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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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Drive-by shooting targets Jewish family’s Hanukkah display, police in California town say
(JTA) — A California home decorated for Hanukkah was targeted Friday night in a drive-by shooting, with police saying the assailants fired what appeared to be an airsoft gun from a car.
During the attack on the home, which had several inflatable Hanukkah decorations in its yard, the assailants drove by in a vehicle and allegedly unloaded 20 shots.
Later, the occupants of the vehicle allegedly shouted “F–ck the Jews” and “Free Palestine, N–ger,” according to an account of the incident posted to X by a resident of the home, Rodgir Cohen.
“Just as a reaction, people just, through ignorance and hate, respond with negativity and violence,” Cohen told CBS News. “For random acts of hate crimes, it’s scary to be in the midst of a victim and it’s scary.”
Cohen told a different local news outlet that he and his son had encountered the alleged assailants in person shortly before the shooting.
The City of Redlands said no injuries or damage was reported, and the weapon used was believed to be an airsoft gun after an investigation found no shell casings and the surveillance video of the incident showed no muzzle flash.
Local officials condemned the incident, which came during the same weekend as a major antisemitic attack on Jews celebrating Hanukkah in Sydney, Australia.
“As our friends in the Jewish community begin their celebration of Hanukkah, several tragic incidents have occurred across the globe, targeting people simply because of their faith,” the City of Redlands wrote in a statement. “Unfortunately, Redlands is not immune to these hateful acts, as a local family was targeted because of their festive home decorations celebrating Hanukkah. ”
The incident is currently being investigated as a hate crime, and Redlands Police said they believed the family was targeted because of the Hanukkah decorations. They also said they would provide additional patrols in the area and around local places of worship.
The Los Angeles chapter of the Anti-Defamation League decried the incident. “Last night’s shooting into the home of a Jewish family on Shabbat in Redlands, CA is another dangerous and despicable act of violence impacting the Jewish community in Southern California,” David Englin, the group’s senior regional director, said in a statement. “This cannot be tolerated or accepted as normal.”
Last year, the ADL reported that California had 1,344 antisemitic incidents, the second-highest number of any state besides New York. Of those incidents, 1,000 were antisemitic harassment, while 311 were vandalism and 33 were assault.
Congregation Emanu El, a Reform synagogue in Redlands, wrote on Facebook Sunday that it was in communication with the family, who were past members, as well as with Redlands Police.
“Please know that the safety and well-being of our community remains our highest priority,” wrote Congregation Emanu El President Greg Weissman. “We will continue to stay in close contact with local authorities and share updates as appropriate. Thank you for your care for one another and for our community.”
Cohen is a lecturer in religion at Cal State Fullerton and a former political candidate in Redlands who ran on a tough-on-crime platform. His wife Heftsibah Cohen told a local news outside that she initially thought fireworks were going off before checking a surveillance tape.
“We always know there’s antisemitism and hate and racism out there. It’s always out there,” she said. “But when it comes by your house, it’s that reminder of how real it is.”
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Alyssa Katz Named Next Editor-in-Chief of the Forward
Alyssa Katz has been named Editor-in-Chief of the Forward, the nation’s most influential and widely-read Jewish publication. The appointment was announced today by Forward Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen. Katz will join the Forward in January 2026.
Katz is an award-winning journalist who has worked at THE CITY since 2019, first as Deputy Editor and currently as Executive Editor. In these roles, she has managed the investigative reporting team while guiding coverage of labor, housing, politics, government and social services. She has led interactive projects and data investigations, including collaborations with ProPublica and the Guardian. Prior to joining THE CITY, she served in editorial roles at the New York Daily News, The Village Voice and other publications.
Katz said, “I am thrilled and inspired to be joining the Forward to provide editorial leadership at this critical moment. In a world that continues to test Jewish safety, identity and values, the Forward celebrates what makes us who we are while taking a critical journalistic eye to our challenges.”
“We’re so proud to welcome Alyssa to the Forward as our next Editor-in-Chief,” said Fishman Feddersen. “She brings formidable journalistic expertise as an editor and reporter, as well as deep experience managing an ambitious nonprofit newsroom. She has produced groundbreaking work that demonstrates courage, accountability and integrity — the same values on which the Forward was founded 128 years ago and upholds today.”
