In 2023, Naomi Klein wrote “Doppelganger,” a tragicomic memoir about identity conflation and the spread of false information in the digital age. A liberal activist known for her books on climate change and globalization, Klein had found, to her distress, that people often mixed her up with Naomi Wolf, the author of “The Beauty Myth” and a one-time adviser to Al Gore who had morphed into a rightwing conspiracy theorist. “I have been chronically confused” with Wolf, she wrote, “for more than a decade.” Klein noted that Wolf is “a person who does many extreme things that cause strangers to chastise me or thank me or express their pity for me.”
I know from experience some of what Klein has been going through. For more than five years, I’ve been dealing with my own doppelganger: Josh Hammer is a young columnist and podcaster whose admiration for Donald Trump and support for Israel’s destruction of Gaza have made him a darling of the far right. By a bizarre coincidence, Hammer and I share not only the same name but also a key part of our resumés. Between 1988 and 2006, I was a staff writer and foreign correspondent for Newsweek. Since 2020, Hammer, a generation younger, has been a senior editor at the same magazine. This blurring of identities has baffled friends and colleagues and forced me to try repeatedly to set the record straight.
Politically, the Other Josh and I couldn’t be farther apart. My father was a New York Times reporter and an author who wrote about the American civil-rights movement and Vietnam, and idolized Robert F. Kennedy (the Senator) and Eugene McCarthy. I inherited his politics and followed him into journalism. I rarely write opinion pieces, but anyone who knows me recognizes where I stand: I vote Democratic and abhor Trump and his authoritarianism. I support Israel’s right to exist but believe that the IDF is carrying out war crimes and possibly genocide in Gaza.
The Other Josh was born in Westchester, New York, as I was, and is Jewish, but there the similarities end. He worked for Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign, sits on the boards of the New York Young Republican Club and the United Jewish Gun Coalition, and cofounded Jews Against George Soros. The magazine that hired him — now co-owned by Dev Pragad and Johnathan Davis, both of whom have links to an evangelical Korean church — bears no resemblance to the liberal publication where I spent much of my career. It was owned during that time by the Washington Post, which unloaded it for $1 in 2010, the first of several sales that cast the magazine adrift. “The once-esteemed magazine has been reduced to a soapbox for the far right,” the Daily Beast declared in 2022, “thanks to a MAGA activist running the opinions page.” The MAGA activist being, of course, Josh Hammer.
As far as I can piece it together, I first became aware of my doppelganger (literally, “double walker”) in early 2020. A colleague who had left Newsweek during its rightward shift drew him to my attention during the COVID lockdowns. “Hope all’s well with you and yours,” he wrote. “I was reading a piece about the recent Supreme Court decision on LGBT rights which mentions a conservative columnist named Josh Hammer. He seems to write for the publication which uses the name of our magazine.” Hammer had denounced the ruling upholding those rights as a “betrayal” of American conservatives. I took note, may have felt some apprehension about the confusion this might cause, but swiftly forgot about it.
Things escalated that summer. After Joe Biden named Kamala Harris as his running mate, Newsweek’s opinion page, now edited by the Other Josh, published a column by John Eastman, the lawyer who would later be indicted for co-plotting the January 6, 2021, coup attempt. Eastman argued that the California-born Harris might not be qualified to serve as vice president because both of her parents were immigrants. The line echoed Trump’s prevarications about Barack Obama’s supposed birth in Kenya. A torrent of criticism followed, and Hammer co-wrote an editorial trying to justify Eastman’s reasoning. The contretemps, in the heat of the U.S. Presidential campaign, generated lots of media attention, and people I knew began to take notice.
The next day, my close friend J., a fellow journalist and author, shot me a WhatsApp message.
“Is this you????” she wrote. “Shame on you. This can’t be you. This is naked misogynistic birtherism.”
“Not me! It was my doppelganger,” I protested.
“Omg. What the f—?”
“I can’t believe you thought this was me.”
“I was shocked! I apologize.”
Anyone who did a little digging would quickly recognize that the Newsweek pundit couldn’t be me. He was in his early 30s, had a full beard (which, except for a brief period in my early 20s, I’ve never had), and, except for the Newsweekly overlap, had a totally different bio. Were people so lazy that they wouldn’t double-check? And what about my close friends, such as J.? Did they know me so little that they believed that I could abandon my political beliefs so easily? Or that I had secretly been MAGA all along?
At the same time, I understood their confusion: I’d been a prominent writer for Newsweek for almost 20 years, and the name Josh Hammer wasn’t exactly common. What were the odds it could be anyone else?
