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The battle for Jewish hearts and minds returns to the printed page
(JTA) — The last 20 years haven’t been kind to Jewish journalism, with local weeklies shrinking or folding and even big city papers suspending their print publications and going completely digital. Publishing online has allowed these papers to cut costs and given them the potential for a wide reach — albeit a potential undermined by an increasingly siloed and ideologically polarized market for news and ideas.
Yet still there are those who aren’t giving up on print — at least in small, carefully targeted batches. This spring has seen the launch of two Jewish journals — Masorti, a reboot of the former Conservative Judaism, and Fragments, a product of the left-leaning Jewish human rights group T’ruah. The two magazines join a small but scrappy fraternity of journals aiming to steer the Jewish conversation.
“We’re the people of the book. I think print is having a moment,” said Rabbi Lev Meirowitz Nelson, who as director of Emor, T’ruah’s affiliated think tank, edits Fragments. “In the midst of all the [digital] bombardment people experience, there’s something very grounding about picking up a hard copy and being able to mark it up or carry it with you.”
Of course, Fragments and its more established cousins — from a legacy Modern Orthodox quarterly like Tradition to the interdisciplinary journal Modern Judaism — are all available online, and few print more than 1,000 copies at a time. The goal, the editors and publishers of some of the newer publications told me, is to establish a brand and repair what each one said was a broken communal discussion about Israel, domestic politics and religion.
“I hate what’s become of discourse in Jewish life, which largely goes on on Twitter and other places like that,” said Mark Charendoff. “I think Jews like longform discussions, and we’ve become very, very impatient. I wanted to carve out a space for that long type of writing and reading.”
Charendoff is president of the Maimonides Fund, which publishes Sapir, perhaps the best known of the newish journals. It has a high-profile editor — Bret Stephens, the conservative columnist on the New York Times opinion page — and a penchant for hot-button topics that rally conservatives and enrage liberals. Recent issues of the two-year-old journal have focused on “cancel culture” and a campus environment that most of its contributors consider hostile to conservatism and Jewish life.
“I think society and the Jewish community has become so polarized that people are afraid of articulating controversial views. We need to take a breath and say, ‘You’re not going to be harmed by reading something you disagree with,’” said Charendoff.
T’ruah believes there are plenty of controversial views being aired, but mostly on the right: It has explicitly positioned its new journal as a “necessary alternative to well-funded right-wing Jewish publications.” The news release announcing Fragments did not name those publications but presumably they include Sapir; Mosaic, supported by the right-leaning Tikvah Fund; and Tablet, which is published by Nextbook, Inc., whose president, Mem Bernstein, is on the board of Tikvah and is the widow of its founder. Tablet has published writers from across the political spectrum, but has drawn howls from the left for its frequent articles denouncing “wokeness” and cancel culture and a recent piece questioning the motives of donors who support gender-affirming care for trans people.
(Another journal, The Jewish Review of Books, was initially backed by Tikvah, but recently spun off under its own foundation.)
The premiere issue of Fragments includes essays on concepts of freedom by Laynie Soloman, a director at SVARA, an LGBTQ yeshiva based in Chicago, and Joelle Novey, the director of an interfaith environmental group in the Washington, D.C. area.
Nelson sees two audiences for Fragments: “It’s definitely speaking to the left and offering a deepening of language and of conversation around Jewish sources and Jewish ideas,” he said. “And it’s an effort to speak to the center, which often shares our values and can be spooked by the language they see coming from the right.”
Fittingly for a magazine published by a group formerly known as Rabbis for Human Rights, Fragments leans into Jewish text and religious perspectives. That sets it apart from Jewish Currents, a legacy journal of the Jewish left that, after a relaunch in 2018, now aims for an audience of young, left-wing, mostly secular Jews who, when not anti-Zionist, are deeply critical of Israel. Arielle Angel, editor in chief of Jewish Currents, has said that the magazine has become “a reliable and essential space for challenging, rigorous, surprising work that has shifted the discourse even beyond the American Jewish left.”
