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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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Norman Podhoretz, Commentary editor and archetypal Jewish neoconservative, dies at 95
(JTA) — Norman Podhoretz, the journalist and public intellectual who charted a path from Jewish liberal to pro-Israel neoconservative that would become well worn, has died at 95.
Podhoretz was the influential editor of Commentary magazine for 35 years, after being appointed to run the American Jewish Committee’s thought journal at 30 in 1960.
He initially continued in the magazine’s liberal tradition. But over the course of the 1960s, he became disillusioned by the left. He lamented the radicalism that became prevalent in campus antiwar activism. He also objected to a mounting critique of Israel and its occupation of Palestinian territories within the New Left following the Six-Day War in 1967.
By the decade’s end, Podhoretz had openly refashioned himself as what would become known as a neoconservative — someone his friend and intellectual ally Irving Kristol would describe as “a liberal who has been mugged by reality.”
Many of the most prominent neocon intellectuals were Jewish and, like Podhoretz, from New York City. Commentary became a central platform for their outlook on civil rights, the threat of communism and especially foreign policy, where Podhoretz was known as a particular expert. He argued strenuously against the Soviet Union and expressed steep concern about the U.S. detente with Russia as communism collapsed. He also advocated an interventionist U.S. foreign policy in support of promoting democracy abroad, causing him to support foreign wars that many liberals opposed.
Israel was a focus for Podhoretz, an observant Jew who was a longtime member of Manhattan’s Congregation Or Zarua. He believed that Israel was essential for both Jewish safety and U.S. interests and argued in support of its military pursuits. He soured early on the prospects for a peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He also warned early — and seemingly presciently — that Jews could not rely on left-wing values to keep them or their homeland safe.
Podhoretz made waves in 2016 for endorsing Donald Trump in his first run for president, at a time when many traditional Republicans could not countenance him. He argued that Hillary Clinton would continue Barack Obama’s policies including the Iran nuclear deal that Obama struck, which Podhoretz called “one of the most catastrophic actions that any American president has ever taken.”
By the time he retired as Commentary’s editor in 1995, Podhoretz had embraced mainstream conservative views on a range of social issues, too, opposing abortion and gay rights. He also rejected his early liberal views on immigration, saying in 2019 that contemporary immigrants did not want to assimilate the way his parents’ generation had sought to.
“I was always pro-immigration because I’m the child of immigrants,” he told the Claremont Review, a leading journal of contemporary conservatism. “And I thought it was unseemly of me to oppose what not only had saved my life, but had given me the best life I think I could possibly have had.”
Born in 1930 in Brooklyn to parents who immigrated from Galicia, now Poland, Podhoretz attended public schools but also got a rich Jewish education at the urging of his father, a Yiddish-speaking immigrant who worked as a milkman. In addition to learning Hebrew, Podhoretz worked at Camp Ramah and took classes at the Jewish Theological Seminary while attending Columbia University, from which he graduated in 1950.
The final of his dozens of books, published in 2009, attempted to explain why most U.S. Jews are liberals — and why they should not be.
“He was a man of great wit and a man of deep wisdom and he lived an astonishing and uniquely American life,” his son John Podhoretz, who succeeded him as Commentary’s editor, wrote in a remembrance for the magazine announcing his father’s death. “And he bound himself fast to his people, his heritage, and his history. His knowledge extended beyond literature to Jewish history, Jewish thinking, Jewish faith, and the Hebrew Bible, with all of which he was intimately familiar and ever fascinated.”
Norman Podhoretz is survived by four children, 13 grandchildren and 16 great-grandchildren, according to the remembrance. His wife, the social commentator and critic of feminism Midge Decter Podhoretz, died in 2022.
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I’m a neuroscientist. Here’s why Ahmed al Ahmed’s bravery at Bondi Beach strains our narratives.
(JTA) — We tend to think of human behavior as deeply shaped by group lines. Again and again, research in social psychology and social neuroscience, along with everyday experience, shows how easily people come to see themselves as members of distinct groups, how quickly an “us” and a “them” emerge, and how rapidly loyalty on one side gives way to suspicion on the other, sometimes even when those divisions are thin or arbitrary.
As a fiction writer and a doctoral student in cognitive neuroscience who studies how narratives shape our perception of the world, I think often about how events like this strain the explanatory stories we rely on to make sense of why people act as they do. These patterns of group loyalty are familiar and empirically robust. People genuinely experience themselves through group identities.
And yet sometimes a single human action cuts across these categories, exposing the limits of the narratives we use to understand how people act in the world.
That is what we have experienced this week in the story of Ahmed al Ahmed, the Muslim fruit-seller who intervened, at great personal risk, to try to stop a deadly attack on Jews celebrating Hanukkah in Sydney.
