Breitbart Senior Editor Invited To Speak At AIPAC Conference

Breitbart editor Joel Pollak appears at Politicon at the Pasadena Convention Center. Image by Joel Sciulli/Getty Images for Politicon

By Nathan Guttman February 7, 2018

Corrected 3:21pm

Joel Pollak, the senior editor-at-large at Breitbart News, attended his first AIPAC Policy Conference when he was in high school. Since then, he has risen in the ranks of Breitbart News, a website that once prided itself on being “the platform for the ‘alt-right,’” a label the publication is now pushing back against.

Pollak will be returning to AIPAC in March, this time as an invited speaker.

According to Breitbart, Pollak was asked by AIPAC to participate in a panel discussion titled “Media in the Trump Era.” Breitbart reported that other participants will include the Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg; Weekly Standard founder Bill Kristol; and veteran journalist Frank Sesno, director of George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs. However, Goldberg made clear in a tweet that he is not participating in the panel or at other events in the AIPAC conference.

Pollak said that being invited to speak at the AIPAC conference “is an appropriate recognition of the leadership of Breitbart News as a pro-Israel voice and a flagship of conservative journalism.”

AIPAC spokesman Marshall Wittmann told the Forward that the group’s annual policy conference “uniquely provides approximately seven hundred speakers offering a broad diversity of views across the political spectrum.”

Contact Nathan Guttman at [email protected]

Nathan Guttman, staff writer, was the Forward’s Washington bureau chief. He joined the staff in 2006 after serving for five years as Washington correspondent for the Israeli dailies Haaretz and The Jerusalem Post. In Israel, he was the features editor for Ha’aretz and chief editor of Channel 1 TV evening news. He was born in Canada and grew up in Israel. He is a graduate of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning journalism this Passover.

In this age of misinformation, our work is needed like never before. We report on the news that matters most to American Jews, driven by truth, not ideology.

At a time when newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall. That means for the first time in our 126-year history, Forward journalism is free to everyone, everywhere. With an ongoing war, rising antisemitism, and a flood of disinformation that may affect the upcoming election, we believe that free and open access to Jewish journalism is imperative.

Readers like you make it all possible. Right now, we’re in the middle of our Passover Pledge Drive and we need 500 people to step up and make a gift to sustain our trustworthy, independent journalism.

Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO