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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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A war-weary Jerusalem marks Purim one day after the rest of the world, a tradition born in what is now Iran
(JTA) — JERUSALEM — As the sun rose over Jerusalem on Wednesday morning, sirens rang out, signaling yet another incoming missile attack from Iran.
This time, it coincided with the morning of Shushan Purim, as thousands of Israelis gathered — despite a prohibition on public gatherings — to read the Megillah and fulfill the mitzvah of hosting a reading after sunrise on the day of Purim.
Purim in Jerusalem, known as Shushan Purim, takes place a day later than in the rest of the world due to its status as a walled city during the time of the holiday’s story, when the Jews in Shushan, also a walled city located in what is now Susa, Iran, fought for their survival a day longer than Jews elsewhere in the kingdom.
Emergency regulations imposed by Home Front Command ban large gatherings, even in shelters, but Israelis have eschewed the restrictions to continue their celebrations. Top rabbis in Israel encouraged Israelis to follow government guidelines but opined that Zoom readings do not fulfill the requirement under Jewish law to hear the Megillah read in a prayer quorum. On Tuesday, Israelis across the country celebrated Purim in bomb shelters and underground parking garages, many of which are rated to withstand bombs dropped from above.
Just a few hours after the air raid alert ended on Wednesday, Jerusalemites could be seen wandering the streets, some intoxicated and others wearing costumes — or both — to celebrate the public holiday.
Two yeshiva students from New Jersey said, while waiting to catch a light rail train into the city, that they “were not worried at all about the missiles. We check our phones and go to the shelter.”
In the haredi neighborhood of Mea Shearim, life continued largely as normal. Children wandered the streets wearing costumes, and families walked into synagogues for Shacharit services, with prayers echoing through the streets.
In more secular neighborhoods, friends gathered to drink and celebrate the holiday, with some describing a “waiting game” to get their drinking in before another missile is launched and they have to head back to the shelter.
An ultra-Orthodox man celebrates in the streets of Mea Shearim, holding wine in one hand and showing a thumbs up with the other. The official commandment from the Torah is to drink until one cannot tell the difference between “cursed is Haman” and “blessed is Mordecai.”
Amber, Maya and Vicky kept their family shop open on Jaffa Street despite the threat of missiles. You Need Coffee has been open at its current location since 2011, and Maya described how “during the last war our business took a really big hit, and it’s something we expected this time, but the community keeps showing up.”
Vicky added, “They need their coffee, and we know our customers, so there’s a sense of we’re all in this together. Plus, we have a shelter in the basement, so it’s safer here than anywhere else.”
This is the second full-scale war with Iran in the last nine months, but all of the workers in the shop said they were willing yet again to deal with the consequences for the “freedom of the Iranian people.”
A family wearing matching costumes waits to catch the light rail into the Jerusalem city center. Public transportation in Israel is operating at limited capacity due to the war. The light rail had been closed since the war’s start but reopened on Wednesday.
A child who lives in Beit Yisrael, a haredi neighborhood in central Jerusalem, poses for a photo to show off his IDF soldier costume.
Children walk down the streets of Mea Shearim with their parents as they shop for goodies to celebrate the holiday. Pashkevils, or public announcements, cover the walls and communicate rabbinical rulings and other public information.
A Beit Yisrael family poses for a photo showing off their Purim costumes.
A man wearing a bunny costume walks in the streets of Mea Shearim, where not everyone was in costume for the holiday. Still, Yiddish techno music could be heard echoing off the brick walls of the neighborhood from the parties taking place there.
On Etz Hayim Street, just outside the Jerusalem shuk, a young Israeli poses to show off his costume — one half Israeli soldier, the other half sporting a suit.
One of the commandments for the Purim holiday is to give tzedakah, or charity to the poor — matanot la’evyonim — which requires giving to at least two people in need on the holiday. A young boy waits on the street, asking passersby for donations.
The post A war-weary Jerusalem marks Purim one day after the rest of the world, a tradition born in what is now Iran appeared first on The Forward.
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Faith heals the Deepest Wounds, Soothes the Greatest Woes
Across centuries, the Jewish people have experienced collective trauma, from the ancient exiles to modern-day tragedies. Despite these painful occurrences, Jewish tradition is a real treasure trove of healing through religious practices and teachings of the Torah. The Torah shows people how to process and move beyond suffering, and how the Bible can be a source of resilience and hope, even when all seems lost.
One of the greatest Jewish principles of practice is the practice of remembrance. The Torah calls the Jewish people to recall past suffering, not to dwell in sorrow, but in order to take the moment to derive lessons and strength from their adversity. This is reflected in such rituals as Passover, which celebrates the Exodus from Egypt and the liberation of the Jewish people from slavery. Likewise, Tisha B’Av is a day of remembrance for the destruction of the First and Second Temples. These rituals are not reminders of sorrow but tools necessary for transmitting the lessons of history to future generations. Through the practice of remembrance, Jewish communities are reminded time and again of the strength they have shown over the ages and the necessity to cultivate hope for the future.
