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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 post The battle for Jewish hearts and minds returns to the printed page appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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What Happened, Megyn Kelly?
Megyn Kelly hosts a “prove me wrong” session during AmericaFest, the first Turning Point USA summit since the death of Charlie Kirk, in Phoenix, Arizona, US, Dec. 19, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Caitlin O’Hara
Megyn Kelly is one of the leading voices in the American right-wing media landscape.
The former Fox News host’s podcast draws millions of listeners, and is one of the highest-ranked news podcasts in the United States.
But with that influence has come a noticeable and troubling shift in her approach to Israel.
In less than a year, Kelly has gone from a supporter of Israel and the Jewish people to someone who downplays antisemitism and suggests Israel wields disproportionate influence in American politics.
A few examples illustrate the change:
- In November 2022, Kelly referred to far-right figure Nick Fuentes’ meeting with then-former President Donald Trump as “absolutely disgusting” and “deeply, deeply wrong.” Yet in November 2025, during a conversation with Ben Shapiro, she defended Tucker Carlson’s decision to platform Fuentes.
- In June 2025, Kelly lauded the American bombing of Iranian nuclear sites and emphasized longstanding US opposition to a nuclear Iran. Nine months later, she described the joint Israel-US operation as “Israel’s war.”
- In November 2022, Kelly called rising antisemitism “disturbing” and forcefully condemned anti-Jewish hate. By December 2025, she accused Jewish figures like Ben Shapiro and Bari Weiss of “making antisemites,” while downplaying the role of figures like Tucker Carlson in amplifying such rhetoric.
- In June 2025, Kelly framed an attack on a gathering of Jews advocating for Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colorado, as a likely terror incident tied to broader antisemitic violence. But after a Lebanese man attacked a Michigan synagogue in March 2026, her only responses were reposting a claim about the attacker’s family — omitting their Hezbollah ties — and a brief reference to him as a “naturalized citizen from Lebanon.”
So, what changed?
Kelly’s shift appears to have begun in July 2025, when she claimed that Israel was making itself “the villain of the world” during an appearance on Piers Morgan’s show.
A month later, she interviewed then-Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who argued that Israel exerts undue influence over the US government and that American politicians are “bought and paid for” by AIPAC. Kelly stopped short of endorsing Greene’s claims of “genocide” in Gaza, but still maintained her support for Israel’s right to defend itself.
In September 2025, Kelly cited Max Blumenthal, regarding the death of Charlie Kirk and Israel, lending credibility to a figure widely associated with misinformation and conspiracy theories.
Since then, the pattern has intensified. As noted above, Kelly has defended Tucker Carlson’s platforming of antisemites, declined to confront antisemitism on the right (claiming her focus is the “left”), and increasingly suggested that Israel exerts outsized control over US foreign policy.
This change appears driven by both political and personal factors.
Within the American right, an ongoing dispute between traditional foreign policy hawks and “America First” isolationists has intensified — especially since the assassination of Charlie Kirk in September 2025.
Israel has become a central fault line in that divide.
On the isolationist side, this debate has increasingly overlapped with the normalization of extremist and antisemitic rhetoric seen in figures like Tucker Carlson and others who platform voices that demonize Israel and Jews.
This retreat from foreign engagement, combined with flirtations with antisemitism, is particularly pronounced among younger right-wing audiences drawn to figures like Carlson and Candace Owens.
Against this backdrop, Kelly appears to be recalibrating.
Rather than shaping her audience, she is following it, moving from tentative criticism to increasingly sweeping claims.
Yet she has not fully embraced the conspiratorial rhetoric of Carlson or Owens. Instead, she acts as a bridge shielding more extreme voices while refusing to challenge them.
That makes her less an extremist than an enabler.
There are also more personal incentives at play. As noted by Ben Shapiro, Kelly has a history of adjusting her positions to maximize engagement, reflecting trends within the right rather than shaping them.
