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
How a Jewish, German-averse writer came to love Berlin
Berlin Before and After: A Cautionary Mirror for Our Times
By Wendy Lesser
Harper, 352 pages, $32
For years, Wendy Lesser was a proud, Germany-avoiding Jew with what she calls “an ingrained distaste for the nation that gave rise to the Third Reich.” Then, in 2003, Lesser, founder and editor of The Threepenny Review and a prolific critic and author, was the recipient of a fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin. Those few months in residence started her love affair with that history-embattled city, where she now returns regularly and feels surprisingly at home.
“One of the things I discovered, when I eventually got to Berlin,” she writes in her latest book, Berlin Before and After, “was how deeply Jewish that city’s culture still is. Or…how thoroughly the German and Jewish cultures at one time entered into each other, so that the versions we now have of them…are still colored by that mutual infusion.”
Berlin Before and After is Lesser’s highly idiosyncratic, selective take on the city — as much travelogue as cultural history. Its subtitle, A Cautionary Mirror for Our Times, evoking the civil rights abuses of the Trump era, reveals something of its raison-d’être. But Lesser doesn’t belabor the comparison, by now a cliché of American political discourse. She is at least as interested in the diverse artistic pleasures of contemporary Berlin as in the historical shadows that shape its landscape and personality.
The conceit of the book is simple: Lesser begins with an admiring look at Berlin in the year 1929, which she defines as “the last year in which it was possible to turn a blind eye” to impending disaster. “Runaway inflation, widespread economic despair, and violent social unrest were just around the corner,” she writes, “but they were invisible to most people.”
Lesser skips over the rise of the Third Reich, the Holocaust and the devastation of World War II and resumes her narrative in the contemporary city, with its wealth of museums, memorials and other cultural attractions. An aficionado of Berlin’s public transit, she ends, somewhat bizarrely, by taking readers on an extended bus ride across the city.
Some of the greatest achievements of the Weimar period, she argues, date to 1929. Lesser proceeds chronologically but also associatively, touching on architectural treatises, novels (including Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel), and the photography, paintings, silent film, dance and theater of the era. Though her focus isn’t political, she lauds the achievements of chancellor and, later, foreign minister Gustav Stresemann. She also remarks on the celebrity of Albert Einstein, one of the many German Jewish scientists and intellectuals who eventually found refuge in the United States.
In the section “Berlin Now,” Lesser is concerned with the impacts of two separate, but related traumas: the Nazi era and the Cold War, epitomized by the Berlin Wall dividing the city into east and west. Berlin’s intense memorial landscape has by now been the subject of countless articles and books, but that doesn’t impede Lesser from digging in. “Berlin is the companion who never shuts up, and what it wants to tell you about is itself,” she writes. The city “lives on a daily basis with its history in a way that is true of no other place I know.”
Lesser is right on the big picture. But her patience for dissection of both the history and its memorialization is limited. She rushes through the Topography of Terror museum (admittedly, a heavy lift), built on the site of Gestapo and SS headquarters and the Reich Security Main Office. She has little to say about the German Resistance Memorial Center, another site-specific museum, located in the military headquarters where the failed July 20, 1944, assassination plot against Adolf Hitler was planned. And she contemptuously dismisses what she calls “the self-glorifying architecture” of Daniel Libeskind’s generally acclaimed Jewish Museum Berlin in a single paragraph, without any reference to the many important shows it has mounted over the years or to its revamped (in 2020) core exhibition.
Nor does Lesser explicitly consider the notion of the “counter-memorial” — those self-effacing monuments that serve as a critique of more conventional, celebratory memorials. She nevertheless describes several of them. Among the earliest is Bibliothek, the underground “empty library” memorial on Bebelplatz, commemorating the 1933 book burnings that took place there. She visits Peter Eisenman’s vast, unmissable (and controversial) Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, but makes no mention of its excellent underground museum. She examines the now ubiquitous Stolpersteine (Stumble-Stones), recording the last known residences, deportation dates and fates of Berlin’s Jewish residents, and Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock’s Places of Remembrance, whose playful signs attached to lampposts catalog the plethora of anti-Jewish ordinances enacted by the Third Reich.
She also covers memorials to Germany’s division, including remnants of the Wall, the Stasi Museum, the Spandau Zitadelle (with its collection of “toxic monuments”) and the gruesome Hohenschönhausen Prison, whose brutal past clearly captures her imagination.
Berlin’s greatest draw for Lesser is arguably its culture, though it, too, is inseparable from history. She delves into the art of Gerhard Richter, the music of the Russian-born conductor Vladimir Jurowski, the television series Babylon Berlin, and the literature and film of East Germany.
