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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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Howard Zinn: a radical historian with a Jewish conscience
“I am a sportswriter by trade,” Dave Zirin, sports editor at The Nation, told me. Zirin has written 11 books, all of them dealing with the knotty and oft-controversial politics of sport, coming at the games he loves — and the machinations behind them — from a progressive position. His previous subjects have included Colin Kaepernick, Barry Bonds and John Carlos.
But Zirin’s latest book, The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn, is not that. It’s a biography of the late Boston University professor and self-described “radical historian,” best known for the long-running bestseller, A People’s History of the United States, which was first published in 1980.
“I never would have thought in eight trillion years that I was ever going to write a book about Howard Zinn,” Zirin, 52, told me by phone from Washington, D.C.. “He was a hero of mine, a great influence, and I would have thought it presumptuous to even think about it, not just to mention that I never gave thought to writing a non-sports book.
“But I just had so many people in recent years want to engage me in this discussion of ‘What would Howard say about these incredible demonstrations in 2010 of the Black Lives Matter movement, and, especially, in the age of Trumpism, the rise of neo-fascism, not just in this country, but abroad?’”
If Zirin couldn’t divine an exact answer, he was at least in a position to hazard an educated guess. Turned on to an abbreviated 20th century-focused version of A People’s History as a high school graduation gift by his sister, Zirin became a history major at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn. Much later in life, Zirin found himself hosting Q & A sessions with Zinn at venues throughout the country.
Zirin says that the events of the two Trump terms made people wonder: “‘Would that have shaken Howard’s faith in the power of the people to make positive change and the ability for people to bend the arc of history, as they say, toward justice?’ That made me want to write the book.”
When he started work on the biography, Zirin knew the basics of Zinn’s public trajectory: his service in WWII as an Air Force bombardier; his stint teaching at Spelman College and his role in the Civil Rights movement, his protests against the Vietnam War, his ongoing conflict with Boston University president John Silber, his work as a playwright, the Hollywood actors and rock musicians who read his prose and wanted to meet and work with him. The bottom line: Zinn had an unwavering commitment to unions and organization, the power of the people.
“The power of tyranny is overestimated (not in the short run, but in the long run),” Zirin quotes Zinn as saying in his preface, “and can be overcome by the unity, the determination, of apparently powerless people.”
“When we were on stage,” Zirin told me, “he would speak about things he was a central player in, but he would kind of leave himself out of the narrative, partly out of humility but I also think that’s the political training of people who came up in the 1930s during the Depression. They’re always thinking about the movement, not about themselves.
Still, Zirin added, “Howard had so many great stories that he would tell about his life offstage. So, I really wanted to tell his story because I felt truly that it hadn’t been told and I wanted to learn about him. I wanted to invest in it.”
What did Judaism mean to Zinn and, now, to Zirin? “Judaism was expressed through the pursuit of knowledge, of questioning established truths, and always standing with the underdog,” said Zirin. “It is why he felt strongly that Jews of conscience needed to advocate for the Palestinian people. I am inspired by this commitment to tikkun olam and I share his approach to how we need to apply our faith: as voices against apartheid and genocide.”
Zinn’s cultural identification as a Jew often emerged in his sense of humor that Zirin calls his “secret sauce.”
“It’s not like I think Howard Zinn was like Billy Crystal with a history book,” Zirin said. “His ability was to keep an audience listening through humor. [He could] apply history to the present and make people think about it, bring it alive in present terms and then Howard had that third layer, that third gear, where he could be funny and affable and work that twinkle in his eye and that smile and keep an audience focused. I think that allowed him to speak in a lot of diverse circumstances.”
Zinn, of course, attracted negative heat, too. In 2020, President Donald Trump said, “Our children are instructed from propaganda tracts, like those of Howard Zinn, that try to make students ashamed of their own history.” Zinn caught flak not just from the expected bastions of the far-right but also from other historians. The latter, Zirin says, were critical of Zinn mostly out of jealousy. Zinn was popular and well-read; they were not.
