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.
The U.S. presidential election has divided Jews as it has the whole country. While recent surveys show that some three-quarters of Jewish voters support former Vice President Joe Biden, as they have largely backed Democrats for the last century, a sizable portion of our communities are siding with the incumbent Republican President Donald Trump. With…
Eric Early, a Republican candidate for Congress in California, Tweeted this weekend about the philanthropist George Soros, a Holocaust survivor — who Early called “a Nazi sympathizer” and “a danger to our nation.” As the Forward, the Anti-Defamation League, and other sources have all ably documented, there is no truth behind the spurious claim that…
Facebook announced a major policy change to its posting guidelines this week to ban content that “denies or distorts” the Holocaust. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, who in 2018 had said Holocaust denial was “nothing more than things that different people get wrong,” explained the move by saying his “own thinking has evolved as I’ve seen…
On Tuesday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York announced sweeping new restrictions on parts of New York City with rapidly rising rates of coronavirus cases, placing a particular focus on neighborhoods with large proportions of Orthodox Jews. The news came just days after New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio specifically asked the state to…
By almost all accounts, Tuesday’s debate between President Trump and Vice President Biden will be remembered most for the President’s refusal to condemn the anti-Semitic white supremacist group known as the Proud Boys. But the context of those words involved another controversial group altogether: Antifa. Chris Wallace asked President Donald Trump to condemn white supremacists…
These are difficult days for Jews. The stress of the pandemic and economic devastation it is wreaking, combined with High Holidays in quarantine and surging antisemitism finding new forms for the strange times we’re living in, create a perfect recipe for Jewish anxiety. But in at least two ways, this was also a year of…
Every Jewish person knows that this is going to be a High Holiday season like no other in recent memory. Most of us won’t be able to attend services in synagogue in person, and many of us won’t even be able to visit our families. We’re all going to become very familiar with all of…
One of the most defining characteristics of President Trump’s personality is his consistent refusal to apologize, even when he has obviously behaved wrongly. It’s something observers have pointed out about Trump ever since he launched his campaign in 2015. But Joe Biden makes a point of portraying himself as a different sort of person, someone…
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