Joel Swanson
By Joel Swanson
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Opinion Learning Hebrew brought me closer to Judaism — and alienated me from Israel
Israeli politicians tells their own people one thing and English-speakers another, writes a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago
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Opinion Debate | Should supporting Israel be a litmus test for participation in a rally against antisemitism?
Last Sunday, thousands gathered in the nation’s capital to protest a rise in antisemitism. The “No Fear: A Rally In Solidarity With The Jewish People” event was organized in response to the global uptick in antisemitic attacks during the last round of violence in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza in May. The rally brought…
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Opinion Debate | Should we use the term ‘apartheid’ in discussing Israel?
Human Rights Watch, a major international advocacy group, on Tuesday issued a report alleging Israeli officials are committing the crime of apartheid. Conversations about the ways in which that term may or may not apply to Israel have become more prominent in recent years. With this latest development, we asked contributing columnists Joel Swanson and…
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Opinion Is Naftali Bennett Israel’s Ted Cruz? Comparisons to help you make sense of the Israeli election.
Keeping track of the myriad players in Israel’s election on Tuesday can be dizzying, even though we’ve seen this movie before, as this is the Jewish state’s fourth balloting in less than two years. For confused Americans who want to follow along but are unsure how to understand all of the major players — what’s…
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Opinion Trump has not done teshuva — so the Senate must convict him
Even for those of us whose hearts are hardened and who have tragically come to expect a certain degree of political violence in our system, the video was still hard to watch. Footage shown for the first time this week during the second impeachment trial of former President Trump reveals just how close the events…
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Opinion Sheldon Adelson is gone. Soon his favorite political projects will be, too.
Sheldon Adelson, the self-made casino billionaire and leading political donor to right-wing political causes in both the United States and Israel, passed away this week at the age of 87. Reactions to the loss of one of the leading Jewish political donors came swiftly, with political allies such as Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu hailing…
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Opinion Trump has nurtured far-right extremism at every turn. This is his fault.
“Stand back and stand by.” When President Trump said those words to the far-right paramilitary group, the Proud Boys, at a presidential debate in September, I felt a terribly deep pit open in my stomach. I feared that Trump’s overt dog whistle to a right-wing paramilitary group — by no means the only time he…
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Opinion Political concession is a Jewish value — we know abandoning it can be deadly
President Trump is not a man inclined to graciously accept political defeat. Of course, we knew that long before this past weekend. But on Sunday, the Washington Post published the audio and transcript of an extraordinary phone call between President Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which Trump baldly asked Raffensperger to…
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Opinion Admit it, American Jewish establishment: Peter Beinart was right
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