“He was able to break out of the academy and impact the world,” Zirin said, “He saw academic praise meaning very little relative to the world. He took greater joy in writing 800-word columns that spoke to what was happening rather than writing another 800 -page book the likes of which a lot of academics write, these things that no one reads.”
As to the right-wing trolling, Zirin said, “I think he would have just taken that as a badge of honor. I think for Howard that just rolled off his back because of his interests, which was in teaching and seeing how what he was teaching applied to the world — he loved bringing the lessons of the street into the classroom and he loved seeing what was in the classroom applied to the streets. He was blessed to have lived in interesting times and in important places.”
The book explores Zinn’s family life, too. Zirin got co-operation and input from Zinn’s son Jeff, an activist-playwright, and his daughter, Myla, an educator and environmental advocate. Some of those stories involve their upbringing. Howard was on the road frequently, and Zirin writes that his wife Roslyn (Roz) had to play good cop and bad cop, neither role she relished.
Roz Zinn, who died at 85 from ovarian cancer in May 2008, was also an activist and artist, and though the couple remained happily married for 64 years, she lived, to an extent, in his shadow. Her death crushed him.
“Howard stayed extremely active after Roz passed and in many ways that was his therapy,” Zirin said. “He took to email voraciously. He traveled, he spoke, he did events like the ones I did with him where he could sit because, while he was still sharp, he didn’t want to stand that long. The twinkle would go out during those moments when the warmth of a crowd, or a friend, would leave the stage or his presence.”
“At the very end,” Zirin said, “he had these moments of looking very sad. How do you comprehend what it’s like to lose someone you’ve been married to for 64 years? Incomprehensible.”
Zinn died from a heart attack at 87 on Jan. 27, 2009. He’d been in a swimming pool in a Santa Monica, California hotel. He was not, as some said, swimming laps; he didn’t have the strength for that. At the memorial service at the Arlington Street Church in Boston April 23, 2010, Myla said he was standing in the pool. A pool worker pulled him out of the water and asked if Zinn wanted an ambulance. He reportedly said, “No, I’m OK.”
Zinn’s friend Noam Chomsky spoke at the service, as did Matt Damon — whose family grew up next to the Zinns in Newton, Mass. — and poet Martín Espada, who read a tribute poem written for Zinn. Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon — founding member of the SNCC Freedom Singers and Sweet Honey in the Rock, cultural historian and activist — led the crowd in singing “This Little Light of Mine” and “Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho.”
Zirin told me that Zinn’s writings and words have made him less pessimistic about the world. “It irrevocably changed me,” he said. “The main effect that Howard had on my own outlook was that there are answers in history. Howard imbued me with this idea that you had to be more than angry. You had to have a sense of the world if you wanted to change it. I also really thought about how we could not just be objects but subjects of history.”
“So many people out there want the world to be a different place and are disgusted by the state of things, of what Naomi Klein describes as ‘end times fascism,’” Zirin said. “You try to imagine a sense that if you can root your ideas and even your anger in history, there’s a path out, there’s a road map out.”
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Israel is revoking entry permits for U.S. activists involved in West Bank
Hannah was on her way to class on Jan. 8 when she opened her inbox and found an email from Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority. Due to a change of circumstances, it said, her authorization to enter Israel had been revoked.
“I had to read it a few times, honestly, and then I Googled it and just started crying. I was on my way to class. I was bawling,” Hannah told the Forward. Hannah asked that her last name not be published because she fears that speaking to the media could affect her ability to visit Israel in the future.
Hannah, whose boyfriend lives in Israel and who has family there, has spent almost every summer of her life in the country. She was left dumbfounded by the email. There was no explanation of the reason for the revocation, and nothing about how, or whether, she could appeal.
