Yardena Schwartz is an award-winning freelance journalist, Emmy-nominated producer, and author of the forthcoming book Ghosts of a Holy War, which will be published in October 2024 by Union Square & Co, a division of Barnes & Noble. From 2013 to 2023 Yardena was based in Israel, where she reported for dozens of publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, National Geographic, Rolling Stone, Time, The New York Review of Books, Foreign Policy, and Columbia Journalism Review, among others. Yardena has also reported from Morocco, Nepal, Ukraine, Poland, France, Germany, and the United States. She previously worked at NBC News headquarters in New York, including stints at The Today Show, Nightly News with Brian Williams, and MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports. She graduated with honors from Columbia Journalism School in 2011, earned an Emmy nomination for her work at MSNBC in 2013, and an RNA award for excellence in magazine reporting in 2016. From 2021 to 2022 she was a Journalism Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. Yardena now lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with her husband and two children.