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.
Fifty years ago, at the inaugural celebration of Kwanzaa, 60 black Americans gathered in a California living room to celebrate their distant African past. It was 1966. They wore dashikis and hand-woven headwear. A troupe of musicians played drums. Men and women bowed to each other and poured libations to the ancestors. Later, someone switched…
White supremacists are calling for a boycott of the latest “Star Wars” movie as evidence of a Jewish plot to foist racial diversity on whites, even as some on the “alt-right” say they watch the film and root for the evil Empire. “(((Star Wars))) Is Anti-White Social Engineering,” a Reddit user named GenFrancoPepe posted in…
With a surge in hard-right political movements across Europe, and white nationalism enjoying a higher profile in the United States, American Jews are asking themselves if the world is becoming more hostile to them. They could be overlooking an ally with a unique position in Christian culture. Across the country, people with Jewish backgrounds who…
The messages are written in the voice of a close friend, appealing for help. “Dear Ivanka,” they all begin. “I’m afraid of the swastikas spray painted on my park.” “I’ve been raped and I need to have an abortion.” “I’m an American Muslim and I was attacked on the subway.” The instagram account @dearivanka appeared…
The “alt-right” has catapulted to the spotlight in the wake of Donald Trump’s win. The decentralized movement, led largely by white nationalists like Richard Spencer, has championed Trump from the early days of his campaign, seeing in him a figure who would allow their dreams of building a “white ethno-state” go mainstream. Now that Trump…
Last week a shocking photo of former reality TV star Tila Tequila doing a Nazi salute with two men went viral. The three were standing inside a gathering of the “alt-right,” the white nationalist movement which has rallied around president-elect Donald Trump. The salute — known to some as a Nazi salute, to other’s as…
Donald Trump’s presidential win this month was buoyed by a rising tide of the political far-right. His truimph was celebrated by high-profile anti-globalist conspiracists and white nationalists, who saw in Trump a type of savior — someone who would save their country from threatening forces. Of course, voters chose Trump for a range of reasons…
Before Donald Trump’s rise, they were relegated to shadowy blogs or the far corners of Reddit and Twitter, where they would lament the decline of Western civilization, bemoan the Jewish control of the media and dream of building a pure “white ethno state.” Now, the white nationalist movement known as the “alt-right” holds conferences in…
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