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.
President Trump is not a man inclined to graciously accept political defeat. Of course, we knew that long before this past weekend. But on Sunday, the Washington Post published the audio and transcript of an extraordinary phone call between President Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which Trump baldly asked Raffensperger to…
We are now weeks away from the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. The end of the Trump era is nigh. Perhaps other than President Trump himself, there has been no figure more important in the White House than his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Kushner has played many roles as Trump’s right…
On a recent trip to Israel, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the U.S. now officially considers the BDS movement to boycott Israel to be antisemitic. Soon after, news broke that Pompeo also plans to label Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Oxfam as antisemitic for their anti-Israel activism. In so doing, Pompeo was…
This week, President-elect Joe Biden announced many of his cabinet picks. And to some, they were eerily familiar, names of people who had served under President Obama or who were adjacent to Obama’s cabinet. Is some good old fashioned stability just what the doctor ordered? Or are we overdue for some serious change? We asked…
On Monday evening, President Trump finally agreed to allow President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team to do its job. What this means is that the next presidency is on its way in. What will a Biden administration’s approach to Israel be? What should it be? We asked Forward contributing columnists Ari Hoffman and Joel Swanson to…
There’s a number that sums up the yawning and growing gap dividing American and Israeli Jews right now. That number is 77. That’s the percentage of American Jewish voters who chose Joe Biden over Donald Trump in this week’s election, according to a preliminary exit poll from J Street. Coincidentally, the number 77 pops up…
On Monday, the night before what felt like the most consequential election in my lifetime, I saw photos of a Jewish cemetery in Grand Rapids, Michigan that had been vandalized with slogans reading “Trump” and “MAGA” in red spray paint. Trump was preparing to fly to Grand Rapids that evening for his very final campaign…
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…
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