker is hateful, frightening, or despised.

The test of free speech, in Neier’s argument, is whether we still believe in it when the person speaking is our enemy.

Why It’s In The Collection

Defending My Enemy belongs in Consigned to Darkness because free expression becomes meaningful only when defending it becomes uncomfortable.

The Skokie controversy forced one of the hardest questions in civil-liberties law: whether a democratic society can protect itself from authoritarian ideas without adopting authoritarian methods of its own.

Neier’s biography made that question even sharper. He had every personal reason to hate the ideology he was defending from government suppression.

This first printing preserves that argument at the moment it entered public debate, and the original publisher review slip strengthens the copy as a publication-period object rather than a later record of the controversy.

The book does not ask whether Nazis deserve sympathy. It asks whether freedom survives if rights disappear when sympathy does.

Collection Categories: Free Expression · Publication-Event Object · Anti-Authoritarianism · Political Dissent · Political History · Civil Rights · Human Rights · Holocaust & Genocide

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Authentication Evidence

• Title page identifies the work as Defending My Enemy: American Nazis, the Skokie Case, and the Risks of Freedom by Aryeh Neier.

• Title page identifies E. P. Dutton · New York as publisher.

• Copyright page states “Copyright © 1979 by Aryeh Neier.”

• Copyright page explicitly states “First Edition.”

• Copyright page carries the complete number line 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1, directly confirming First Printing status.

• Original red publisher’s cloth remains present.

• Binding retains gilt spine lettering.

• Original E. P. Dutton dust jacket remains present.

• Dust jacket is unclipped and retains the original $9.95 publisher’s price.

• Jacket design is credited to James Udell.

• Original publisher review slip is laid in.

• Review slip identifies the title, author, $9.95 price, and publication date of February 28, 1979.

• Review slip requests two copies of any resulting review, consistent with publisher promotional distribution.

• ISBN 0-525-08972-1 matches independent bibliographic records for the 1979 Dutton first edition.

• Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 78-10180 matches independent bibliographic records.

• Physical collation of 182 pages agrees with independent bibliographic records for the first edition.

• No evidence of book-club manufacture, later printing, rebinding, restoration, or facsimile jacket is observed.

• Observable physical and bibliographic evidence supports identification as the 1979 First Edition · First Printing · Publisher Review Copy.