The resulting narrative is an intellectual potpourri, probably most engaging to those who know Berlin (but not too well) or who might be contemplating a visit. Lesser follows her own wide-ranging curiosity and assumes that we’ll tag along. “Viscerally and consciously, with a kind of self-awareness that is rare in a collective entity,” she writes, radiating enthusiasm, “Berlin has continued to reveal itself to me in ways I never cease to find moving.”
The post How a Jewish, German-averse writer came to love Berlin appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
What Black voters can teach Michigan Jews about Abdul El-Sayed
Jewish Democrats in Michigan face a tough choice. They can vote for Abdul El-Sayed, a candidate whose views clash with their own, or withhold their support for the Democratic candidate for senator in a razor-close election that may determine which party controls the Senate.
In a race where a single percentage point separates the two candidates, and in which Jews make up 1.4% of the electorate, every Jewish vote counts. That’s why it’s instructive to look at the history of another minority voting bloc — Black Americans.
Black Americans have faced a version of the El-Sayed dilemma for a century: Should they support a candidate who is imperfect or even hostile on issues they care about intensely, or hold their noses, be pragmatic and vote for the larger prize of institutional power?
Black Americans “don’t have the luxury of picking a candidate who is purely for their interests,” Sam Fulwood III, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who specializes in race and public policy, told me in a phone interview. “I don’t think there’s ever been a moment in history where there’s been a pure choice.”
I get why so many Michigan Jewish voters see El-Sayed as the ultimate “impure” choice. He said he’d cut off both offensive and even defensive military aid to Israel. He called the Israeli government evil, comparing it to Hamas. He has campaigned with Hasan Piker, the influencer who called Israel “the Jewish ISIS” and said that American Jews bring violence on themselves by supporting Israel.
Amid a storm of criticism and calls to distance himself from Piker, El-Sayed reiterated his support for Jews. “I love and revere Judaism and the Jewish people,” he said.
At the same time, El-Sayed’s progressive stances on health care, education and economic justice and even his sharp criticism of the Israeli government have resonated with some Jewish voters.
Others have been satisfied by his pledges to fight antisemitism and his call for a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that, in his words, guarantees equal rights “for Palestinians and Jewish Israelis alike.”
“So many young Jewish people are active in Abdul’s campaign, and it’s their Judaism that leads them to that position,” said former U.S. Rep. Andy Levin, a self-described Zionist.
Many Michigan Jewish Democrats remain unconvinced. Just before the High Holidays, dozens of Michigan rabbis and Jewish leaders signed onto a list of “non-negotiable” principles about Jewish safety and Israel that any candidate hoping to earn their support must espouse. The petition, called Non-Negotiable Michigan, didn’t name El-Sayed directly, but it’s clear he was its target.
Ultimatums cut both ways. In setting terms for El-Sayed Jewish leaders have created one for themselves. Elections, despite what we learned in high school, aren’t popularity contests. A vote isn’t an approval. It’s a choice.
The Democratic Jews on the fence over El-Sayed may ultimately be faced, come November, with the prospect of an imperfect candidate representing a wing of the party they fear, versus two more years of a Republican majority that will continue to rubber-stamp the Trump administration’s damage to the economy, democracy, the environment, the social safety net, health care and immigrant rights.
If the choice is novel for many Jewish Democrats, it’s old news for Black Americans.
The dilemma goes back at least as far as the 1936 election, when Black voters shifted to the Democratic Party to vote for Franklin D. Roosevelt, even though FDR, fearful of losing Southern support, repeatedly refused to support federal anti-lynching legislation.
Or consider Lyndon Johnson. In 1957, Johnson, then Senate Majority Leader, stripped the enforcement teeth out of that year’s Civil Rights Act to get it passed, bypassing the objections of civil rights leaders. Seven years later, after Johnson became president and signed the Civil Rights Act, Black voters delivered him about 94% of their vote — despite a legislative record on civil rights that had been mixed at best.
Even more recently, Black voters have had to sacrifice the perfect for the good, supporting Hillary Clinton despite the impact of Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill that contributed to mass incarceration.
In all these cases, Black voters didn’t overlook or excuse these records. Instead, they made a strategic calculation to focus on the bigger goals, realizing politicians are often imperfect vehicles to get us there.
“Black Democrats have overlooked differences in the Democratic Party and even overlooked prejudice because they knew the Democratic Party was much better than the alternative,” Ada Horwich, a longtime Democratic Jewish activist in Los Angeles told me. “We need to learn from their political behavior.”
Perhaps the best example, Fulwood reminded me, was John F. Kennedy, who saw the civil rights movement as a domestic distraction. But in 1960, after Martin Luther King Jr. was jailed, Kennedy privately — so as not to offend Southern Democrats — called Coretta Scott King to offer support, while his brother Robert worked behind the scenes to secure King’s release. That persuaded King’s father, King Sr., to throw his considerable electoral influence behind the Democrat.
