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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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The last hostage returned. Can Israel finally exhale?
Israelis went into this week preparing for the possibility of yet more military confrontation. A United States aircraft carrier and other warships were moving toward the Middle East, giving the sense that an attack on Iran might be imminent. Tehran was warning that any strike would be answered with missiles, and that Israel would be implicated whether it participated in U.S. action, or not.
And then came a moment of true peace — perhaps the first since the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023. The last hostage came home.
Israelis have been holding their breath for nearly 28 months. With the return of the remains of Staff Sergeant Ran Gvili, they can finally stop.
Gvili’s tragic story is also almost uniquely heroic — and profoundly Israeli. Despite being in recovery for a fractured shoulder, the 24-year-old put on his uniform on the morning of Oct. 7, when news of the Hamas attack broke, and rushed south. He helped rescue civilians fleeing the Nova music festival. He fought at Kibbutz Alumim.
Then, wounded and surrounded, he was overpowered and murdered. His body was taken to Gaza.
Gvili embodied the most demanding and meaningful quality of Israeli citizenship: obligation. He went in first. He came out last.
The return of his body, which was reportedly discovered in a north Gaza cemetery, resolved one of the two war aims Israel set for itself in the aftermath of Oct.7 catastrophe: to bring every hostage home. It is a milestone worth celebrating. There has been something deeply revealing in how Israelis have spoken about the return of the remains of the last hostages: a refusal to accept that death dissolves social ties. A declaration that dignity does not end when life does.
This is a society obsessed with survival, but not indifferent to honor and human dignity.
Unfortunately, the other aim, the destruction of Hamas, remains disturbingly unfulfilled.
The hostage issue fostered a certain moral unity in Israel. The country was divided over everything else: the conduct of the war, the devastation in Gaza, the government’s competence, the international backlash, the collapse of trust after the judicial overhaul crisis.
But on the hostages there was something closer to consensus. For most, they were family.
Every Saturday night, hostage families gathered in the plaza outside the Tel Aviv Museum, which became known as Hostages Square. Joining them there — to protest in demand of the hostages’ return — became a ritual. My wife went there weekly, along with many thousands of others. For most Israelis, closely following the hostage talks — the rumors and leaks, partial releases and collapses — became part of daily life.
This meant that as the government continued to pursue the Gaza war, the hostages became a massive liability for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet. Long before military stalemate set in, by mid-2024, polls showed overwhelming support for a deal that would end the fighting after Hamas had been badly degraded in exchange for the return of all hostages.
The government did not listen. Hard-liners in the coalition, who controlled its fate, wanted the war to go on indefinitely. They even wanted Gazans forcibly expelled and the territory settled by Jews. Netanyahu basically had to have his arm twisted by President Donald Trump to strike a ceasefire deal in September.
In part because of that delay, today, virtually every poll suggests that forthcoming elections will produce a crushing defeat for Netanyahu’s coalition. Netanyahu rushed to the cameras Monday to declare Gvili’s return a great success, but my sense is that few Israelis are inclined to grant him credit. The state has completed an obligation, but the government has not redeemed itself.
That sense may have implications on the ground in Gaza, in the quest to rid the strip of Hamas once and for all.
The argument that movement toward a second phase of the Gaza framework must wait until the final hostage is returned is gone. The most likely first step is a partial reopening of the Rafah crossing into Egypt, which is as significant to Gazans as the hostage issue was to Israelis. If, as Israeli and American officials have suggested, that reopening moves forward, it will mean an end to the brutal, suffocating total siege of the strip. Coming days will see talks on who and what can get through, who has a role in checking for smuggling, and what limitations might be applied.
They will also see an intensification of discussion on the other main condition for moving forward: the disarmament of Hamas, which still controls large parts of Gaza. The militant group still believes time is on its side; it imagines that by returning the hostages it has purchased survival.
One thing is for sure: In a week when missiles may yet fly, when Israel may yet face costs far beyond its control, something quietly monumental happened. The country exhaled. The last hostage came home. In an cynical era of promises routinely broken, this one in a way has finally been kept.
The post The last hostage returned. Can Israel finally exhale? appeared first on The Forward.
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Western Countries Crack Down on Hamas Terror Threat in Europe
A flag is flown during a protest in support of Palestinians in Gaza, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, outside the European Parliament, in Strasbourg, France, Nov. 27, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Yves Herman
Western authorities are intensifying efforts to curb Hamas’s terror threat in Europe, arresting suspected operatives in Germany and imposing US sanctions on key Hamas-linked figures and organizations.