Her podcast is managed by Red Seat Ventures, which also produces Tucker Carlson’s show and other right-leaning content. Breaking with those figures could carry professional costs.
Taken together, Kelly’s shift appears driven by audience capture, relevance, and incentives, not principle.
And when a major media figure operates that way, it raises serious questions about the integrity of American political discourse.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
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Yes, It Should Be Spelled ‘Anti-Semitism’ — and Yes, It Matters
Jewish Americans and supporters of Israel gather at the National Mall in Washington, DC on Nov. 14, 2023 for the “March for Israel” rally. Photo: Dion J. Pierre/The Algemeiner
With everything happening right now — bombs thrown in New York City; synagogues and Jewish schools shot up in Michigan, Toronto, and the Netherlands; Israelis beaten in nearly every European country — one would think that semantic arguments would be the last thing we’re engaging in.
But we’re Jews; we do like to argue. And even pro-Israel millennials were raised on the post-modern falsehood that words can be manipulated to suit personal agendas.
It all started with the forbidden hyphen, which refused to conform to social media norms. Hashtags are sacred on social media. And hashtags are anti-hyphen — sorry, #antihyphen — so anti-Semitism had to be smushed up and millennialized: “antisemitism.”
If you dare to spell it correctly, you will receive long tirades on how conformity will set you free.
Never mind that non-conformity is at the essence of who we are as a people — and all free societies. And that when French anti-Semites began throwing Holocaust survivors out of windows and poisoning Jewish kids’ food, the perpetrators didn’t shout: “No hyphen!”
In the old days, we would call these types of theoretical arguments “academic” — essentially, meaningless. It’s quite ironic, actually, given that so much of academia is now meaningless. But we’ve now moved past meaningless to actually harmful.
The newest post-modern fascism I mean fashion is to not just remove the hyphen from anti-Zionism but to smush it up into: antizionism.
It is so disrespectful to the word Zion, which of course means Jerusalem (Tziyon), and to Zionism, which means the return of Judeans to our homeland, that many of us find it hard to even look at these post-modern configurations.
But by unlinking the term to anti-Semitism, post-modernists have also allowed it to be redefined by anyone with an anti-Semitic agenda. At a minimum, this could lead to a course called something like “Zionism vs. anti-Zionism,” and we all know how factually accurate that will be.
The post-modernists argue that we need to say that anti-Zionism is a hate movement. Leaving aside the fact that anti-Semitism says precisely that, I would even be willing to indulge a little of this nuttiness if the primary source of today’s anti-Semitism was still coming from the Soviet Union.
The Soviets did a great deal of damage, and not just by promoting the warmth of collectivism. In addition to creating the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) with Egyptian Yasser Arafat in 1964, the Soviets first introduced the oppressor/oppressed narrative into our universities, failing to mention of course that Russia has been (and is) one of the greatest oppressors throughout history.
But the truth is, the bulk of today’s anti-Semitism on the left — both in and out of academia; both here and in Europe — is not coming from Marxists. It’s coming from Islamists. Many people who immigrated here came from countries where anti-Semitism was part of the formal education system, and also the informal one. It’s taboo to say that these days — even though a look at the “anti-Israel” marches on the streets of the West shows this dynamic — but ignoring the problem doesn’t make it go away.
Arab Muslims who were living in Eretz Yisrael before 1948 — before the fulfillment of Zionism — opposed Jews living on any piece of the land. That’s why there is no “Palestinian state” today. Because while the UN granted one in 1947, the Palestinian Arab population and five Arab armies rejected that. Instead, they tried to kill every Jew in Israel, and take all of the territory for their own. You never hear the fact that they turned down a Palestinian state in any discussion about the Middle East these days.
The anti-hyphen warriors claim to be merely calling out a hate movement. But by giving it a new name they’re legitimizing it. We still need to “name the movement,” they vehemently demand.
