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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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Why is AIPAC targeting Trump’s ICE funding?
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, often a reliable ally of pro-Israel Republicans, is now echoing Democratic outrage over one of President Donald Trump’s most polarizing policies: immigration enforcement. It comes amid backlash sparked by the fatal shooting this month of Renee Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis.
AIPAC’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, began airing an attack ad over the weekend against former Democratic Rep. Tom Malinowski, who is running in a Feb. 5 primary for the House seat vacated by New Jersey Governor-elect Mikie Sherrill. The ad highlights his 2019 vote for a bipartisan border funding bill, which included an increase in funds for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. “We can’t trust Tom Malinowski” to stand up to President Donald Trump, the voiceover says in the 30-second video.
AIPAC has become increasingly controversial among mainstream Democrats for backing pro-Israel Republicans who questioned the 2020 election results. That opposition deepened during the Gaza war as Democratic voters became more polarized over U.S. policy on Israel. Congressional candidates, including some Jewish Democrats, have promised not to take contributions from AIPAC. The group has also drawn attacks from white nationalists and some leaders of the MAGA movement for their lobbying on behalf of a foreign government.
The new ad is especially notable given that AIPAC has spent years cultivating ties to Trump-aligned Republicans, many of whom strongly support aggressive immigration enforcement. By attacking a Democrat over ICE funding while sidestepping Trump himself, the group is threading a narrow needle — aligning rhetorically with Democratic outrage while maintaining its broader bipartisan posture.
In the 2024 election cycle, the group spent $28 million in high-stakes Democratic primaries. That included more than $14 million, which contributed to the defeat of Rep. Jamaal Bowman, a strident critic of Israel. Malinowski, who served two terms in Congress from 2019 to 2023, holds a mainstream Democratic stance on Israel. During his first term, he traveled to Israel on a trip sponsored by the American Israel Education Foundation, AIPAC’s educational affiliate.
Israel has not been a key issue in the crowded special election in the northern New Jersey district, which includes a sizable Jewish electorate. The Jewish Democratic Council of America held a virtual candidate forum last week with eight candidates on issues important to Jewish voters.
A spokesperson for the United Democracy Project did not immediately respond to questions about why the group is targeting Malinowski, particularly on such a deeply contentious political issue. AIPAC spent at least $350,000 on the ad.
AIPAC ad is out https://t.co/f0cH6AIgja pic.twitter.com/udwL7nJgYf
— umichvoter (@umichvoter) January 17, 2026
Malinowski, 60, is a former assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor in President Barack Obama’s second term and previously served as a foreign policy speechwriter for President Bill Clinton. He first ran for Congress in 2018 in New Jersey’s 7th District, saying he was motivated by Trump’s election.
“I am myself an immigrant from Poland. My family was not Jewish, but experienced life under the Nazi occupation,” Malinowski said in an interview at the time. “That’s where my commitment to defending human rights comes from. That’s where my belief in the importance of protecting Israel comes from.” He is a close friend of former Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Malinowski was defeated in the 2022 election.
Malinowski is competing for the open seat against at least two leading contenders: Outgoing Lt. Gov. Tahesha Way and Essex County Commissioner Brendan Gill.
AIPAC typically focuses on U.S.-Israel relations and national security issues. However, its political arm has focused on domestic issues in close contests.
In 2024, they attacked Reps. Jammal Bowman of New York and Cori Bush of Missouri — two of the first House members to advocate for a ceasefire after the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023 — over their votes against signature Biden-era bills, like infrastructure and healthcare.
In a statement to the New Jersey Globe, Malinowski called the attack “laughably preposterous” and suggested it would boomerang against AIPAC. “I have many pro-Israel supporters in the district, including AIPAC members, who believe you can be passionately pro-Israel while being critical of Netanyahu,” Malinowski said. “To say that they’re appalled by this ad would be an understatement. In fact, I’m reading a collective sense that AIPAC has lost its mind.”
The post Why is AIPAC targeting Trump’s ICE funding? appeared first on The Forward.
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The Jewish women who kept Confederate graves from disappearing
In June 1866, just over a year after the Civil War ended, young Jewish men in Richmond, Virginia, removed their coats and set to work among the graves of their fallen comrades. Some were “frail of limb,” a newspaper noted. They wheeled gravel and turf, filled the graves, and tamped the earth down “in a very substantial manner.” It was the last sad tribute they could offer.
The work that day was organized by Jewish women in the city. Their aim was permanence: to enclose the soldiers’ graves, to mark them, and to ensure they would not disappear “before the relentless finger of time.”
The Hebrew Cemetery in Richmond was established in 1816, decades before the Civil War reshaped the nation and long before the city became the capital of the Confederacy. It was the second burial ground for the Beth Shalome Congregation, Virginia’s first synagogue. Tucked within its grounds is the Soldiers’ Section, where 30 Jewish Confederate soldiers are buried, in what is believed to be one of only two Jewish military cemeteries in the world outside Israel.
They came from across the South, including Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Virginia, and beyond. A bronze plaque at the entrance reads: “To the glory of God and in memory of the Hebrew Confederate soldiers resting in this hallowed spot.”
What matters here is not only who is buried — but who remembered them, and how.