On Friday, German authorities arrested a 36-year-old man, identified as Mohammad S., at Berlin Brandenburg Airport, who is suspected of belonging to a terrorist cell that plotted attacks on Israeli and Jewish targets across the country
According to local media, he is the fourth member of a cell – three of whose members were arrested last year – with links to Hamas, and he is accused of supplying the Palestinian terrorist group with weapons.
The German federal prosecutor’s office ordered the arrest of Mohammad S. upon his return from Lebanon, after investigators found that he acquired 300 rounds of ammunition in August 2025 in preparation for potential Hamas attacks on Israeli and Jewish institutions in Germany and across Europe.
Last year, local police arrested Lebanese-born Borhan El-K, a suspected Hamas operative, after he crossed into Germany from the Czech Republic — part of an ongoing probe into the Islamist group’s network and operations across the continent.
German authorities confirmed the suspect had obtained an automatic rifle, eight Glock pistols, and more than 600 rounds of ammunition in the country before handing the weapons to Wael FM, another suspected member of the terrorist group, in Berlin.
Local law enforcement also arrested Lebanese-born Wael FM, along with two other German citizens, Adeb Al G and Ahmad I, who prosecutors say are foreign operatives for Hamas.
As part of an internationally coordinated investigation into a global terrorist network linked to the Islamist group, German authorities uncovered evidence that it had smuggled weapons into the country for potential attacks in Europe.
The United States is also stepping up efforts to counter the threat of Hamas-linked terrorism in Europe, including imposing renewed sanctions on the group and its operatives.
Last week, the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated UK-based pro-Palestinian activist Zaher Birawi, an alleged senior Hamas member, as a supporter of a Hamas-linked group, freezing his US assets and barring Americans from doing business with him.
The US government also sanctioned Birawi’s organization, the Popular Conference for Palestinians Abroad (PCPA), identifying him as one of its founding members and a senior official.
According to the Treasury Department, the PCPA “does not only work with, and in support of, Hamas — it operates at Hamas’s behest.”
Birawi also runs the Palestinian Forum in Britain (PFB) and holds leadership positions in the Hamas-affiliated European Palestinians Conference (EPC), organizing anti-Israel protests, flotillas, and campaigns.
Birawi drew international attention in 2025 as a key organizer of the Gaza-bound aid flotilla.
Israel, which designated Birawi as a key Hamas operative in Europe in 2013, uncovered documents last year in Gaza revealing the terrorist group’s direct role in organizing and funding the flotilla.
Among those documents was a detailed list of PCPA activists involved in the flotilla, identifying Birawi as the head of the PCPA’s Hamas sector in Britain.
According to a 2024 report on Hamas civilian fronts in the UK and Europe, Birawi was identified as “one of the most prominent Hamas- and Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated operatives in the UK.”
The OFAC also sanctioned six Gaza-based charitable organizations — Waed Society, Al-Nur, Qawafil, Al-Falah, Merciful Hands, and Al-Salameh — for supporting Hamas’s military wing.
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Iran’s Rising Death Toll Ramps Up Pressure on Trump to Respond
Protesters gathered on Jan. 24, 2026, at Joachimsthaler Platz in western Berlin, Germany, to rally in support of anti-regime demonstrations in Iran, calling for US military intervention. Photo: Michael Kuenne/PRESSCOV via ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
More than 30,000 people may have been killed by Iranian security forces during a brutal crackdown on widespread anti-government protests earlier this month, according to new estimates that far exceed earlier death tolls.
The new figures have intensified pressure on the international community to respond to the Iranian regime’s shocking scale of violence, especially amid a US military buildup in the region following President Donald Trump’s repeated warnings to Iran and calls to help the protesters.
Two senior Iranian Ministry of Health officials told TIME that the scale of the killings and executions has overwhelmed the state’s capacity to dispose of the dead, as anti-regime protests erupted across more than 400 cities and towns, with over 4,000 clashes reported nationwide. According to the officials, as many as 30,000 people could have been killed in the streets of Iran on Jan. 8 and 9 alone.
The Iranian regime has reported an official death toll of 3,117. But new evidence suggests the true number is far higher, raising fears among activists and world leaders of crimes against humanity.