The aspiration that the “discourse can be shifted” by gladiators writing for small magazines harkens back to the post-World War II period, a sort of golden age of Jewish thought journals. Jewish and Jewish-adjacent publications like the Menorah Journal, Partisan Review, Commentary and Dissent provided a launching pad for an ideologically fluid cohort of “New York intellectuals” that over the years included Sidney Hook, Hannah Arendt, Lionel Trilling, Saul Bellow, Irving Howe, Delmore Schwartz, Norman Podhoretz, Paul Goodman, Midge Dector, Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Alfred Kazin.
Partisan Review was among a spate of magazines that offered a platform for Jewish intellectuals in the years immediately after World War II. (Open Culture)
While writers like these tackled Jewish issues, or general issues through a Jewish lens, many of them influenced the wider national conversation. Angel has said she has drawn inspiration from Commentary: Founded in 1945 by the American Jewish Committee, the magazine became hugely influential in promoting neoconservative ideas and thinkers in the 1980s and ’90s.
The “golden age” was an explosion of Jewish creativity, and political influence, that would be difficult to replicate today. Benjamin Balint, a former editor at Commentary and author of a history of the magazine, says the flowering of Jewish journals in the mid-20th century was the result of “terrific pent-up pressure among the children of immigrants who were pushed down for so long and were able to explode into the mainstream.” Small magazines “provided that release — pushing critics and writers into the larger culture,” said Balint, who previously edited Sources, the journal of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America.
A long piece in Tablet recently argued that such Jewish influence is in steep decline “anywhere where American Jews once made their mark,” from academia to Hollywood to government. Author Jacob Savage doesn’t blame the loss of the immigrant work ethic, however, but rather “American liberalism” for marginalizing Jews.
Whatever the cause, few of the newer journals aspire to that kind of influence on the larger culture, and acknowledge that they are trying to shape the conversation within the Jewish community.
“We believe that Jewish leaders need great ideas to do their work well,” said Rabbi Justus Baird, senior vice president for national programs at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America and publisher of its journal Sources, launched in 2021. “The way we invest in ideas is by cultivating a large group of Jewish thinkers and scholars who are doing not just the scholarship for its own sake, but really trying to work collaboratively on how Jewish thought can apply to the challenges facing the Jewish people.”
The Hartman Institute (which also counts the Maimonides Fund among its long list of major donors) is a religiously pluralistic, liberal Zionist think tank with outposts in New York and Jerusalem. Recent essays in Sources include lengthy essays by Yale religious studies professor Christine Hayes on the ethics of shaming and Hartman scholar Mijal Bitton on how relationships can heal the breach between the Diaspora and Israel.
Part of Hartman’s goal in publishing the journal is to provide a space for such long-form articles, filling what Baird calls “a gap between the quick, super-responsive, news-oriented Jewish publication landscape, the hot takes about what is going on, and the academic Jewish work.”
“It’s a space where ideas can really percolate,” said Claire Sufrin, who now edits Sources. “The written word, the printed word is there and can be shared in that way and people can engage with it over and over again.”
Masorti, the relaunched journal of Conservative Judaism, is also trying to bridge a gap, in this case between Jewish scholarship and the synagogue.
“Rabbis have responsibilities to serve as congregational leaders, and also the obligation to engage in Jewish learning and scholarship,” said Rabbi Joseph Prouser, the editor of Masorti.
The original Conservative Judaism was published from 1945 through 2014. The reboot is sponsored by the movement’s Rabbinical Assembly and its five seminaries, including the Jewish Theological Seminary, the New York flagship. Its readership base is rabbis and cantors affiliated with the movement.
Masorti arrives at a critical time for the Conservative movement: In an essay in the first issue, its associate editor, Rabbi Jonathan Rosenbaum, says what was once America’s largest Jewish denomination is at a “precipice.”
“At its summit, the plurality of [North American] Jews identified with the Conservative movement, something like 40%,” Rosenbaum said in an interview. “There was something like 1.6 million Jews who were thought to be part of the Conservative movement up to maybe the late ‘80s, early ‘90s. Today, there are about 500,000.
