Joel Swanson is an assistant professor of religion and Jewish studies at Sarah Lawrence College. He holds a doctorate in the history of Judaism from the University of Chicago, and in addition to academic publications, his work has been published in the Forward, Haaretz, Religion Dispatches, Slate, The Times of Israel, The Jerusalem Post and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“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…
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…
We are now weeks away from the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. The end of the Trump era is nigh. Perhaps other than President Trump himself, there has been no figure more important in the White House than his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Kushner has played many roles as Trump’s right…
On a recent trip to Israel, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the U.S. now officially considers the BDS movement to boycott Israel to be antisemitic. Soon after, news broke that Pompeo also plans to label Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Oxfam as antisemitic for their anti-Israel activism. In so doing, Pompeo was…
This week, President-elect Joe Biden announced many of his cabinet picks. And to some, they were eerily familiar, names of people who had served under President Obama or who were adjacent to Obama’s cabinet. Is some good old fashioned stability just what the doctor ordered? Or are we overdue for some serious change? We asked…
On Monday evening, President Trump finally agreed to allow President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team to do its job. What this means is that the next presidency is on its way in. What will a Biden administration’s approach to Israel be? What should it be? We asked Forward contributing columnists Ari Hoffman and Joel Swanson to…
There’s a number that sums up the yawning and growing gap dividing American and Israeli Jews right now. That number is 77. That’s the percentage of American Jewish voters who chose Joe Biden over Donald Trump in this week’s election, according to a preliminary exit poll from J Street. Coincidentally, the number 77 pops up…
On Monday, the night before what felt like the most consequential election in my lifetime, I saw photos of a Jewish cemetery in Grand Rapids, Michigan that had been vandalized with slogans reading “Trump” and “MAGA” in red spray paint. Trump was preparing to fly to Grand Rapids that evening for his very final campaign…
די ענדערונגען בײַם „אוישוויץ־מוזיי“ שאַפֿן אַ באַזונדערע פּראָבלעם פֿאַר עלטערע לײַט
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