Uncategorized
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?
—
The post The battle for Jewish hearts and minds returns to the printed page appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
At a synagogue meeting about how to beat Mamdani, Sliwa faces calls to exit NYC mayor’s race
NEW YORK CITY — More than 100 people gathered Sunday morning in the basement of Fifth Avenue Synagogue, a Modern Orthodox congregation on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, to discuss one thing: how to stop Zohran Mamdani’s march to City Hall.
“Fifth Avenue Synagogue invites you to attend a parlor meeting to discuss DEFEATING MAMDANI PLAN B,” the invitation read.
Synagogue president Jacob Gold had invited Mamdani’s two competitors in New York City’s mayor’s race, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Republican Curtis Sliwa, to join the event. Only Sliwa RSVPed yes, speaking to the group before taking questions from the mix of members and guests of the synagogue.
Over coffee and bagels with egg salad, attendees voiced their appreciation for the Guardian Angels founder, who was wearing his signature red beret — but their overwhelming message was one that he did not want to hear.
“We all love you, we want you to win,” said synagogue president Jacob Gold, who was standing by Sliwa at the podium. “But you’re at 15%, and Cuomo’s at what percent? And Mamdani’s at what percent?”
No one answered, but everyone knew the numbers: Cuomo netted 28% of the vote in the latest poll, which was also the first to show Mamdani crossing the 50% threshold.
“Let’s cut to the chase — you want me to drop out,” Sliwa interjected.
“No!” Gold replied. “I want you to merge with Cuomo.”
Many others in the room joined Gold in yelling out “No” in unison. But a smattering of voices told Sliwa he had sized the situation up correctly.
A number of attendees spoke up during the Q&A period, pleading their case that Sliwa, who is polling third, should team up with former Gov. Andrew Cuomo against Mamdani.
“Merge!” attendees blurted out at various points, as well as “Unite!” One suggested Sliwa could take a position in Cuomo’s administration. Another posited that Sliwa could take over as mayor once Cuomo runs for president of the United States in a couple years.
But Sliwa has resisted calls to drop out before and did so again during the synagogue meeting. “It’s not happening,” he said.
The pleas to unite with Cuomo did not necessarily reflect loyalty to the former governor, whom Gold said might visit the synagogue next week: The phrase “Plug your nose and vote Cuomo” was uttered more than once. Instead, they came as part of an attempt to overcome a sizable lead by Mamdani, the Queens state lawmaker whose harshly critical views on Israel and democratic socialist politics are anathema to many in Orthodox Jewish communities.
“He’s an antisemite, period!” one man yelled out.
Once Sliwa left after concluding his Q&A, other speakers took to the podium including Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran political consultant; former Lieutenant Governor Betsy McCaughey, who’s behind an anti-Mamdani independent expenditure committee called Save NYC; and Jason Meister, a former Trump advisor who’s heading Defend NYC, a super PAC aimed at thwarting Mamdani’s campaign.
They emphasized the importance of a major get-out-the-vote effort, citing their belief that Mamdani could still be beaten if voter turnout reached 45%. McCaughey distributed leaflets about Mamdani’s support for a law that she said could cause voters against him if they were aware.
“He’s the only candidate who backs rigorous enforcement of Local Law 97, which will force one million Homeowners like you to foot the enormous cost of converting oil or natural gas heat to electric heat throughout your building,” part of the leaflet reads, with “DO NOT VOTE FOR MAMDANI” in big red letters.
Sheinkopf urged attendees to combat the presence of Mamdani’s tens of thousands of volunteers by campaigning against him.
“The only thing that matters here is communicating with people and getting in the street. The rest of it is nonsense,” Sheinkopf said. “Sure as we’re in this room, I need your help to hit those doors and get in the street and get on those phones. Because if we do, we have the potential to win this thing.”
Ultimately, however, the biggest push from the attendees themselves was their attempt to talk Sliwa into a coalition with Cuomo.