The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), which tracks deaths by name and location, has confirmed 5,937 deaths, including 214 security personnel. Nearly 20,000 potential deaths are still under investigation, and tens of thousands of additional Iranians have been arrested amid the crackdown.
According to Dr. Amir Parasta, a German-Iranian physician, the latest figures do not include protest-related deaths recorded at military hospitals or in regions the investigation never reached, suggesting the toll is likely to keep rising.
More than 30,000 fatalities have been registered so far. With the support of my dedicated colleagues in Iran, we have been able to submit verified figures on deaths, injuries, and executions to the United Nations and to governments, and we will continue to update these data.
— Prof. Dr. Amir-Mobarez Parasta (@ProfParasta) January 25, 2026
Aligned with the Ministry of Health’s new figures, Iran International reported that security forces killed over 36,500 Iranians during the Jan. 8–9 nationwide crackdown, marking the deadliest two-day protest massacre in modern history. Thew news outlet cited newly obtained classified documents, field reports, and accounts from medical staff, witnesses, and victims’ families.
Iran International also noted the prevalence of extrajudicial execution of a number of detainees.
“Images released from morgues leave little doubt that some wounded citizens were shot in the head while hospitalized and undergoing medical treatment. It is evident that, had these individuals sustained fatal head wounds on the streets, there would have been no reason to admit them to hospital or begin treatment in the first place,” the outlet reported. “The images also show that in some cases, medical tubes and patient-monitoring equipment remained attached to the bodies. In other cases, cardiac monitoring electrodes are visible on the chest, suggesting these individuals were under medical care before being shot in the head. A number of doctors and nurses have also told Iran International that so-called ‘finishing shots’ were fired at wounded patients.”
Some families of protesters who were killed have reportedly been told they must pay up to $20,000 to bury their loved ones, while others were forced to sign papers falsely claiming their relatives had served in the security forces instead of participating in the protests.
According to Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, director of Norway-based Iran Human Rights, the Islamist regime is using this technique to conflate the number of security forces killed and downplay the death toll among protesters.
“One reason for this practice is that the regime seeks to avoid international pressure for killing protesters,” Amiry-Moghaddam said. “Another motive is to prepare the ground for future executions of protesters.”
Iranian judicial officials have previously dismissed US President Donald Trump’s claims about halting execution sentences for protesters as “useless and baseless nonsense,” warning that the government’s response to the unrest will be “decisive, deterrent, and swift.”
With Iranian authorities now maintaining an internet blackout for nearly three weeks, the actual number of casualties remains difficult to verify. Activists fear the internet shutdown is being used to conceal the full extent of the crackdown on anti-regime protests.
Iranian officials told The New York Times that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ordered security forces to suppress protesters “by any means necessary,” with explicit instructions to “shoot to kill and show no mercy.”
The latest figures, double previous estimates, come as the United States and the broader international community face growing pressure to act against the regime’s ongoing violence. For its part, the Iranian government has warned that any attack will be treated “as an all-out war.”
As regional tensions mount over the regime’s brutal crackdown on anti-government protests, Washington has increased its military presence in the region, moving a range of assets into the area — including the USS Abraham Lincoln and its strike group.
On Sunday, the US Air Force said it was set to begin a multi-day readiness exercise across the Middle East “to demonstrate the ability to deploy, disperse, and sustain combat airpower” in the region.
The UK Ministry of Defense announced last week it had also deployed Typhoon fighter jets to Qatar “in a defensive capacity.”
In the last few weeks, Trump has repeatedly warned that he may take “decisive” military action against Iran if the regime continues killing protesters.
“We’re watching Iran,” Trump said on his way back from the World Economic Forum in Davos. “I’d rather not see anything happen but we’re watching them very closely.”
With pressure mounting for Iran at home and abroad, experts say it remains unclear how Tehran will respond — whether by escalating militarily beyond its borders or by offering limited concessions to ease sanctions and mend ties with the West.
The nationwide protests, which began with a shopkeepers’ strike in Tehran on Dec. 28, initially reflected public anger over the soaring cost of living, a deepening economic crisis, and the rial — Iran’s currency — plummeting to record lows amid renewed economic sanctions, with annual inflation near 40 percent.
However, the demonstrations quickly swelled into a broader anti-government movement calling for the fall of Khamenei and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and even a broader collapse of the country’s Islamist, authoritarian system.