Gale Fall 2024: "Fighting Hatred in the Heartland" by Samuel G. Freedman

September 26, 2024

"Fighting Hatred in the Heartland: Hubert Humphrey's Battles Against Antisemitism and Extremism in Mid-Century Middle America" by Samuel G. Freedman

Decades before Hubert Humphrey became a national hero as Lyndon Johnson's vital ally in pushing through landmark civil rights legislation, he was starting his public life as the mayor of Minneapolis. That city, though known today as a liberal stronghold, was in the 1940s one of the most racist and antisemitic cities in America. As its mayor, Humphrey took on both the bigoted extremists and their mainstream enablers, transforming Minneapolis into a national model of forward progress on human rights. His brave battles then lend historical perspective to the struggle for inclusive democracy that is still being waged today.

Samuel G. Freedman is an award-winning author, columnist, and professor. A former columnist for The New York Times and a professor at Columbia University, he is the author of the ten acclaimed books. The most recent of them, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights, won the 2024 Hillman Prize for Book Journalism, an award previously bestowed on such authors as John Hersey and Isabel Wilkerson. One of Freedman’s previous books, Jew vs. Jew won the National Jewish Book Award for Non-Fiction in 2001. As a result of the book, Freedman was named one of the “Forward Fifty” most important American Jews in the year 2000 by the weekly Jewish newspaper The Forward.

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 110 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 Awards and member of the Journalism Advisory Council of Religion News Service and the faculty advisory board of the Center for Journalism Ethics. He has spoken at the Smithsonian Institution, Yale University, and UCLA, among other venues, and has appeared on National Public Radio, CNN, and the PBS News Hour.

Freedman holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism and history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which he received in May 1977. He lives in New York with his wife, Christia Chana Blomquist.

This talk is a part of the Gale Family Foundation Lecture Series.

Видео Gale Fall 2024: "Fighting Hatred in the Heartland" by Samuel G. Freedman канала Schusterman Center