“Everybody’s talking about it privately,” said Daria Fane, an attendee who is not a member of Fifth Avenue Synagogue, but frequently attends services there and at other Upper East Side congregations.
“We sit around the dinner table talking about it — where’s New York City going, and what are we going to be able to do?” Fane said in an interview following the event. “And one of the little truisms that always comes up is that Curtis Sliwa should drop out. If it’s just a two-way race, Cuomo would have a better chance of winning.”
She added, “We’ve had this conversation since before Eric Adams dropped out.”
During the Q&A, a woman who said she was wearing a red hat in support of Sliwa asked that he not “put down Cuomo” in the next debate, as he had done in Thursday’s. “You need to both go against Mamdani — Mam-dummy,” she said, getting some laughs with a derisive nickname.
But Sliwa did not entertain the idea of a coalition with Cuomo, and doubled down on his criticisms of the former governor.
“I was raised in America — one man, one woman, one vote,” Sliwa said. “I never heard of one man, one woman, and the rest of you drop out.”
“Andrew Cuomo needs to get out on the campaign trail. He’s spending all of his time trying to get me to drop out. It’s not happening. I’m out there to get my vote out,” he said, which was met with more shouts of “Unite!”
“But then you’re going to be a spoiler!” someone in the crowd said, which drew some boos.
“You guys would make the best government ever,” an attendee chimed in, appealing to the idea that they “unite” rather than using the term “drop out.”
Sliwa did not hold back from criticizing Cuomo, skewering him for signing cashless bail legislation reform as governor. He also came out hard against Mamdani, telling attendees that they must convince their Mamdani-supporting “children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren that they are committing a shanda,” the Yiddish term for “shame.”
Sliwa did defend Mamdani, however, when an angered attendee recalled when Mamdani asked Cuomo during the debate if he’d ever visited a mosque.
“Cuomo should’ve said, ‘Have you ever been in a synagogue?’” she said.
A mix of cheers and chatter erupted; Sliwa shook his head. “Excuse me — he has been in a synagogue,” he said, correcting the record.
Mamdani attended a mayoral candidates forum in the spring at B’nai Jeshurun, a non-denominational synagogue on the Upper West Side, as well as High Holiday services at the progressive Brooklyn congregation Kolot Chayeinu and the “God-optional experimental Jewish community” Lab/Shul. Last weekend Mamdani spoke at Congregation Beth Elohim, the biggest Reform synagogue in Brooklyn.
Even with Sliwa not budging on his position, speakers including McCaughey and Defend NYC’s Meister said a major voter turnout could swing the election against Mamdani. With the election on Nov. 4, however, time is not on their side, leaving some attendees wondering if it’s too little, too late.
“I don’t know,” said Monique Silberman, a member of Fifth Avenue Synagogue. “It’s last-minute — this whole thing is last-minute.”
—
The post At a synagogue meeting about how to beat Mamdani, Sliwa faces calls to exit NYC mayor’s race appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
US Says It Hit Colombian Rebel Vessel as Trump Calls Petro ‘Illegal Drug Leader’
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth attends a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on US President Donald Trump’s budget request for the Department of Defense, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, US, June 11, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz
US forces attacked a vessel associated with a Colombian leftist rebel group, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Sunday, the same day President Donald Trump called Colombian President Gustavo Petro an “illegal drug leader” and said payments to the South American nation would cease.
Trump‘s comments marked a new low in relations between Bogota and Washington, which have frayed since Trump returned to office in January and since his administration launched a series of strikes on vessels allegedly transporting drugs in the Caribbean.
Hegseth wrote on X that the Pentagon had destroyed a vessel and killed three people on Friday “in the USSOUTHCOM area of responsibility,” which includes the Caribbean.
He said the ship was affiliated with the leftist rebel group National Liberation Army and was involved in illicit narcotics smuggling, without offering evidence to back the claim.
The Pentagon said it had nothing to add beyond Hegseth’s initial post.
