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.
Sam Kestenbaum
By Sam Kestenbaum
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News Meet Dan Goldstein, the Jewish Lawyer Who Faced Off With Ivanka Trump on JetBlue Flight
'They ruin the country and now they ruin our flight'
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News Inventor of ‘Alt-Right’ Defends Mom as His Followers Target Jews in Hometown
Amid a campaign by neo-Nazis to harass Jewish residents of a small Montana town, white nationalist and “alt-right” figurehead Richard Spencer is rallying to his mother’s side after she said she was under pressure to sell a building she owns there. “They are trying to punish me by punishing my mother,” Spencer said in an…
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News Among White Nationalists, Catchy New Shorthand for the ‘Jewish Question’
When Nazi strategists gathered on the shores of Lake Wannsee outside Berlin to plan the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question in Europe,” they probably did not imagine future neo-Nazis using catchy shorthand for their ideas. As white nationalists rebrand their movement with the moniker “alt-right,” the Jewish Question has re-emerged with a new name…
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News Neo-Nazi Backlash Against Montana Jews Spurs Stepped Up Police Patrols
The police in Whitefish, Montana are stepping up patrols and working with the F.B.I. after a Neo-Nazi website listed the names and contacts of local Jews, urging readers to “take action” against them. Lt. Bridger Kelch of the local Police Department told the New York Times that the force was ramping up their efforts after…
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News Neo-Nazis Target Jews in White Supremacist Richard Spencer’s Montana Town
For two years, the quaint town of Whitefish, Montana, has been the unlikely site of a showdown against white supremacy. Now, amid agitation by local activists against a resident white supremacist and his family, neo-Nazis have made a public call for harassment against the Jews in his predominantly white and Christian area. “The heat is…
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News Self-Styled Jewish Militant Sentenced to 20 Years for Mosque Stabbing
A Queens man who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for stabbing a Muslim is a self-styled Jewish extremist who said he left the Jewish Defense League at age 13 because “it was not militant enough.” Bernhard Laufer, 59, stabbed a man at a mosque in Flushing in 2012 and was convicted of second-degree…
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Fast Forward Introducing Pepe Le Pen, the Face of the French ‘Alt-Right’
In the hours after Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential elections, bloggers on the white nationalist “alt-right” were exuberant. Their hours of trolling on Twitter for The Donald had paid off. The flood of amateurish viral images — where they recast Trump as a white crusader or a dark Emperor in Star Wars or the…
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News In Montana, Activists and a Rabbi Resist the Resident White Supremacist
The small city of Whitefish in Montana’s Flathead Valley may seems like an odd battleground in the fight against white supremacy. The city is in a pristine valley, between the snow-capped mountains of Glacier National Park and the peaceful Flathead Lake. Every winter, the town of Whitefish fills with visitors who come to ski the…
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