Joel Swanson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago, where he studies and teaches undergraduate courses on modern Jewish intellectual history. He teaches, speaks and writes widely on Jewish history and politics, for both academic and journalistic sources.
In August of this year, the U.S. Department of Education sent a letter to Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill threatening to revoke $235,000 in federal funding unless they agreed to significantly revise its educational programs. The letter cited the universities’ positive portrayal of Islam, noting that in the consortium’s…
Nineteen out of twenty American Jews are Zionists. At least, that’s the perception you would get if you read the breathless coverage of a recent Gallup poll about American Jewish political attitudes. The fact that the poll found that 95% of American Jews “have favorable views of Israel” was cited by a variety of commentators…
Last week, American Jews found themselves defending their loyalty to the U.S. after President Trump said that Jews who vote for Democrats display “either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.” By contrasting the Jewish people in Israel, who “love him” with American Jews, who “don’t know him or like him” and who “don’t…
This year, Jews across the United States marked the fast day of Tisha B’Av — the saddest day on the Jewish calendar which commemorates the destruction of the Temples in Jerusalem — by protesting against a modern-day example of the destruction, uprooting, and banishment of communities: the detention and deportation of immigrants by US Immigration…
A few important and upsetting events took place in the past few weeks, events which should have nothing to do with one another. On Friday, Israeli snipers shot and killed 21-year-old medic Razan al-Najjar in the Gaza Strip, as she tended a demonstrator who had been injured during the tenth week of the Great March…
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