“Part of the goal of the journal,” he said, is to “look at the problems and the means of solving them.”
In the past the Conservative Judaism journal had been a forum for debate within the movement. It published dueling papers, for example, on the decision to ordain women and what is and isn’t permissible on Shabbat. Prouser says he’ll uphold that tradition of dissent: The current issue features an essay by Michal Raucher, a Jewish studies professor at Rutgers University, who criticizes the movement’s establishment for embracing a justification for abortion that doesn’t go far enough in recognizing the bodily autonomy of women (an argument she also advanced in a JTA oped).
And Prouser does hope these arguments are heard beyond the movement, positioned between traditionalist Orthodoxy and liberal Reform. “One of the beauties of the Conservative movement is that we can talk to people to our right to our left right, we can talk to the entire spectrum of the Jewish community,” he said.
The editors of the new journals agree that there are fewer and fewer spaces for civil conversation among Jews, blaming the filter bubble of the internet and the take-no-prisoners style of current political debate. And each said they would like to be part of the solution.
Sufrin, the editor of Hartman’s journal, calls it a “bridge, because people can talk about it together, they can engage with the ideas together, and it’s in that conversation that they can develop a relationship and ultimately, talk together more productively.”
The question is whether it is too late: At a time when algorithms reward readers with the kind of material they are likely to agree with, will even an elite reach across ideological divides and listen to what the other side is saying? When institutions — from government to religion — regard compromise as surrender, who dares to concede that your ideological opponent might have a point?
“Difference and disagreement are productive when we engage with the best versions of those with whom we disagree,” Hayes writes in Sources. That sounds like a call to action. Or is it an epitaph?
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Jake Lang led a protest against Mamdani and Muslims. Then the Nazis showed up to protest him.
Far-right activist Jake Lang led a march last week protesting Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s presence at the 9/11 25th anniversary memorial ceremony. The protest attracted swastika-sporting men describing themselves as Nazis; they were there to counterprotest Lang, whose mother is Jewish.
Around 100 demonstrators attended Lang’s march, which happened blocks away from the ceremony held at Ground Zero. Lang described the march on X as a “Great CRUSADE on Muslim SCUM Zohran Mamdani.”
The “crusade” was laden with anti-Muslim messaging, including a poster reading “Deport All Muslims.” About 40 counter-protesters arrived to oppose Lang. While most were antiracist protesters, seven were neo-Nazis. One counter-protester got into a physical altercation with someone from Lang’s march.
Lang is best known for his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection. He spent four years in prison, facing assault charges for attacking a police officer with a baseball bat, before being pardoned by President Donald Trump. In August, Lang lost a campaign to secure a Republican congressional nomination in Florida.
Though Lang’s mother is Jewish, he identifies as Christian, and has brandished wooden crosses at his marches, some of which he called “Christian Crusades.” Lang has publicly renounced his Judaism and the state of Israel, burning a copy of the Talmud and performing a Heil Hitler salute outside the AIPAC headquarters in D.C.
Nevertheless, seven men wearing swastika armbands — and one clad in an Elmo suit draped with a Palestinian flag as a cape — stood near Lang’s march holding a sign reading, “Jake Lang is a Jew.”
The men performed Sieg Heil salutes and, in an unusual move for self-identifying Nazis, chanted “Free, free Palestine,” alongside the declaration, “We are the real racists.” They passed out flyers reading “no more wars for Jews” and ranted about American soldiers lost in battles they said were directed by Israel.
“I want them out of our government,” said one of the men, Gregory Conte, a former schoolteacher who was fired for his white-nationalist ties. “And not just Zionists — Jews.”
The swastika-clad men drew a bevy of critics, including one man who told them, “I agree Israel did 9/11, but you guys are Nazis, man, you guys brought them to Palestine.”
One person filming the protest asked Conte, “Do you hate Jewish people?” He replied: “I’ve never had one do a good thing for me.” Conte then asked whether the man behind the camera was Jewish and he said he was; Conte refused to speak to him further, stating that he does not talk to Jews.