Al Ahmed’s action was not only an act of exceptional bravery, but a direct challenge to the worldview advanced by so many figures today. By knowingly risking his life to protect Jews outside his own group and identity, he crossed the very boundary that many insist cannot be crossed, revealing a simple truth: that human moral action cannot be reduced to rigid theories of group loyalty alone.
Perhaps one of the most prominent proponents of a growing online current that frames human life as fundamentally governed by group identity is the white supremacist livestreamer Nick Fuentes. He has repeatedly advanced antisemitic claims, arguing that Jews are incapable of full civic loyalty, that they put their own group first, and that Jewish Americans are ultimately more loyal to Jews as a group or to Israel than to the United States itself. He has said about Jews, “They have this international community across borders, extremely organized, that is putting the interests of themselves before the interests of their home country.” In Fuentes’ framing, human existence is a competition between groups, and moral loyalty is by definition exclusive. He is careful to insist that these claims are not antisemitic, presenting them instead as a hard-headed and honest description of human nature.
A similar logic appears in the rhetoric of Thomas Rousseau, the leader of the extremist group Patriot Front, who describes the United States as being locked in an inevitable racial struggle. Rousseau has framed this worldview in stark terms, declaring that white people are “being relentlessly erased on all sides, by the Jew, by non-whites who hate us,” a statement that casts social and political life as an existential battle between fixed identities.
But the worldview advanced by figures like Fuentes and Rousseau collapses when confronted with a single human act such as that of Ahmed Al Ahmed. If human life were truly governed only by intergroup competition and instinct, there would be no room for a person to knowingly risk his life for strangers from another group, let alone in the midst of mortal danger. Yet this is precisely what happened. Al Ahmed risked his life to protect members of a group to which he did not belong. This altruistic act directly contradicts the theories advanced by Fuentes and Rousseau and exposes them for what they truly are, not neutral descriptions of reality but ideological narratives imposed upon it. Beneath the edgy aesthetics, viral memes, and provocative social media packaging, these claims amount to recycled pseudo-intellectual arguments, longstanding tropes of racism and antisemitism that have circulated throughout history under different guises.
Understanding Al Ahmed’s act, however, requires moving beyond abstract theory to the explanations offered by those closest to the event. Two interpretations have emerged in media accounts of why he risked his life. One, expressed by his father, presents the act in simple and universal terms. His father said that “Ahmed was driven by his sentiment, conscience and humanity.” The other explanation, voiced by Lubaba Alhmidi AlKahil from within the Muslim and Syrian community after visiting Al Ahmed in the hospital, situates the act within a specific moral culture and identity. As she put it, this kind of response is “not strange for a Syrian individual,” coming from a community with strong bonds that has learned to refuse injustice. What is striking is that these two explanations can exist side by side without canceling one another, a possibility that figures like Nick Fuentes and those who share his worldview struggle to grasp because they are locked into a rigid, binary understanding of human motivation.
One might argue that Al Ahmed’s act was a rare exception in a world otherwise governed by group conflict and self-interest. But the reality is that every day, people risk their lives to protect others across lines of identity. Adam Cramer dove into the water to save a drowning girl. Lassana Bathily hid Jewish shoppers during the Hyper Cacher attack in Paris. Mamoudou Gassama saved a child he did not know. Wesley Autrey jumped onto subway tracks to rescue a stranger, and Henri d’Anselme confronted a knife attacker to protect children. Seen in this light, Ahmed Al Ahmed stands within a long human tradition that includes, even in more distant history, figures such as Raoul Wallenberg and Chiune Sugihara, who risked their lives to save others during the Holocaust.
Evolutionary research itself points in the same direction. Across species, altruistic behavior appears again and again, from dolphins that keep injured companions afloat so they can breathe, to rats that will free trapped cage mates. Far from an anomaly, altruism is a recurrent feature of social life, and our brains have a remarkable capacity for empathy and for understanding the experiences of others, far beyond the lines of group identity and social belonging. Fuentes and those like him may insist that people are loyal only to their own group, but reality erodes this impoverished and intellectually lazy theory on a daily basis.
Crucially, these acts do not testify only to universal altruism abstracted from identity. In many cases, they emerged from deeply held group identities and moral traditions. Cultural, religious, and national affiliations did not prevent these individuals from acting on behalf of others. They often supplied the very moral language and sense of responsibility that made such action possible. Universal concern and particular identity therefore do not stand in opposition. They coexist, with specific histories serving not as barriers to moral action but as sources from which it can arise.
That is precisely what figures like Nick Fuentes and those who share his worldview fail to account for. Their politics rests on a rigid vision of identity as a closed framework, one that leaves no room for moral action that crosses its prescribed boundaries. The horrific attack at Bondi Beach, and the courage of Ahmed Al Ahmed within it, remind us that moral action often arises neither from abandoning identity nor from clinging to it defensively, but from inhabiting it fully while remaining open to others.
