In an era when American political discourse is marked by deep polarization along partisan and ideological lines, American Jewry has found itself sought out, or manipulated, as a potential swing vote. More than ever during the years of the Obama presidency and Netanyahu prime ministership, political conservatives in both the United States and Israel have looked for wedge issues that can move American Jewish voters away from their tradition fealty to the Democratic Party and liberal values. The current vitriolic debate over the Iran nuclear deal is, in many ways, the logical extension of mobilizing efforts that go back to 2008 and have antecedents decades earlier. This lecture, and the essay that will arise from it, will look at the religious, cultural, demographic, and generational forces that underlay the currently fractious and embittered state of American Jewry and its Israeli brethren – a blow-up that is not nearly as sudden or unexpected as one might believe.

Samuel G. Freedman is an award-winning author, columnist, and professor. A columnist for The New York Times and a professor at Columbia University, he is the author of the seven acclaimed books, most recently Breaking The Line: The Season in Black College Football That Transformed the Game and Changed the Course of Civil Rights (2013). His previous books are Small Victories: The Real World of a Teacher, Her Students and Their High School (1990); Upon This Rock: The Miracles of a Black Church (1993); The Inheritance: How Three Families and America Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond (1996); Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry (2000); Who She Was: My Search for My Mother’s Life (2005); and Letters To A Young Journalist (2006).
A tenured professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Freedman was named the nation's outstanding journalism educator in 1997 by the Society of Professional Journalists. In 2012, he received Columbia University’s coveted Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching. Freedman’s class in book-writing has developed more than 70 authors, editors, and agents, and it has been featured in Publishers Weekly and the Christian Science Monitor. He is a board member of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prizes and Religion News Service as well as a judge in the non-fiction category for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. Freedman has spoken at the Smithsonian Institution, Yale University, and UCLA, among other venues, and has appeared on National Public Radio, CNN, the PBS News Hour, MSNBC and ESPN.

Freedman holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism and history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which he received in May 1977.