The closest thing to an incident she can point to came the previous July, when she joined her rabbi and a group of volunteers accompanying a Palestinian farmer during the grape harvest — a practice known as protective presence, in which foreign witnesses aim to deter settlers and soldiers from interfering. Israeli soldiers stopped the group and held them for hours. “They asked to see my passport and said they were looking to see if there was any reason to deport me,” she said. They found none, and told her she was free to go.
Hannah came up through the institutions Israel counts on to keep American Jews attached to it. In high school, Hannah was involved with hasbara fellowships, and her mother is active in her local Jewish federation. “It’s so odd that almost the more I become familiar with the place in ways that I wasn’t as a kid, and maybe less naive about it, now I don’t have the ability to be there,” she said. “I’m not welcome there anymore.”
Hannah is one of seven American Jews who told the Forward that Israel had revoked their electronic travel authorization, or ETA-IL, after they participated in protective presence activities in the West Bank.
A loose network of Jewish organizations recruits diaspora Jews for the work and frames it as an expression of Jewish values. Programs range from 10-day delegations to seasonal olive-harvest cohorts to Hineinu, Hebrew for “here we are,” a three-month placement in Palestinian communities in Masafer Yatta that the Center for Jewish Nonviolence launched in 2021.
According to figures from the Center for Jewish Nonviolence, dozens of participants in its Hineinu program and other protective presence initiatives have had their authorizations revoked since the system took effect.
Israel launched ETA-IL as a pilot in June 2024 and made it mandatory for travelers from visa-exempt countries, including the United States, on Jan. 1, 2025. The application is a brief online form, usually approved automatically within minutes, that allows visa-free entry for tourism or business. It functions as Israel’s counterpart to the U.S. ESTA system, and followed Israel’s admission to the American Visa Waiver Program in 2023.
A State Department spokesperson declined to comment on individual cases or on the department’s discussions with Israeli officials, but said the Department of Homeland Security, in consultation with State, regularly reviews whether Visa Waiver Program participants meet program requirements.
Israel was admitted to the program in 2023 only after signing a memorandum of understanding committing it to treat all American citizens equally at its borders, a longstanding program requirement that had kept Israel out for years over its treatment of Palestinian American travelers.
None of those who spoke to the Forward had been arrested or charged with a crime. Some received no notice at all, which Daniel Roth, executive director of the Center for Jewish Nonviolence, said has become increasingly common. Those who did get revocation emails received identical notices citing a change of circumstances, with no explanation of the duration of the ban.
By the letter of the law, all of those whose authorizations were revoked remain eligible to make aliyah — immigrate to Israel — unless they are deemed a security threat under a provision of the Law of Return. Neither of two immigration attorneys who spoke with the Forward could recall any applicant being blocked as a security threat.
The visitors could open a file with the group Nefesh B’Nefesh and, in theory, be Israeli citizens within months. For now, they are barred from entering.
The Forward asked the Population and Immigration Authority how many ETA-IL authorizations have been revoked and on what legal basis, and the Israel Police asking whether it recommends revocations. Neither responded.
The Jewish Agency, which facilitates immigration by Jews to Israel under the Law of Return, said in a statement: “There is no connection between the ETA process and the Aliyah process. Regardless, we cannot comment on ETA refusal because we do not handle any part of that process. The criteria for eligibility for Aliyah remain unchanged.”
Change of circumstances
That Israel’s government sees protective presence workers as an adversary and target for law enforcement is no secret.
In April 2024, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir ordered the creation of a police task force to handle foreign and Israeli left-wing activists in the West Bank, which he described as a team for dealing with “anarchists.”
The unit sits under the West Bank district police and works in coordination with the Population and Immigration Authority. Ben-Gvir publicly credited the immigration authority for its role in deporting 32 foreign activists in October 2025 following an olive harvest action in the northern West Bank.
