Jake Wasserman
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jacobhwasserman.bsky.social
Jake Wasserman
@jacobhwasserman.bsky.social
490 followers 330 following 190 posts
Audience editor @us.theguardian.com, formerly @forward.com, sometimes reporter, always a union guy.

[email protected]
Signal: jwasserman.75
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jacobhwasserman.bsky.social
Extremely relatable knitter husband image in Ken Burns’ American Revolution documentary
An 18th century painting of a man holding open a skein of yarn while a woman winds it from a distance
November 18, 2025 at 3:36 PM
jacobhwasserman.bsky.social
I will not accept this disrespect of the James Gandolfini Service Area
A sign of James Gandolfini’s face outside an NJ rest stop that says “Jersey strong”
November 13, 2025 at 3:17 PM
jacobhwasserman.bsky.social
Wtf is up with this random bashing of New Jersey by Kathryn Ruemmler in the Epstein email trove that the House released yesterday?
In a separate exchange, Ruemmler shared her apparent disdain for the people of New Jersey during an email about a planned road trip to New York. “Think I am going to drive,” she wrote. “I will then stop to pee and get gas at a rest stop on the New Jersey turnpike, will observe all of the people there who are at least 100 pounds overweight, will have a mild panic attack as a result of the observation, and will then decide that I am not eating another bite of food for the rest of my life out of fear that I will end up like one of these people.” Screenshot via POLITICO
November 13, 2025 at 3:04 PM
jacobhwasserman.bsky.social
Yeah
Beagle laying his face on couch while standing and wearing striped sweater
November 11, 2025 at 2:54 AM
jacobhwasserman.bsky.social
I’m at Mikie Sherrill’s campaign watch party to talk with supporters as polls close and results come in!

Stay tuned and keep a watch on our blog
A press badge for Mikie Sherrill’s campaign
November 4, 2025 at 11:42 PM
jacobhwasserman.bsky.social
A local school board candidate who voted for Ciattarelli told me she’s running for parental rights over school policies that provide guidance for supporting trans students — “in case we don’t have a governor like Jack.”
At the Sayreville Senior Citizen Center in New Jersey, Jessica Vant, 44, stood outside handing out pamphlets about the local school board election with her husband Eddie, 48. They both voted for Jack Ciattarelli for governor. Vant, a realtor and substitute teacher, is running for the board in the Middlesex County town, and said her number one issue in the election concerns Policy 5756 - a statewide school policy to provide guidance on supporting transgender students - which she described was “erroneously” marked as mandatory when it was rolled out in 2017. Parents have been challenging the policy both in court and in their own districts ever since, but Vant said that she’s running “in case we don’t have a governor like Jack.” At an August rally with the parental rights group Moms for Liberty in Jersey City, Hudson County view reported that Ciattarelli blasted the policy as “immoral,” “indecent,” “wrong,” and “dangerous”.
November 4, 2025 at 10:06 PM
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A retired federal worker in a predominantly Republican town where Trump owns a golf course in NJ (not Bedminster) told me he’s voting for Sherrill because “the Republicans are going to hurt me” because he is gay
In Colts Neck, a bucolic town near the Jersey shore that voted for Jack Ciattarelli in 2021 (when he first ran for governor) and Donald Trump in 2024, at least one voter is bucking his community’s support for Republican candidates. Two miles from a golf course owned by the president, retired federal worker John Stolz, 74, said he was voting for Mikie Sherrill for governor because, as a gay man, “the Republicans are going to hurt me”. In October, Politico reported that a Ciattarelli campaign ally advocated for a ban on same-sex marriage in the Garden State. Ciattarelli reaffirmed his support for marriage equality, but did not condemn the comments. As a state assemblyman in 2012, Ciattarelli voted against a state bill legalizing same-sex marriage. Marriage equality was legalized in New Jersey by a court ruling in 2013, and was later codified into law in 2022 by Governor Phil Murphy.
November 4, 2025 at 8:09 PM
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NJ is already off to a weird morning, with bomb threats called at polling places in 7 counties.

I’ll also be supplying our live blog with on the ground updates.

Send tips to [email protected] or jwasserman.75 on Signal
Voters in New Jersey are starting their election day with a notice posted by the state’s attorney general Matt Platkin about bomb threats in seven counties. There is now a razor thin margin in the race between congresswoman Mikie Sherrill and businessman Jack Ciattarelli in the closely watched gubernatorial race, and disruptions to normal voting procedures could prove consequential. Law enforcement is currently investigating and counties have already reopened some locations, while relocating others.
November 4, 2025 at 2:27 PM
jacobhwasserman.bsky.social
I’ll be driving around Middlesex and Monmouth county to talk to voters in NJ today for @us.theguardian.com!

Hopefully this sign helps with NJ’s 100 foot electioneering laws…
Sign says “I’m a reporter at The Guardian — talk to me about the governor’s race”
November 4, 2025 at 2:27 PM
jacobhwasserman.bsky.social
The people fighting back against Holocaust distortion and the growth of the right in the former East have seemingly only been able to do that effectively amongst the generation who had Nazi parents.