Footage showed Conte on the subway, this time without his armband, talking about how “Jake Lang is trying to start a war.” Independent journalist Talia Jane asked him, “Want to show them your armband?” Conte declined to take it out.
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Why antisemites are shopping in the kosher aisle
“I had sex with a Jewish billionaire and made him tell me why nobody in their family is fat.”
This is the opening line of an eight-minute viral AI video hawking an oregano oil supplement, claiming it is the closely guarded Jewish secret to svelte physiques.
The animated video, which is entirely in song, features a Black woman — the narrator who has sex with the Jewish billionaire — who works for a wealthy Jewish family that includes both black-hatted Orthodox men and women wearing kippot, a practice unheard of in Orthodox circles.
The woman sings about her confusion over the family’s slim physiques despite the fact that they never exercise and eat big meals of brisket and “challah bread” (incorrectly pronounced with a hard “ch”). But when she begins a romance with the son, they reveal that they all take an oregano oil supplement that gets rid of the “parasites” that regular Americans get “from food, water — everywhere.” The woman begins to take the oil and gives it to her mother; both become magically healthy.
The ads seem like an outgrowth of the popularity of the term goyslop, the false conspiracy that Jews are feeding the masses heavily processed, nutritionally bankrupt foods in order to weaken non-Jews so they are easier to control. (Jews in this conspiratorial universe run the world, of course.) The implied flipside, it seems, is that Jews eat secret, incredibly healthy, strengthening sustenance, which remains hidden from everyone else.
Goyslop isn’t a new idea; in fact, the idea that Jews had a secret food that kept them healthier than everyone else is part of old Russian folklore. But the term found mass visibility thanks to the mainstreaming of scientifically dubious alternative health ideology popularized by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and is particularly popular among naturopathic health influencers who are skeptical of pasteurization and Western medicine. (RFK has not himself used the term.)
Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising, then, that some conspiratorial influencers are advising their followers to look for a few supposedly secret symbols in the grocery store that they believe prove the food is safer and higher quality: hechshers.
“If you look on the labels, you’ll see a ‘U’ in the corner, or sometimes it’ll say kosher,” said one influencer in a viral video of this ilk. “If the 🧃 are eating and drinking it, it’s a lot safer than the food that they’re giving us.” She also warns against eating pork and encourages her followers to shop in the kosher aisle. (The influencer bleeps out the word “Jews” in her video, and replaces it in the closed captions with a juicebox emoji, referencing a common code — “juice” — that antisemites often use to talk about Jews while avoiding censorship.)
“Goyslop is the poison that they feed us, goyim, we’re the cattle, we’re subhuman to these people,” said antisemitic influencer Ryan Matta, in another guide to the grocery store pointing out hechshers. “So if you’re not getting the bottles that are labeled with the K or the special label, then it’s not kosher. And if it’s not kosher, it’s poison.”
(Matta, who does not seem to understand any actual rules of kosher, spends much of the video trying to find a kosher version of his preferred pasta sauce flavor: Italian sausage.)
Resilia, the company hawking its supplements in the ad, has made numerous AI singing ads; many have received multiple millions of views. The ads aren’t always about Jews; one — confusingly for a product supposed to make you healthier — features a decrepit singing skeleton. Others namedrop different ethnic groups like Norwegians. Almost all of them involve cheating or illicit affairs, as is common in AI-generated videos posted across the internet, many of which feature soap operas starring families of fruit or sodas.
But more than one of the Resilia ads features Jews hiding health secrets. Another one, with 4.3 million views on YouTube, has nearly the same plot as the first, just gender-swapped — a male gardener has an affair with the wife of a Jewish billionaire who, after making him promise to keep it secret, tells him that Resilia’s garlic supplements are the key to the family’s heart health and lack of diabetes.
Goyslop has become a casual and ubiquitous meme — teenagers throw it around to refer to low-quality food like chips or hot dogs, but also bad movies and TV. They are often blaming corporations, not Jews, for feeding the masses swill. They’re also, almost always at least, joking.
