Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order!’: A Biography

Joel Pollak is a South African-born writer and attorney living in Los Angeles, California. He grew up in suburban Chicago and graduated from Harvard College in 1999. He returned to South Africa as a Rotary Foundation Ambassadorial Scholar, and stayed on to work as a freelance journalist. From 2002 to 2006, he served as the speechwriter to the Leader of the Opposition in the South African Parliament, Tony Leon, and worked on the mayoral campaign of Helen Zille in Cape Town in 2006. He earned a Master’s degree in Jewish Studies at the University of Cape Town, then returned to the U.S. and graduated from Harvard Law School in 2009. Once a left-wing activist, his politics shifted to the right, and he ran for Congress in 2010 as a Republican in his home district in Illinois, losing to an entrenched incumbent but mounting a campaign that earned national attention. He joined conservative media pioneer Andrew Breitbart at Breitbart News in 2011, where he currently serves as senior editor-at-large and in-house counsel. He is the author of over a dozen print and online books, including How Trump Won and Red November. He is married to labor economist Julia Pollak (née Bertelsmann), the daughter of the late Rhoda Kadalie, and they have three children.