COLOMBIA CONDEMNS TRUMP‘S REMARKS
Colombia’s Foreign Ministry condemned Trump‘s remarks as offensive and a direct threat to its sovereignty, and vowed to seek international support in defense of Petro and the country’s autonomy.
“These accusations represent an extremely serious act and undermine the dignity of the president of Colombians,” it said in a statement.
The post from Hegseth came hours after Trump lambasted Petro on social media and said the United States would stop large-scale payments and subsidies to Colombia.
“President Gustavo Petro, of Colombia, is an illegal drug leader strongly encouraging the massive production of drugs, in big and small fields, all over Colombia,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
“The purpose of this drug production is the sale of massive amounts of product into the United States, causing death, destruction, and havoc,” Trump wrote.
Reuters could not immediately establish which payments Trump was referring to. Colombia was once among the largest recipients of US aid in the Western Hemisphere, but the flow of money was suddenly curtailed this year by the shuttering of USAID, the US government’s humanitarian assistance arm.
The US State Department referred questions to the White House, which did not immediately respond to a query.
FRAUGHT RELATIONS
Last month the United States revoked Petro’s visa after he joined a pro-Palestinian demonstration in New York and urged US soldiers to disobey Trump‘s orders.
The US administration’s deadly strikes on boats in the Caribbean have also outraged Colombians. Many legal experts and human rights activists have condemned the extraordinary series of military actions, with Amnesty International describing it as murder on the high seas.
Earlier this month, Petro said one of the strikes hit a Colombian vessel, an allegation the Trump administration denied.
Petro condemned the most recent bombing, saying the boat belonged to a “humble family,” not the National Liberation Army. He also hit back at Trump‘s remarks.
“Mr. Trump, Colombia has never been rude to the United States… but you are rude and ignorant to Colombia,” Petro responded on X. “Since I am not a businessman, I am even less a drug trafficker. There is no greed in my heart.”
Colombia is fighting its own longstanding drug problems. Last year, Petro pledged to tame coca-growing regions in the country with massive social and military intervention, but the strategy has brought little success.
In September, Trump designated countries such as Afghanistan, Bolivia, Burma, Colombia and Venezuela among those the United States believes to have “failed demonstrably” in upholding counter-narcotics agreements during the past year.
Uncategorized
Trump Urged Zelensky to Cut a Deal with Putin or Risk Facing Destruction, FT Reports
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy meets with U.S. President Donald Trump (not pictured) over lunch in the Cabinet Room at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., October 17, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
US President Donald Trump urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to accept Russia’s terms for ending the war between Russia and Ukraine in a White House meeting on Friday, warning that President Vladimir Putin threatened to “destroy” Ukraine if it didn’t comply, the Financial Times reported on Sunday.
During the meeting, Trump insisted Zelensky surrender the entire eastern Donbas region to Russia, repeatedly echoing talking points the Russian president had made in their call a day earlier, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter.
Ukraine ultimately managed to swing Trump back to endorsing a freeze of the current front lines, the FT said. Trump said after the meeting that the two sides should stop the war at the battle line; Zelensky said that was an important point.
The White House did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment on the FT report.
Zelensky arrived at the White House on Friday looking for weapons to keep fighting his country’s war, but met an American president who appeared more intent on brokering a peace deal.
In Thursday’s call with Trump, Putin had offered some small areas of the two southern frontline regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in exchange for the much larger parts of the Donbas now under Ukrainian control, the FT report added.
That is less than his original 2024 demand for Kyiv to cede the entirety of Donbas plus Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in the south, an area of nearly 20,000 square km.
Zelensky’s spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent outside business hours on whether Trump had pressured Zelensky to accept peace on Russia’s terms.
Trump and Putin agreed on Thursday to hold a second summit on the war in Ukraine within the next two weeks, provisionally in Budapest, following an August 15 meeting in Alaska that failed to produce a breakthrough.