Still, the underlying idea — that unhealthy food is somehow, nefariously, connected to Jews — persists through the language, even if the majority of jokesters don’t understand the reference.
Perhaps that’s how we got the Resilia ad about secret Jewish oregano oil supplements. It’s not clear if the company purposefully inserted Jewish content into some of their ads; the AI customer service bot on the company website denied any relationship to Judaism. Resilia is purported to have thousands of these AI singing ads, so the Jewish narrative may purely be a result of the algorithmic machine resurfacing the antisemitism it consumed in its training data.
In any case, however healthy the supplements Resilia sells might claim to be, the ad is its own form of slop — AI slop.
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Israel’s culture minister called this documentary about IDF tactics ‘vile.’ It deserves to be seen.
VENICE — At its premiere here last week, towards the end of the 83th Venice International Film Festival, Naza, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s documentary about Israel’s killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, received a 25-minute-long standing ovation, a record at the festival. Two nights later, the film won the festival’s Special Jury Prize. By Sunday, Israel’s culture minister, Miki Zohar, was calling the film “vile,” describing it as treason and threatening to revoke its directors’ citizenship. Zohar invoked his reform of cinema funding, saying Israelis should no longer have to pay for work that harms the army and the state.
I left the press screening of Naza angry, depressed and utterly convinced of its importance. Its account of the procedures that govern the deaths of civilians is devastating precisely because so much of the testimony sounds like people describing an ordinary working day. The film will have its North American premiere at the New York Film Festival on Sept. 26. It deserves to be seen, and debated with considerably more patience than some of its detractors have displayed.
Venice has traditionally worn its politics more lightly than Berlin, where a filmmaker’s acceptance speech can cause an international incident. This year, however, festival director Alberto Barbera programmed a competition that invited controversy. Alongside Naza was Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s DAU, which drew Ukrainian objections over the production’s Russian connections (including to Sergei Adoniev, a businessman who has been sanctioned by Ukraine and the U.S.) In the run-up to the festival, Barbera defended DAU as a denunciation of totalitarianism. Both films are international productions by directors whose countries have become objects of international opprobrium. Both venture into their societies’ heart of darkness. Barbera deserves enormous credit for programming them both in the main section of the world’s oldest film festival despite the objections of many.
Berlin supplies a cautionary precedent. No Other Land, the Oscar-winning documentary Abraham and Szor made with Palestinians Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, premiered there in 2024, where it won the festival’s documentary prize. After Abraham and Adra gave speeches condemning Israel’s policy of apartheid in the West Bank, the German culture minister Claudia Roth, caught on camera applauding at the ceremony, clarified that her applause had been intended for the Israeli director. I shudder to imagine the official response Naza might have elicited there. Venice at least offered an opportunity to discuss what was on screen.
The film, which presents testimonies from 24 serving and former military personnel, grew out of years of investigative reporting. Produced by the British newspaper the Guardian and JW Films, in collaboration with the Israeli-Palestinian magazine +972 and its news website Local Call, it builds on Abraham’s investigations into Israeli intelligence and his work with Guardian journalist Harry Davies. Revelations about targeting systems had appeared in print while filming was underway and were subsequently reported on by both The New York Times and Washington Post. All this means that the disclosures made in Naza are not brand new. However, the stark, focused and lean approach that Abraham and Szor take in the documentary ensure that the information hits home with chilling force.
The film’s unusual title is the Hebrew term for collateral damage — specifically, the anticipated civilian toll of a military strike in Gaza. Speaking to Abraham from a series of Tel Aviv rooftops at night, the interviewees, whose appearances and voices are digitally disguised, explain with patient detachment how targets in Gaza are identified and eliminated. One of the tools used to identify suspected militants is an AI system called Lavender. The frightening efficiency of such technology is discussed alongside the human decisions that determine what constitutes an acceptable loss.
One of the most disturbing claims has prompted a specific military rebuttal. An interviewee says a strike was once approved with 500 civilian deaths anticipated; he does not know how many were actually killed. The IDF claims it has never planned, approved or conducted a strike expecting anything near that toll, and challenges the filmmakers’ ability to verify the account. It also maintains that humans authorize strikes and questions the witnesses’ competence to discuss broader strategy.
