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.
On Sunday, Poland will hold its presidential election, after postponing the original election date in May due to coronavirus lockdowns. The incumbent president, Andrzej Duda of the right-wing Law and Justice Party, is running for reelection to a second term, and while President Duda enjoyed a comfortable lead for most of the campaign, recent polls…
Consider two articles that the venerable New York Times published in 1939, in the final months before the formal outbreak of World War II. In May 1939, the M.S. St. Louis set sail from Hamburg, Germany, for Havana, Cuba, carrying 937 passengers, nearly all of them Jewish refugees. When the Cuban government refused to admit…
Over the past week, thousands of Americans have taken to the streets to protest the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who brutally kept his knee on Floyd’s neck for no less than eight minutes and 46 seconds until Floyd died. These protests, met with support from many corners of the…
Albert Memmi, the great Tunisian-born French Jewish intellectual, passed away in Paris last Friday at the age of 99. He was arguably the last surviving member of a generation of great mid-20th-century Francophone intellectuals. Sadly, few in the English-speaking world seemed to notice. While major French, German and Hebrew news sources reported on his passing,…
These are anxious times to be an American Jew. Of course, every time is an anxious time to be an American Jew. As a New York-born Ashkenazi Jew, chronic anxiety is as much a part of my cultural heritage as bagels and schmear. Trust me, if there isn’t some genuine threat to my safety, my…
Borrowing from Tolstoy, one might say that every economic boomtime is alike in its happiness, while every economic crisis is unique in the misery it brings. And the particular economic crisis facing the United States in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, which economists fear could culminate in the worst economic downturn since the Great…
Columnists Ari Hoffman and Joel Swanson discuss.
Join Forward contributing columnists Ari Hoffman and Joel Swanson for a live debate on April 21 about whether anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic. At a time of rising anti-Semitism, the question of how to define that ancient scourge that still plagues our modern world is a central one. It’s also a difficult one, given that we Jews…
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