Sam Kestenbaum is a contributing editor and former staff writer for the Forward. Before this, he worked for The New York Times and newsrooms in Sana, Ramallah and Beijing. Contact him at kestenbaum@forward.com and follow him on Twitter at @skestenbaum and on Instagram at @skestenbaum.
Over the past two years, Nazis and other white supremacists have been going through a series of dramatic makeovers. They’ve cast off the cloak of the Ku Klux Klan and emerged in the guise of the frat boy next door, in polo shirts and khakis. They dubbed themselves the “alt-right” and tried to join the…
Jack Posobiec, the pro-Trump Internet activist best known for his role in promoting the “Pizzagate” hoax and a conspiracy theory involving the murder of Democratic aide, announced on Twitter this weekend that he and his wife had decided on their honeymoon destination — the Holy Land. “We are taking our Honeymoon in Israel!” Posobiec wrote…
A Georgia city council candidate defended himself against allegations of anti-Semitism last week, saying that his tweets describing Zionists as “cockroaches” and calls for Jews to be removed from the White House do not make him racist. “I’m absolutely not racist in the very least,” Joe Briggs told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Briggs, a 59-year-old engineer…
Papa Johns said they don’t want racists eating their pizzas, after a neo-Nazi website claimed on November 3 that the chain served the “official pizza” of the ‘alt-right.’” “We condemn racism in all forms and any and all hate groups that support it,” the company said in a statement on November 6. “We do not…
A major neo-Nazi website has dubbed Papa John’s the “official pizza of the ‘alt-right,’” in apparent praise of the company’s criticism of the ongoing NFL national anthem protests. “So Papa John is a major, long-standing sponsor of the NFL. And yet even they’re panicked about what’s going on,” a blogger for the Daily Stormer wrote…
A white nationalist group led by the self-styled “alt-right” figurehead Richard Spencer was barred from holding its annual conference in a federal office building because of security concerns raised by the building’s management company, the New York Times reported. The decision comes as schools and towns are grappling with the question of when and how…
With snappy and conversational videos, the far-right is mastering YouTube — and finding new ways to promote ideas like white nationalism to the masses. YouTube “has created an environment where white nationalists and right-wing extremists can easily inject hateful rhetoric and conspiracy theories into national political discourse,” according to a report last month from Right…
The meaning of “Allahu akbar” was at the center of a polarized debate this week in the wake of a terror attack in which a motorist plowed down a crowd in Manhattan and reportedly shouted the Arabic phrase. Since then, pundits have been arguing over the use and meaning of the expression. “The Arabic chant…
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