The film’s restraint gives incendiary testimony such as this time to register. For the majority of the film, we only glimpse the interviewees’ faces in silhouette and watch as they crudely draw diagrams to explain the logistics of a military strike, say, on a crowded building. Every so often the camera wanders off the roof, peering into the illuminated homes and high-rise office buildings of Tel Aviv at night. The point is precisely to convey an unsettling sense of normalcy.
I was particularly struck by the absence of the racist invective I had half expected. Some interviewees describe themselves as educated, liberal people. Their accounts nevertheless reveal a callous disregard for civilian causalities. One recalls the pleasure of a job well done. “It’s so much fun,” he says of reaching his targets and we hear in his voice how the remote killings he takes part in gives him an indescribable rush. After a pause, he tells Abraham that as someone raised in the Israeli context, someone who had got to visit the death camps in Poland, he always considered and asked himself how they could do what they did. “For me the Nazis are evil,” he says. “So what does that make me?” It is perhaps the film’s most damning exchange.
One of Naza’s strength as a documentary is that it does not demand agreement that Israel is committing war crimes, including genocide, before its investigation begins. That gives it a chance to reach people who have defended Israel and remain capable of reconsidering their position.
Some of the most vociferous criticism of Naza has not come from IDF spokesmen or other Israeli officials. Almost immediately after the premiere, footage from the film’s lengthy ovation (where Abraham and Szor stand looking intensely uncomfortable and withdrawn) went viral, with numerous commentators on X and other platforms making ugly accusations against the filmmakers, including for granting anonymity to the whistleblowers who feature in the film.
“A viscerally nauseating spectacle. Imagine SS officers, shielded and protected by anonymity, getting a 25-minute standing ovation for recounting their tortures and murders. Criminal perpetrators should only be heard at their trials not at gala celebrations,” read one tweet that has been viewed close to 150,000 times. Though the language of that post is particularly incendiary, the sentiment it expresses is surprisingly widespread on social media.
Confidentiality was a condition of obtaining these accounts, a standard journalistic arrangement that confers no clemency. At the press conference, Abraham described that his sources were motivated variously by remorse and professional pride. He affirmed that his goal was to keep the victims of Gaza at the film’s center — and not to congratulate its witnesses.
The tenor of this debate recalls Nadav Lapid’s withdrawal from the Marseille film festival in June after boycott calls. His Yes, an infernal satire of post-Oct. 7 society, is a ferocious attack on Israeli complacency. It would take considerable ingenuity or imagination to claim that either it or Naza is an apology for Israel.
Accepting his award in Venice, Abraham said that he made Naza because “the denial of a crime is what helps it persist.” He later pledged to distribute the film as widely as possible in Israel. The interviewees, he explained, “spoke in Hebrew because they wanted to reach out to the Israeli public.” Not surprisingly, the film, sight unseen, has already been widely condemned within Israel. Former defense minister and opposition politician Avigdor Lieberman called the directors “haters of Israel” and accused them of turning Oct. 7 into a blood libel. Such accusations should make the necessity to reach Israeli viewers even more urgent.
Days after the film’s victory in Venice, Haaretz ran an editorial with the blunt headline, “Israelis Must Finally Confront What Israel Has Done in Gaza.” After years of trying to “air dirty laundry at home” with limited success, Abraham and Szor now had found in the Venice Film Festival a major platform where the conclusions of their investigations were impossible to ignore. The editorial’s key sentence is also its shortest: “Israel’s problem is not public relations, but reality.”
Naza only leaves the rooftops of Tel Aviv for two brief occasions. In the first of these, we see archival footage of a young Benjamin Netanyahu promoting his 1995 book Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat Domestic and International Terrorism, In the clip, a much-younger Netanyahu defines terrorism as a policy of deliberately killing and maiming civilians to advance political goals. Bibi’s words hang uncomfortably over the rest of the film, inviting and daring viewers to draw their own conclusions.
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