Of the Jews the Forward interviewed, one described himself as an anti-Zionist. The others were liberal Zionists who said they are concerned about the rise of settler violence in the West Bank and the preservation of Israel as a liberal democratic state. They were day school and summer camp alumni. Most have family in Israel and visit regularly.
Sam Sherman, an actor and writer who lives in New York City, was in Masafer Yatta, a collection of hamlets in the southern West Bank, when he opened an email telling him that his ETA-IL had been revoked due to a change of circumstances.
He was about seven weeks into his stint with a Hineinu group, and he was not the only one. “It happened to me and a few others in my cohort … within the same hour,” Sherman said. “A few of us got the same email within minutes of each other.”
Sherman was never arrested. He describes one incident that he believes amounts to a detention in place, and otherwise a pattern of identification, soldiers, police and armed settlers photographing his passport during confrontations he says were initiated by settlers.
“We were just there hanging out with people, essentially,” he said. “But we were treated as if it was almost criminal for us to be there.”
His first reaction was confusion. “I was like, what does this mean?” he said. More experienced activists told him what it meant: once he left Israel, he would be unable to return unless he chose to make aliyah. “If I’m the wrong kind of Jew for Israel,” he said, “sure. Great.”
Rabbi Jill Jacobs is the CEO of T’ruah, a rabbinic human rights organization that has been sending American clergy to the West Bank for years. She said the revocations cut against Israel’s founding promise.
“The promise of Israel is that it’s going to be a refuge and a home for Jews everywhere in the world, not just for Jews with certain political opinions,” said Jacobs. “Israel should be the place in the world that is safest for Jews, no matter what your religious practices are, what country you’re coming from and what your political views are.”
Another participant in Hineinu said she never received an email at all.
Nina, who asked to be identified by her first name only, had a valid authorization when she left the country for a weekend in Cyprus to reset her tourist visa. When she tried to re-enter Israel, she said, she was held at the border and denied entry.
“I never got an email that my ETA had been revoked,” she recounted. “I never got any correspondence at all, and I never got anything written, that said that ETA had been canceled or revoked or anything.” Hours later she resubmitted the application from her phone and got an automatic rejection.
‘Nothing’s out of the question’
Critics of the volunteers say it is simply a law enforcement matter.
Naomi Kahn, director of the international division at Regavim, a right-wing Israeli legal advocacy group that campaigns against unauthorized Palestinian construction in the West Bank and lobbies for demolitions, said some of the accompaniment activity takes place in closed military zones and active IDF firing zones.
“It should not be considered unusual when a sovereign state chooses to deny entry to people whose declared intention is to break the law,” Kahn said. “It should come as no surprise when tourists are disinvited when they break the law. I don’t think this raises eyebrows anywhere else in the world.”
Closed military zones have become a point of contention between activists and the Israeli military. In late October 2025, two American Jewish women, Rachel Beth Flamholz and Leila Stillman-Utterback, were deported and banned from Israel for 10 years after entering a closed military zone imposed on the Palestinian village of Burin the same day they had arranged to pick olives there.
“In my experience, closed military zones are used as a tool to clear Palestinians and those supporting Palestinians, including us, from an area,” Roth said, “and by and large, to leave space for Israeli settlers to do whatever it is they want.”
Jacobs draws a distinction between conduct and status. A tourist who commits a crime in Israel is subject to Israeli law, she said, as a tourist would be subject to the law of any place they were visiting. That, she argues, is not what is happening here. None of the volunteers were charged with anything.
“These are the best of the best,” Jacobs said. “These are people who are devoting, in some cases, months or more of their lives, that they could be spending doing anything, to trying to make Israel a more just place for both Jews and Palestinians. And that’s exactly who Israel should want to be standing by and supporting.”
This fall, some will head to the West Bank as part of Protect the Harvest, an initiative run by an international coalition of Palestinian, American, Israeli and Jewish organizations responding to an invitation from Palestinian farmers. The campaign runs in week-long cohorts from mid-October through mid-November.