In an age shaped by clickbait, algorithms and relentless simplification, such moral complexity is difficult to sustain. Political arguments reward camps and slogans. But the actual behavior of people like Ahmed Al Ahmed escapes the internet’s simplified categories and points instead toward a richer form of conduct, one that can be called, quite simply, humanity.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.
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The Israel news we don’t hear – and the forces that silence us
I spent part of Shabbat reading about the stunning performance of the Israeli stock market — which is up dramatically since Oct. 7, outpacing the gains of the S&P by a significant margin.
The 35 Israeli stocks with the largest market capitalizations are up a whopping 90 percent since Oct. 7. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 was up 60 percent during that same time period.
I wondered why I had not read more about this, and was struck by what Eugene Kandel, the chairman of the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, told Investors Business Daily.
“Israel was, and still is, under a PR attack from ideological actors, who finance huge campaigns against us,” Kandel said. “But even during these two years, the collaboration with so many organizations, companies, governments and investors did not stop despite threats and protests.”
Why aren’t we hearing about those collaborations?
Then the news of the Bondi Beach Hanukkah shooting broke. Instantly, all the peace of Shabbat dissipated, along with all the thoughts of collaborations — and who is covering what and why, and in which language.
Instead, I thought again of how terrorists worldwide seem to own a well-thumbed Jewish calendar. The date and timing of this massacre — on yet another Jewish holiday — was no accident, and Jews around the world know this.
We are living through a sustained campaign to make Jews afraid to be Jews. Attacks on Jewish holidays are an effort to erase Jewish joy, Jewish observance, and in the case of Hanukkah, Jewish history.
And perhaps we are also under a sustained campaign to minimize Jewish achievement.
Some politicians take notice
Some politicians are making efforts to look at the often-exhausting layers of what is happening and find ways to name them.
I appreciate the effort to find language for all of this. Representative Brian Mast, the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and a Florida Republican, commented that he discerns a “very specific network that is in place that works together to sow antisemitism that is now, in many cases, working on the left and right across the media, to go out there and put this wedge in this relationship.”
He was referring to the U.S.-Israel connection.
Speaking at a Hudson Institute conference on antisemitism, he called this network a “very, very serious global threat across multinational organizations, media across the globe and adversaries and terrorist organizations.”
When he said “media,” I thought of the minimal coverage of the Israeli stock exchange and the strength of Israeli stocks.
The relief of acknowledgment
I felt a strange sigh of relief as I read Mast’s comments. It was the relief of actual acknowledgment. It was the relief of hearing someone trying to name things, even though I’m not sure if “network” is the best possible word.
Because something must be said.
What I noticed the day after the Bondi Beach massacre was the deep silence. The silence came from so many people that maybe “network” was the right word for it.
I went to a non-denominational holiday party this week, and no one mentioned what had happened in Australia. I wondered what the conversation would have been like if the shooting had happened at a Christmas tree lighting, or a drag story hour that turned into carnage. What would the conversation have been if any other group, but the Jewish community, had been targeted?
It’s unlikely that there would be total silence. Total non-acknowledgment. No words in a room of people who work with words.
The threat we face is not just the threat Representative Mast detailed, or the PR threat Kandel described. It’s also the silence, a silence so loud that it is visible as candlelight in the darkness.
How to respond to silence
I don’t know how to answer silence, but maybe some wiser people out there do.
Late last night, I saw a reel of a very long line of cars with menorahs on their roofs driving along the New York State Thruway, not far from the Palisades Mall, just a short drive from where I grew up.
The line of cars went on and on. The silent message was Do not be afraid. And I saw it as a response to Bondi Beach.
I hope there are more Hanukkah menorahs lit tonight, not less. And I also hope that we can consider bringing layers of truth into the light. Sometimes, layers represent both a dose of reality and an antidote against despair.
Yes, a father and son attacked the Jewish community on a holiday. But it is deeply important and also true that an unarmed Muslim father and fruit seller named Ahmed al Ahmed jumped on one of the gunmen and undoubtedly saved many lives.
The video of that heroic act should be watched by all.
It is a reminder that perhaps there is another “network” out there, a network of those who object to hatred. And it is a reminder that generalizations can only take us so far; as my mentor James Alan McPherson taught me, a story is about an individual at an individual moment in time.
Ahmed al Ahmed showed us all the power of an individual. And the power of a single layer in any truth, and in any story.
As for all those under-discussed Israeli companies holding on in wartime, through boycotts, pushing up the index by 90 percent since the worst day in Israeli history, continuing to collaborate with partners around the globe despite a PR onslaught to isolate them — even in this darkness, and in this silence, we see you.
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