Okay. It’s called anti-Semitism. It’s the world’s oldest hatred. Spelling it incorrectly doesn’t lessen the hate or mitigate the violence that always follows. It just takes our eyes off of the escalating situation. No doubt Islamists can’t believe their good fortune.
Karen Lehrman Bloch is editor in chief of White Rose Magazine. A different version of this article appeared in The Jewish Journal.
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After Ukraine and Iran, NATO Must Change
A Turkish army personnel walks as they search a field after a piece of ammunition fell following the interception of a missile launched from Iran by a NATO air defense system, in Diyarbakir, Turkey, March 9, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Sertac Kayar
The war with Iran — along with the Ukraine war — have exposed wide cracks in NATO. The political and economic realities have changed dramatically since the birth of NATO, and more so after the end of the Cold War.
Institutions, especially these multinational ones, are never quick to react to the changes around them. And they are also, like every bureaucracy, resistant to change. Eventually, they serve no purpose but the glory of the past and the employment of the bureaucracy itself. And that is exactly where NATO could find itself if reform doesn’t happen.
At the end of the Cold War, Russia, slowly emerging from the ruins of the Soviet Union, presented itself as a great economic opportunity. European NATO members bought into the new economic-security architecture of the continent that consisted of two pillars: energy from Russia and security from the United States.
Europe was to be in the middle, reaping the benefits from the cheap oil and gas from Russia and spending far less on defense than the US.
A military alliance like NATO assumes each member is, regardless of its size, economy, and military capabilities, willing to put its citizens in harm’s way when war is the only option left.
Russia’s aggression against Ukraine has shown that this is not the case. Most NATO members admit that Russia is the biggest threat to Europe and NATO. They publicly declare that Ukraine is just the first step in Russia’s strategy to reclaim its previous glory (and territory), and the status of a superpower.
Yet, they repeat the assertion that under no circumstances will NATO, or any European troops, participate directly in the hostilities. True, Ukraine is not a NATO member, but NATO has shown Europe’s desire to avoid war at all costs. If a country like Poland or Estonia, both NATO members, was attacked by Russia, does anyone believe NATO would actually engage Russia in direct combat?
The blame for this abdication of duties lies, at least partially, with the United States. When NATO was created, Europe, devastated by the war, was in no position to match even remotely what the US could offer to the alliance. The United States assumed the burden in money and fighting force.
Europe has recovered and prospered since that arrangement. The reality changed, but the division of labor in NATO between the US and its European members did not. The United States never, until President Donald Trump came into office, pressed the point forcefully or publicly. NATO did contribute to the War in Afghanistan, but its small participation is not enough to confront the very real threats of Russia and this new century.
The story repeats itself in the war with Iran. The oil and gas from the Middle East is important for energy-hungry Europe. Although the amount of European oil that passes through the Strait of Hormuz is low, the percentage of imported jet fuel is high — and the war affects the market overall.
Yet the United States finds itself begging NATO members to participate in opening the Strait. Iran, with its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile program, with its fanatic anti-Western ideology, and control of the energy routes, is a strategic threat to NATO European members. But the United States finds itself, along with Israel, dealing with the issue.
Some NATO members may still join the fight. It will be great to see some help coming, but the cracks in NATO are irreparable. The conflicts of the 21st century are showing that NATO is hopelessly divided. It is no longer a military alliance, but a bureaucratic machinery pretending to be a military force. NATO must be a coalition of the willing, not just of the participating.
A superpower, no matter how powerful, needs dependable alliances. The United States cannot continue leading the world alone. NATO in its current form does not provide security to either side of the Atlantic. The respective goals are different. Yet the United States and Europe need each other. Perhaps, another alliance should be created in place of NATO, consisting of the countries willing to engage the enemy.
It does not matter if the alliance is smaller. What matters is that the new group of countries shares the same vision and resolve. NATO was never the goal. It was the means. And so should whatever comes next.
The author lives and works in Silicon Valley, California. He is a founding member of San Francisco Voice for Israel.