“He took a lot of Black voters with him,” said Fulwood, “even though Kennedy was not great.”
Fast-forward to 1963, and JFK came around to support the movement.
“It’s a difficult thing,” King Jr. said at the time, “to teach a president.”
One lesson is that politicians are teachable. Stances that seem “non-negotiable” now can change.
That mixture of cold calculation and hope is exactly what this election is asking Jewish Michiganders to negotiate. Or, as Fulwood said of so many electoral choices Black Americans have faced, “One candidate is very bad, and one is less bad.”
The post What Black voters can teach Michigan Jews about Abdul El-Sayed appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
South Florida Democrat Moskowitz airs campaign ad targeting antisemitism with concentration camp footage
(JTA) — South Florida U.S. Rep. Jared Moskowitz pulled on his family’s story as Jews in the Holocaust in a campaign ad targeting antisemitism, as he strives to retain his seat in the November general election.
“In every generation, they rise against us,” the Jewish incumbent says in the ad over a background of somber music and black-and-white photos from a concentration camp. “My great-grandparents were murdered in Auschwitz.”
“In our generation, right here, the Parkland shooter had swastikas carved into his gun,” he continues, standing in front of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, referring to the 2018 fatal shooting that killed 14 students and three educators.
Moskowitz, a top Democratic supporter of Israel in Congress, who fended off progressive challenger Oliver Larkin in a heated August primary, emphasizes in the ad that he has worked to fight antisemitism through bipartisan laws. Some of this legislative action has involved increasing security at synagogues and Jewish nonprofits and expanding education to reduce hate crimes.
“Never again is now,” Moskowitz concludes.
Moskowitz won the August primary with 63.5% of Democratic voter support, to Larkin’s 36.5%. But Larkin was vocal throughout the race about his opposition to arms sales to Israel, going so far as to label the country as a “religious supremacist” nation.
As Moskowitz prepares to face former Boca Raton Mayor Scott Singer, a Republican who is also Jewish, the Democrat may be facing a tight race in a region that had previously been solidly blue.
The 25th Congressional District, which includes parts of Delray Beach, Boca Raton and Miami Beach, is about 25% Jewish, according to local estimates.
Yet recent redistricting efforts have transformed the region into territory that President Donald Trump would have likely won in the 2024 elections. In fact, the Cook Political Report declared a shift from “solid D” to “toss up.”
“There’s no doubt that the race for the new 25th District will be highly competitive in a favorable environment for Democrats,” the report stated.
Moskowitz’s team emphasized the “deeply personal” nature of the congressman’s battle against antisemitism, in a statement issued alongside the ad’s release. He is confronting this challenge, his team explained, by “connecting his family’s experience during the Holocaust to the hatred that continues to threaten our communities today.”
While Moskowitz’s great-grandparents died in Auschwitz, his grandparents were able to escape Europe right before the war. His grandmother left on the Kindertransport, an organized effort that rescued Jewish children from Nazi-controlled territories beginning in 1938.
By Tuesday evening, the Google Ads Transparency Center, which includes data on YouTube ads, did not yet reflect how much money the campaign had spent on its ads there. Meta’s Ad Library also did not yet have data as to how much had been spent on the Facebook version of the ad posted there.
Stephen Sussman, a professor of public administration at Barry University, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that although “Holocaust imagery should never become routine campaign material,” he doesn’t believe that this ad has crossed a line.
“The Holocaust was, of course, a real event that continues to shape Jewish life and memory,” Sussman said, recognizing that Moskowitz’s great-grandparents were murdered at Auschwitz and that many Jews today feel threatened by antisemitism.
“He is not comparing his opponent to Hitler or using the Holocaust to make an unrelated political attack,” Sussman added.
The professor also noted the ad’s direct connections to the congressman’s record, such as his leadership in passing bipartisan legislation on antisemitism awareness and in boosting funding for synagogue security.
Sussman acknowledged that when Holocaust imagery becomes part of a campaign, there “is a legitimate concern” that other people might deploy that imagery less responsibly. But he stressed that given Moskowitz’s history and work record, as well as the current political climate, this particular ad is “powerful but defensible.”
Ken Goldstein, a politics professor at the University of San Francisco, offered a similar perspective, explaining that of the thousands of ads he has watched in his lifetime, he found this one to be powerful but not particularly controversial.
“He was certainly using pictures of the Holocaust, jarring images, but they were his family’s story,” said Goldstein, who is an expert on the impacts of political advertising.
“I don’t think he’s using it to personally attack anybody else except the Parkland shooter,” he added, noting that the ad isn’t being used to attack an opponent. “This one does not strike me as particularly harsh, unfair, or out of bounds at all.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post South Florida Democrat Moskowitz airs campaign ad targeting antisemitism with concentration camp footage appeared first on The Forward.
