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. The Nazis’ real goal was never to march in Skokie, but to push Chicago into letting them rally in their neighborhood, an integration battleground. Most surprising: the march never happened. The Nazis blinked in the face of mass organizing. The resulting legend has been selectively weaponized: to defend hate speech when convenient and to attack its critics when not.

In The Legend of Skokie, award-winning journalist Jonathan M. Katz follows the formidable survivors who fought to stop the Nazis, the militant rabbi whose cadres promised blood, and the Nazi leader with a secret: he was the son of a Jewish Holocaust survivor. Drawing on archives and interviews, Katz traces the case from courtroom to street, the set of a famous scene in The Blues Brothers, 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 a warning about what was built on its myths.