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Nancy Goldstein

Nancy Goldstein's work has appeared in venues including the Guardian, The Nation, NPR, Politico, Raw Story, Salon, Slate, and the Washington Post, where she was an Editor's Pick and the winner of the blogging round during their Next Great Pundit Contest. You can follow her on Twitter at @nancygoldstein.

Recent Articles

NBC's Big Fat Gay Mistake

The network's half-hearted attempts to appear gay-friendly while broadcasting the Sochi Olympics only underscore its complicity with the Kremlin's crackdown on LGBT rights and freedom of the press.

Nancy GoldsteinDec 10, 2013
Flickr/Edgar Zuniga
Flickr/Edgar Zuniga T here is no longer even the illusion of a free press in Russia—not after yesterday, when the Kremlin posted a decree on its website announcing the liquidation of RIA Novosti , the leading state news agency. “The move,” the news service wrote in its own account of the story, “is the latest in a series of shifts in Russia’s news landscape, which appear to point toward a tightening of state control in the already heavily regulated media sector.” That “tightening,” which intensified when Russian President Vladimir Putin returned to power last year and immediately set about silencing any form of opposition to his notoriously crooked government, has reached a fever pitch in the months leading up to Russia’s hosting of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi this February. The country and the games have come under increasing international scrutiny and criticism: First, in the wake of the Kremlin’s passage, this past June, of a trifecta of draconian anti-LGBT laws...

Sticking It to Sochi: Russian LGBT Activists on What Works

Nancy GoldsteinAug 12, 2013
AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis
AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis T here’s no sugarcoating what’s happening in Russia in the days since the Duma and Prime minister Vladimir Putin passed its anti-gay laws earlier this summer. In a jaw-dropping video that Moscow-based journalist and longtime LGBT activist Masha Gessen posted to her Facebook page over the weekend, Dmitry Kiselev, anchorman and deputy director of VGTRK, the Russian state broadcast holding company—in short, a top representative of the Kremlin’s media machine—makes the following statement: I believe it is not enough to impose fines on gays for engaging in the propaganda of homosexuality among adolescents. We need to ban them from donating blood and sperm, and if they die in car accidents, we need to bury their hearts in the ground or burn them as they are unsuitable for the aiding of anyone's life. Kiselev’s audience claps and cheers. So let’s be very clear, very fast about what will and won’t matter to Putin and his cronies when it comes to protesting. There’s...

The Military's Suicide Scandal

Nancy GoldsteinMay 20, 2013
AP Images/Charles Dharapak
What a drag it’s been these past few weeks to watch the military brass—those kings of accountability, at least when it comes to other people ’s behavior—huffing and bluffing and outright lying about what they knew and when they knew it. First we had to endure the sight of them gaping over the news that the sexual-violence crisis they’ve done nothing to squelch since the assault of 83 women and seven men at the Tailhook Air Force convention in 1991 has worsened. Now those same Pentagon officials are shocked, simply shocked, by the military’s spiking suicide rates, despite the fact that those numbers, which have been rising steadily for the past 12 years, come from their own reporting system (and some claim are still an undercount). The only thing worse than the Pentagon’s faux surprise has been the complicity of news organizations willing to echo its talking points. Shame on The New York Times for last week’s “Baffling Rise in Suicides Plagues the U.S. Military.” Disturbing, yes. But...

The Military Can't Handle the Truth

Nancy GoldsteinMay 10, 2013
Flickr/West Point Public Affairs
Flickr/West Point Public Affairs T he real scandal this week around military sexual violence isn’t the release of the latest in a string of Department of Defense (DOD) reports showing stunning levels of sexual assault—hell, even the DOD estimates 26,000 actual incidents compared with the 3,374 reported incidents. It’s not the fact that this year marks the third in a row to show an increase in sexual violence (under law, DOD has published them yearly since 2004), or that the latest report “found that among the one-third of women who reported sexual-assault allegations to a military authority, 62 percent suffered retaliation for speaking up. ” It’s not even the arrest , two days before the report came out, of the officer in charge of sexual-assault prevention programs for the Air Force on sexual battery charges. The real scandal is the degree to which the military has been allowed to continue punting on addressing sexual violence, despite knowing about the widespread sexual abuse of...

The Letter CUNY Should Have Written to Tony Kushner

After offering, rescinding, and re-offering an honorary degree to the playwright Tony Kushner, the City University of New York has a lot of explaining to do.

Nancy GoldsteinMay 11, 2011
Tony Kushner (AP Photo/Paul Hawthorne)
Monday night, the Executive Committee of the City University of New York's Board of Trustees did its best to stem an endless flow of bad publicity and buck-passing in the wake of its earlier decision to first grant and then rescind an honorary degree to Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner. The committee rescinded the rescission and granted the degree to Kushner, but that doesn't mean all is well. The two figures missing from Monday's meeting were -- not coincidentally, I think -- the two CUNY officers central to the Kushner debacle. Notably absent was trustee Jeffrey S. Wisenfeld, whose vehement objection to Kushner, whom he characterized as an opponent and critic of Israel, met with no resistance from his peers. (Several days after his initial outburst, Wisenfeld topped himself by telling a New York Times reporter that certain Palestinians were not human.) Also missing was Benno C. Schmidt, the current chairman of the CUNY Board and a former president of Yale, who voted to...

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