And according to them, the kids are not alright.
While waiting at the bus stop to head back from Buchenwald, I found myself unexpectedly sandwiched in the middle of a high school tour group as they posed for a class photo. After we all boarded the bus, about half of them sat quietly — maybe contemplating the horrors they’d just seen, maybe dozing off. But as we drove down the hill toward Weimar, the bus also filled with the sound of laughter.
October 31, 2025 at 1:08 PM
jacobhwasserman.bsky.social
And though it ended up on the cutting room floor, I want to note that AfD's Jewish caucus chairman thought it was absurd that his views are seen as mainstream in Israel but in Germany, he's thought of as a right-wing extremist.
Like the party’s leaders, the JAfD believes, according to its website, that “the greatest threat to Europe in the 21st century is the growth of the Muslim population” and adds that “the rise of political Islam is also primarily a threat to Jews.” While party leaders’ statements contradict AfD’s official support for Israel, the JAfD is strongly and unequivocally pro-Israel. In January 2024, the German investigative newsroom Correctiv reported that AfD members secretly met with neo-Nazis and wealthy businessmen to plan the mass deportation of immigrants from Germany in a plot called “remigration.” The news brought hundreds of thousands of Germans into the streets in protest. AfD initially disputed what was discussed at the meeting, though eventually party leader Alice Weidel embraced remigration as the official party platform. Though the party is once again trying to distance itself from the controversial remigration concept to create a broader appeal among the mainstream electorate, JAfD still believes that the plan is essential. Abramovych himself is an immigrant — from Ukraine — but claimed that immigration is threatening German society due to Muslim fertility rates.
October 31, 2025 at 1:03 PM
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For this story, I spoke with a Jewish man who was charged with "incitement to hatred" — a charge commonly used by Germany against neo-Nazis — for invoking the memory of the Holocaust against the war in Gaza.

He told me it was possible our conversation was being surveilled by federal intelligence.
The next month, Hoban gave a speech where he said, “Germany can’t wash away its Holocaust guilt with the blood of Palestinians.” Afterwards, he was taken aside by police and charged on suspicion of Volksverhetzung — “incitement to hatred” — a charge that has been used by the German government to prosecute neo-Nazis and far-right extremists, and carries a sentence of up to five years in prison. In Hoban’s view, memory culture had extended past its logical limits to charge him, a Jew, with a violation of the German criminal code for invoking his own history. “They explained to me that I had mentioned the Holocaust and that in Germany, they take the Holocaust very seriously,” Hoban said. “This was a bit surreal.”
October 31, 2025 at 1:00 PM
jacobhwasserman.bsky.social
No Kings and the New York Sheep & Wool festival — Rhinebeck, NY
Warning signs of fascism sign A very proud looking sheep
October 18, 2025 at 8:14 PM
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Headed home now, but I learned so much this week and am looking forward to writing it all up.

Story soon!
A vending machine that says “Goodbye Berlin”
September 24, 2025 at 8:56 AM
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Happened to find the @boell.de HQ while wandering around!
Me, hanging out outside the Heinrich Böll Stiftung
September 21, 2025 at 3:59 PM
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Happened to find the @boell.de HQ while wandering around!
Me, hanging out outside the Heinrich Böll Stiftung
September 21, 2025 at 3:33 PM
jacobhwasserman.bsky.social
In the square outside of Weimar’s Hauptbahnhof are photos of the survivors of Buchenwald, just a few kilometers away and liberated 80 years ago this past April.
September 20, 2025 at 6:49 PM
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Behind the youth prison lies a courtyard where the Nazis used a guillotine to murder their enemies, Bern tells me.
A view onto a courtyard in Weimar that holds a horrifying past
September 20, 2025 at 6:47 PM
jacobhwasserman.bsky.social
In Weimar, Alan Bern is building a music school of othered traditions called “Other Music Academy”. Inside the school is a door made out of the wood that the 1919 constitution was signed on.

Next door, a former GDR youth prison sits empty, its outer wall covered in graffiti from OMA’s community
Alan Bern in Weimar A former GDR youth prison in Weimar
September 20, 2025 at 6:46 PM
jacobhwasserman.bsky.social
Headed today to Weimar where I’ll be speaking with folks from the Yiddish world, as well as at the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial.

Will be heavy but hoping to learn a lot!
A GDR-era survey from an exhibition at the former SS headquarters in Berlin that suggests visiting concentration camp memorials has a waning effect on changing the minds of students. Translation: “How are young people affected by a visit to a memorial? An educational study in the GDR showed that impressions fade after a few weeks. Glorifying communist inmates as heroes of the resistance tended to elicit a defensive response. Young people learned little about the ‘completely normal people’ who suffered as prisoners in the camps.”
September 18, 2025 at 8:06 AM
jacobhwasserman.bsky.social
Guten Morgen von Berlin! Excited to speak with lots of different people this week for @forward.com.

Thanks again to @boellus.bsky.social for sponsoring this reporting trip.
Berliner Fernsehturm above the M5 tram
September 16, 2025 at 9:52 AM
jacobhwasserman.bsky.social
Honored to have won my first-ever Rockower Award (and first place!) from the American Jewish Press Association for this story I wrote last year about the rise of Alternative für Deutschland.

Stay tuned for more later this year!

forward.com/culture/6673...
A screen that shows a First Place award from the American Jewish Press Association for my story "What American Jews need to know about Germany's growing far-right antisemitism"
June 24, 2025 at 1:41 PM
jacobhwasserman.bsky.social
Went on a nice walk today after the psychic also said he wanted longer walks
A happy bluetick beagle with his tongue out on the shoreline with the NYC skyline in the background
June 1, 2025 at 7:18 PM
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Took my dog to a pet psychic today and they told us that he is an extremist
My dog, the extremist
May 31, 2025 at 9:06 PM
jacobhwasserman.bsky.social
Big fan of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s “MerlinID” mobile app. I just went on a walk using it to follow bird sounds and it was fascinating to hear how many types of birds are in my neighborhood
The MerlinID birding mobile app showing a European Starling, and Eastern Kingbird, and a Song Sparrow
May 30, 2025 at 12:27 AM