Jacob Kushner

Jacob Kushner is an international journalist and author who reports from Africa, Germany, and the Caribbean. He writes underreported stories about ordinary people, illuminating how the privileged and the powerful shape, and misshape, their worlds.

A career freelancer, Jacob’s journalism has appeared in dozens of publications including The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Economist, The Guardian, National Geographic, The Nation, VQR, The Atavist, WIRED, Foreign Policy, the ICIJ, and VICE. He has photographed for National Geographic and field-produced for VICE on HBO and PBS NewsHour.

Originally from Milwaukee, he studied journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he edited the local Spanish newspaper and reported an award-winning series about Mexican dairy farm workers who were transforming rural life and politics across the state.

Jacob’s career as a foreign correspondent began in Port-au-Prince, where he conducted award-winning investigations that exposed how the U.S. was illegally deporting thousands of people to Haiti and how U.S. foreign ‘aid’ made Americans rich while keeping Haitians poor. For much of the past decade he has reported from Nairobi where, as an Overseas Press Club fellow with the Associated Press, he covered the Al-Shabab Westgate Mall terrorist attack, then investigated the ensuing extrajudicial killings of Muslim civilians by Kenyan soldiers and police.

Jacob is a graduate of Columbia Journalism School’s MA Politics program. His master’s thesis, China’s Congo Plan, was published by the Pulitzer Center and favorably reviewed in the New York Review of Books. His reporting on the persecution of Africa’s LGBTQ refugees culminated in more than 15 articles, and a book. His latest book is Look Away: A True Story of Murders, Bombings, and a Far-Right Campaign to Rid Germany of Immigrants.

A former Fulbright Scholar, Max Planck Journalist in Residence, and Logan Nonfiction Fellow at the Carey Institute for Global Good, Jacob was a finalist for the Livingston Award for International Reporting. He has taught International Reporting and Migration at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He speaks Dominican Spanish, Haitian Creole, conversational German, and basic French.