Aside from the remembering process, the Torah also provides organized practices designed to assist an individual in coping with loss and suffering. The mourning practices, like Shiva, the seven-day mourning period, and Yahrzeit, the yearly observance of a loved one’s death, are a supportive mechanism whereby both the individual and society can cope with their loss. The practices are social in nature, reinforcing the idea that healing is as much an individual process as it is a social one. The social aspect of the practices creates solidarity and provides mutual support so that everyone mourns together.
Prayer and fasting are of profound significance in the Jewish healing environment. Yom Kippur and Tisha B’Av are such special days for soul-searching, repentance, and spiritual rebirth. On such days, the individual and collective seek forgiveness, atonement, and healing. These are spiritual exercises aimed at cleansing the soul and reconciling with God, an indication of the faith that, irrespective of the intensity of the agony, a path to spiritual healing always exists.
Community lies at the core of healing trauma within Jewish life. At the center of healing is the idea of Klal Yisrael—the Jewish peoplehood. In times of adversity, Jewish communities unite through acts of interdependence, prayer, and shared ritual. The communal care creates a basis of resilience, reminding individuals that they are not isolated in their suffering. In fact, the community’s strength can become a healing force, repairing the damage of trauma.
Chaya Lerner’s book, Torah of Trauma, explores the spiritual and psychological aspects of healing in the Torah. In her book, Chaya addresses how scriptural lessons can guide individuals and communities through healing from trauma and transforming it into what makes them stronger. Chaya utilizes ancient Jewish sources and modern therapy methods to explain that the Torah offers healing tools. Chaya’s work emphasizes that healing from trauma is not merely an understanding of the past but also the transformation of that understanding into a path forward. The book explores how Jewish heritage offers hope, healing, and a way to heal the spirit after suffering.
In an age where trauma manifests in so many different disguises, affecting so many individuals and communities, the Jewish approach to healing with the Torah is a sage one. Chaya Lerner’s Torah of Trauma is a guide for those willing to discover how scripture can heal emotional and spiritual hurts. By immersion in the Torah, remembering past struggles, and participating in communal rituals, the Jewish faith traces a path to resilience, hope, and spiritual rebirth. Through these sacred rituals, individuals and communities can transform their pain into power, emerging from trauma not just as a whole but more resilient than ever before.
Essentially, Jewish heritage teaches the realization that collective trauma does not characterize the people, but rather completes them. By accepting the teachings of the Torah, individuals and communities can heal, not only for themselves, but for society as a whole as well. The teachings given within the Torah are an eternal reminder of redemption, a reminder that there is always space for renewal and development, even in the darkest of sufferings.
The post Faith heals the Deepest Wounds, Soothes the Greatest Woes appeared first on The Forward.
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Poland returns 91 Jewish objects to Greece, decades after they were stolen by the Nazis
(JTA) — A trove of sacred Jewish objects from Greece that was stolen by the Nazis and displaced for decades in Poland is finally heading back home.
Poland returned 91 religious and ceremonial artifacts to the Greek government at a ceremony in Warsaw on Wednesday. Among them were Torah scrolls, a Torah mantle and silver finials that adorned a scroll’s wooden rollers — fragments of a rich Greek Jewish heritage that was nearly wiped out.
This marks the first time Poland has repatriated cultural property held under its care that was illegally taken from another country.
The Nazis stole the objects from synagogues in Thessaloniki, a port city once known as the “Jerusalem of the Balkans.” Jews made up half of Thessaloniki’s residents in 1919. Some 59,000 Greek Jews, over 83% of the country’s Jewish population, were killed in the Holocaust.
These items were seized by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, a Nazi agency dedicated to looting Jewish valuables, as it plundered homes, synagogues, cemeteries and cultural institutions across Greece in 1941. The objects were transferred to Nazi depots in southwestern Poland and rediscovered at a castle in Bożków after the war. In 1951, the Polish Ministry of Culture moved them to the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, where they remained until now.
This return follows years of advocacy and provenance research. The Greek government formally requested the collection’s restitution in 2024, and the World Jewish Restitution Organization coordinated with Greek and Polish authorities to facilitate it. Now, the objects are headed to the Jewish Museum of Greece in Athens.
About 5,000 Jews live in Greece today.
Poland is the only member of the European Union with no comprehensive legislation to address the restitution of property seized by the Nazis and later nationalized by the communist regime. Since the country became a democracy in 1989, several bills have been proposed to return private property to Holocaust survivors and their descendants, but none became law.
In 2021, Poland passed a law that prevented people who sought to claim property from challenging administrative decisions more than 30 years old. This time limit made it virtually impossible for former owners, including Holocaust survivors and their descendants, to recover properties that were appropriated during the communist era.
In a statement, WRJO president Gideon Taylor and COO Mark Weitzman said the return of the Greek Jewish collection represented a milestone in international cooperation for Holocaust-era restitution.
“While Poland has broader restitution issues to address, we hope this historic act marks the beginning of a consistent, systematic approach to historical justice,” they said.
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