T’ruah is bringing a clergy delegation from Oct. 18 to 23, ending four days before Israel’s national elections. Jacobs expects many American rabbis on the ground, some bringing their own congregants.
“I don’t know what the Israeli government is going to do,” she said. “But I think if they decide they’re going to start deporting American rabbis, that would basically be picking a very big public fight with the American Jewish community.” Even people who haven’t been paying attention, she said, will be furious.
Asked whether she thought it was actually possible that an American rabbi could be deported during the harvest, she did not rule it out. “Nothing’s out of the question,” she said.
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A Jewish philanthropist funded this pioneering school for Black students. Now it’s getting a second life.
A small Kentucky town has saved a piece of Black history, with a little-known Jewish connection.
This summer, Sadieville, Kentucky — population 320 — opened an exhibit in a one-room schoolhouse that served Black students during segregation.
Built between 1917 and 1920, the school was partly funded by Jewish philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, an owner of Sears, Roebuck and Company who gave much of his fortune away as part of a collaboration with the influential Black educator Booker T. Washington.
The Sadieville school was one of 5,000 schools for Black students across 15 states that Rosenwald helped fund. The schools transformed Black education across the rural South during the Jim-Crow era, dramatically improving students’ literacy rates and economic mobility.
But today, many of the schoolhouses are in danger of abandonment. As preservationists seek federal recognition of Rosenwald schools in Congress through a proposed national park, the residents of Sadieville took matters into their own hands.
“It is one of our little special treasures that we have here, because there are so few of them remaining in the United States,” Laura Centers, Sadieville’s city clerk, told the Forward. “We want to protect our history.”
Recently introduced legislation in both the House and Senate would help protect that history nationally, but both bills have languished in committee. To pass, they will need Republican support — at a time when the National Park Service is already dealing with staffing shortages and a slim budget. So far, Rep. Rob Wittman of Virginia is the only Republican to sign on.
Sadieville would not be included in the proposed national park, which would initially cover three schools in Maryland, South Carolina and Virginia, along with a headquarters in Chicago. But Dorothy Canter, a retired biophysicist who leads the Rosenwald national park campaign, said local preservation efforts are still essential to the broader movement.
“It helps the campaign because it’s a part of history,” Canter said. “It’s part of Sadieville history.”
As one of more than 150 Rosenwald schools in Kentucky, the Sadieville school operated until integration in 1954 — the year of Brown v. Board of Education. Pioneering journalist Alice Allison Dunnigan, the first Black woman to receive White House press credentials, taught at a Rosenwald school in New Hope, Kentucky.
Getting the Sadieville school in shape for visitors was not easy. During a 14-year renovation of the schoolhouse, the town dealt with termite damage, replaced the pine floors, restored the building’s foundation, patched the drywall on the walls and ceiling, rehabbed windows, and replaced doors.
The town also added historically accurate furnishings, including a chalkboard, desks scattered across the room, and a coal stove for heat. Because the school lacked electricity, large windows provided natural light. The sparse decor includes a photo of Abraham Lincoln and a book about Nicodemus, Kansas, a Reconstruction-era Black farming town founded by a group of formerly enslaved people who fled Kentucky seeking land ownership.
The project was funded by a combination of community donations and national support, with a $10,000 grant from Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky, $7,000 from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and $2,000 from Friends of Sadieville, Inc.
Staffing the exhibit in such a small town is also a challenge, Centers said. The school opened to the public for only two days this summer. After the initial unveiling on June 19 — in honor of Juneteenth – it will open again on August 15.
But Centers hopes those two days will generate enough interest to justify opening for more days next summer.
The exhibit is meaningful for the entire town, she said, but especially for Rosenwald students’ descendants.
“We just want to get the word out there that we do have this,” Centers said. “It’s important to a lot of people’s history.”
The post A Jewish philanthropist funded this pioneering school for Black students. Now it’s getting a second life. appeared first on The Forward.
