Progressives, Liberals, Conservatives, and Right-Wing Populists:

Progressives, Liberals, Conservatives, and Right-Wing Populists: Midwestern Politics and the Future of American Democracy.

A wide-ranging, election-year discussion featuring Samuel Freedman and Dan Kaufman, two journalists with deep roots reporting from the Midwest, the politically volatile region that is almost certain to determine the next President.

This event is co-sponsored by Community Bookstore. Books will be available for purchase at the event.

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. 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.

Dan Kaufman is the author of The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics. (W.W. Norton; 2018). He is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and has written for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The Nation. Last year, his New Yorker article about the U.A.W. strike won a Sidney Award from the Sidney Hillman Foundation for an outstanding piece of journalism. He has received support from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and two fellowships to the MacDowell Colony. He grew up in Wisconsin and currently lives in the Catskill Mountains with his wife and son.

Host or Publisher Congregation Beth Elohim