Emily Colcord Shrader

Emily Schrader is a sophomore majoring in International Relations on the International History and Culture track, with a minor in Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Outside of class, Emily is currently conducting research on the Vietnam War era with Dr. Phil Taubman at the Center for International Security and Cooperation. In 2021, she did significant research for a task force focused on aligning human rights with US foreign policy (led by Freedom House, CSIS, and the McCain institute), and worked on defending the free press as an intern with Reporters Without Borders. This upcoming fall, Emily will be studying transitional justice with Stanford in Cape Town, South Africa.

She received the Donald and Robin Kennedy Undergraduate Award in 2020 for her essay “'The Jews' and 'The Media' as 'The Enemy': President Nixon’s Private Vilification of Jews and Public Denunciation of Journalists,” under the guidance of Professor Rowan Dorin for his seminar on the origins of antisemitism. Through oral history research and personal interviews with former New York Times Executive Editor Max Frankel, the paper investigates how the myth of a Jewish quest for “total world domination” manifested within the US news media as the imagined 'Jewish media cabal' during the Nixon years. It argues that Nixon merged two existing adversarial relationships — one between presidency and press, another between imagined ‘Jews’ and the predominantly non-Jewish public — to mitigate his internal paranoia over what he viewed as excessively powerful forces seeking his demise. In the process, his administration exemplified a unique collision and evolution of anti-media and antisemitic rhetoric.