Josh Hammer

Joshua Hammer covers Germany for GlobalPost. Based in Berlin, Hammer is a contributing editor to Smithsonian and Outside magazines, writes regularly for the Atlantic Monthly and Conde Nast Portfolio, and has contributed to the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, GQ and many other publications. As a longtime correspondent for Newsweek, Hammer reported from five continents covering a dozen wars, a famine, a revolution, six peacekeeping operations and several coups d'état. Between 2000 and 2004, he served as the magazine’s Middle East bureau chief based in Jerusalem, winning a Deadline Club award for feature writing and a 2003 finalist nomination for the National Magazine Award. On May 9, 2004, Hammer was captured in Fallujah, Iraq, by insurgents who threatened to kill him. He was released from a nine-hour detention after a Palestinian journalist convinced his captors that he was a real reporter. Hammer has also served as Newsweek’s bureau chief in Buenos Aires, Berlin, Nairobi and Los Angeles and won several other awards for his reporting. He has written three books: "Chosen By God: A Brother's Journey" (1999), an exploration of the lure of religious extremism in America and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in 2000;  "A Season in Bethlehem: Unholy War in a Sacred Place" (2003), about the Palestinian intifada; and "Yokohama Burning: The Deadly 1923 Earthquake and the Fire That Helped Forge the Path to World War II." He is at work on a fourth book, about Germany's colonial adventures in Africa in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Hammer received his bachelor’s degree in English literature from Princeton University.