Not knowing how else to handle it, I issued a clarification on social media:
“ATTENTION: Before I receive any more perplexed and angry WhatsApp and email messages, I must clarify that I AM NOT the ‘JOSH HAMMER’ now associated with Newsweek,” I wrote. “We have nothing in common other than an employer and a name … So let me put the matter to rest: WE ARE DIFFERENT PEOPLE, AND I COULDN’T BE HAPPIER ABOUT KAMALA HARRIS.”
That post brought forth a wave of sympathy. Everybody, it seemed, had his or her own doppelganger, some notorious. The brother of Dr. Jared Kushner, a Columbia research cardiologist, wrote to assure me that his sibling “feels your pain.” A former Newsweek editor wrote of his discomfort at having a name one letter removed from that of David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam, who terrorized New York in the 1970s. An author in L.A. said he shared his moniker with a “right-wing rapture-loving preacher in Omaha who … hates gays, women, and everyone else.” The son of a psychologist friend was sometimes confused with an infamous peeping Tom in Australia. Jerry Adler, a longtime Newsweek colleague, had often been mixed up with the famed “Sopranos” actor; after James Gandolfini’s death, a New York Post reporter had even called him for a reaction. (“I barely managed to stifle the impulse to say ‘I couldn’t stand the fat f-ck,’” the ever-mischievous Adler wrote to me.) Until the Other Josh Hammer entered my life, I had had a different doppelganger: a prominent gay porn star. As far as I can tell, his principal claim to fame is a featured role in the 2003 erotic spoof “The Hole,” directed by Wash Westmoreland, that begins, according to a synopsis, with “two young men hearing the legend of a videotape that, when watched, will turn you gay in seven days.”
But my clarification didn’t put the matter to rest. One day in 2023, I entered the lobby of my apartment building in Berlin and ran into my neighbor Felix, a ponytailed hipster type. He asked if by any chance I wrote for the Epoch Times, the right-wing newspaper owned by adherents of China’s exiled Falun Gong movement. He’d spotted a pro-Trump column there by Josh Hammer and was trying to make sense of it. I sighed and set him straight. “It didn’t seem like you,” he said. (I wondered: What was this amiable fellow doing reading the Epoch Times, anyway?)
The Other Josh has become nearly inescapable these past few years. He writes a syndicated newspaper column and hosts a popular podcast, “The Josh Hammer Report,” which have strengthened his credentials as a leader of the MAGA movement. He has applauded Trump’s mass deportations, approved of his taking over the D.C. police, and urged that Gaza be turned into a “parking lot.” Six months into Trump’s term, he trumpeted, “America’s restoration is in full swing.“
Meanwhile, the emails and WhatsApp messages keep coming. Some express concern, others seek clarification, and some — the ones that bother me most — cheer me on. “If this is your writing, I cannot disagree,” wrote a U.S. journalist in Sydney. An elderly second cousin in Brentwood emailed: “Just saw your article in the L.A. Times. Great!” On impulse, I fired off a response that must have taken the nonagenarian aback: “I can assure you that I am vehemently opposed to any opinions Hammer espouses.”
Often, I feel it’s pointless to keep explaining. Those who know me and/or my writing must recognize that my doppelganger and I are two different people. Those who don’t, well, why should I care? But that argument only goes so far. And so, I’ve stayed on my toes, trying to keep our identities distinct. I check the page proofs for each article that I write to make sure my byline is always “Joshua Hammer.” Last spring, a Manhattan bookstore where I was to give a talk added a link to my bio directing readers to the Other Josh’s Instagram account. Horrified, I had my publicist call the store, but it took days to rectify. Friends and relatives have suggested that I change my byline to include my middle initial, I. That seems a tad late, 40 years into my career. And it represents a capitulation that I refuse to make.
Friends ask if I have ever reached out to my doppelganger to find out if the confusion of identities affects him as well. I haven’t. Unlike Naomi Klein, who “made the admittedly odd decision to follow my doppelganger into the rabbit hole,” I am not drawn to meet or learn more about the Other Josh Hammer. From everything I know about him, he is as secure in his identity and certain about his politics as I am in mine. We’re the flip sides of an America that has ripped itself in two. We would probably have nothing to say to each other anyway.
Joshua Hammer, a former Newsweek Bureau Chief on five continents, is the author of, most recently, “The Mesopotamian Riddle: an Archaeologist, a Soldier, a Clergyman, and the Race to Decipher the World’s Oldest Writing.”
https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Joshua-Hammer/19043478