The work the war left behind
In 1866, just a year after the war’s end, Jewish women in Richmond organized the Hebrew Ladies’ Memorial Association. That same year, the group issued an appeal “to the Israelites of the South” for aid to enable the society to care for the graves of Jewish Confederate soldiers from all over the South who lie buried in the cemeteries of Richmond.
It was a duty, an act of chesed shel emet, Hebrew for the truest form of kindness, performed for those who could not repay it.
Newspaper accounts from the period are striking for their clarity and urgency. These women understood that the work of memory is laborious — physical, ongoing, and vulnerable to neglect. Graves, they warned, could vanish unless someone acted.
So they took responsibility.
By the late 1860s and 1870s, the Association’s work had grown to include an annual memorial service. Reports describe flowers laid carefully on each grave, marble slabs placed at the head of each burial, names and regiments inscribed so those resting there would not slip into anonymity.
An 1868 account observed that “each grave has been marked in a manner that ensures that the names of the still tenants of this beautiful spot will be preserved from oblivion; and handed down to be further cherished by the generations yet to come.”
That language echoes a Jewish concept. Zachor. Remember.
Memory, they understood, does not preserve itself.
Importantly, these memorial services were not closed affairs. One report from 1868 noted that the crowd gathered in the cemetery “was not confined to any one denomination.” Jewish lives were honored in the public view, but still held apart from Richmond’s larger Confederate cemeteries, Hollywood and Oakwood, which were not consecrated for Jewish burial and could not accommodate Jewish ritual requirements, including separate sacred ground.
Tending the dead
The care itself remained constant, but the language surrounding it did not.
What is striking in early accounts of the Soldiers’ Section of the Hebrew Cemetery is not the absence of politics, but how its weight changes over time.
In the earliest years, memory and the war were still closely bound. The 1866 appeal issued by the Hebrew Ladies’ Memorial Association spoke openly of a “glorious cause” and framed the soldiers’ deaths within the language of Confederate sacrifice. Like other women’s memorial groups in the postwar South, these Jewish women used care for the dead to assert dignity and a claim to sacrifice in a defeated society.
Yet even then, the work itself was grounded in restraint. The focus was on names, tending, and preservation — on preventing the graves from vanishing. The labor was physical, repetitive, and unglamorous. Whatever meanings surrounded it, the work remained the same.
As decades passed, the emphasis shifted. By the 1930s, memorial services featured a cadet, Walter McDonald of the Catholic Benedictine College, sounding taps and the ceremonial laying of wreaths. Confederate organizations were invited to attend. In 1940 and 1941, the public was welcomed to observe the 74th and 75th annual memorials. After 1941, the Hebrew Ladies’ Memorial Association continued to participate alongside other organizations in Memorial Day observances, but it appears that by 1947 the local observance of “Hebrew Memorial Day” or “Jewish Confederate Memorial Day” faded as a distinct commemoration.
Across generations, the observance persisted, a refusal to abandon the dead to neglect. Memory grew larger than any one explanation. The women’s work became less about what the war had meant, and more about what the living still owed to their dead.
A refusal to forget
This is a complex story that shows how history so often complicates memory. It sits at the intersection of some of America’s most divisive episodes and a small minority faith community declaring its presence and its sacrifices over decades.
When the Civil War ended, Jews needed to be buried. What followed was a choice.
The Hebrew Ladies’ Memorial Association chose to take responsibility. To remember “many a loved brother, son, and husband.” To insist that whatever judgment history would render, oblivion was not acceptable for “Israelitish soldiers of the Confederate army.”
Today, the Soldiers’ Section in Richmond’s Hebrew Cemetery remains. Names are still remembered. The work begun in 1866 was not temporary.
The post The Jewish women who kept Confederate graves from disappearing appeared first on The Forward.
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Spanish PM Sanchez Says US Invasion of Greenland ‘Would Make Putin Happiest Man on Earth’
Russian President Vladimir Putin welcomes US President Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff during a meeting in Moscow, Russia, Aug. 6, 2025. Photo: Sputnik/Gavriil Grigorov/Pool via REUTERS
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said a US invasion of Greenland “would make Putin the happiest man on earth” in a newspaper interview published on Sunday.
Sanchez said any military action by the US against Denmark’s vast Arctic island would damage NATO and legitimize the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.
“If we focus on Greenland, I have to say that a US invasion of that territory would make Vladimir Putin the happiest man in the world. Why? Because it would legitimize his attempted invasion of Ukraine,” he said in an interview in La Vanguardia newspaper.
“If the United States were to use force, it would be the death knell for NATO. Putin would be doubly happy.”
President Donald Trump on Saturday appeared to change tack over Greenland by vowing to implement a wave of increasing tariffs on European allies until the United States is allowed to buy Greenland.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump said additional 10 percent import tariffs would take effect on February 1 on goods from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Finland and Great Britain — all already subject to tariffs imposed by Trump.
Those tariffs would increase to 25 percent on June 1 and would continue until a deal was reached for the US to purchase Greenland, Trump wrote.
Trump has repeatedly insisted he will settle for nothing less than ownership of Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark. Leaders of both Denmark and Greenland have insisted the island is not for sale and does not want to be part of the United States.