Katz is the author of the 2015 book, The Influence Machine: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Corporate Capture of American Life (Spiegel & Grau) and 2009’s Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us (Bloomsbury). She has taught journalism at New York University, Hunter College and Brooklyn College, is a graduate of the University of Michigan and was selected for Columbia University’s Charles H. Revson Fellowship for New York City leaders.
Katz has spent many years as an active lay leader at the East Midwood Jewish Center, a historic synagogue and community center in Brooklyn, NY. She is also involved in research and advocacy for preservation of Jewish historic memory in Warsaw, Poland.
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Brown University students light first Hanukkah candle in the shadow of mass shooting
(JTA) — PROVIDENCE, Rhode Island — Dozens of Brown University students shielded their candles at a menorah lighting that doubled as a vigil on Sunday night as the Hanukkah arrived under a sheet of snow and a thick blanket of trauma, following a mass shooting in an economics class.
On Saturday, a gunman opened fire on a room where students had gathered to review for their final exam in Principles of Economics, Brown’s most popular class that is dominated by freshmen. He killed two students and injured nine others at the Barus and Holley engineering and physics building in Providence, Rhode Island.
The school went into lockdown for 12 hours and subsequently canceled all academic exercises for the rest of the semester. On Sunday night, Providence Mayor Brett Smiley said a police investigation was ongoing and a person of interest detained earlier in the day was being released.
Yael Ranel Filus, a sophomore engineering student from Israel, goes daily to Barus and Holley and was at a nearby building when shots rang out. She said she had been in touch with fellow Israeli students, who like her were in disbelief.
“We were talking in the group channel, like, ‘Oh, we thought we left that at home. We thought we left those tragedies at home,’” Filus said. “I don’t think any of us thought we would encounter something like this here.”
Another tragedy loomed over the menorah lighting led by two rabbis, Josh Bolton and Mendel Laufer, the respective heads of Brown’s Hillel and Chabad, located on adjacent blocks at the heart of the school’s urban campus. Across the world on Sunday, at least 15 people were killed and dozens injured in a shooting attack on Jews who gathered to celebrate Hanukkah in Sydney.
Bolton said both shootings were on his mind during a speech to the crowd of students, professors and Hillel staff.
“The message of Hanukkah here is that we should increase the light,” he said. “Even in the midst of this very dark and difficult moment, together as a community, we come together and we give each other a little bit of light.”
Brown recently struck a $50 million settlement with the Trump administration over allegations of antisemitism tied to pro-Palestinian protests during the war in Gaza. It drew particular criticism for allowing students to present a proposal to divest from Israel to the school’s board of overseers, who rejected it.
The school has a Jewish president, Christina Paxson, and the highest proportion of Jewish students in the Ivy League, with particular growth in recent years among its Orthodox student population. It recently hosted a major gathering to celebrate 130 years of Jewish life that attracted alumni from around the world as well as prominent figures including Robert Kraft, founder of the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism.
The economics class that was attacked is taught by Rachel Friedberg, a Jewish faculty member who researches the intersection of economics and Jewish studies and who has worked extensively in Israel, though she was not in the classroom at the time. Police have not indicated any antisemitic motive behind the shooting. But they also have not identified the shooter, igniting unease on campus and speculation online, particularly in the wake of the Sydney attack.
Bolton said regardless of the motive, Brown was being forced to contend with a nationwide plague.
“Whether or not the shooter was antisemitic or anti-Muslim or anti-LGBTQ or whatever, the burden of our culture is lonely, disturbed, usually young men with guns, and you can add whatever other layers of ideological hatred to it,” he said.
The Brown community was ravaged by gun violence only two years ago, when a Brown student, Hisham Awartani, was among three Palestinian students were shot over Thanksgiving break in Burlington, Vermont. Awartani was hit in the spine and paralyzed from the waist down.
The shock that ripped through Brown this weekend was familiar to Zoe Weissman, a sophomore who has lived through two school shootings in her 20 years. As a 12 year-old in Parkland, Florida, she was outside her middle school when she heard gunshots and screams from the adjacent Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where 17 people were killed in 2018. She said the shooting left her with post-traumatic stress disorder.
“I’m an example of how prevalent gun violence is becoming,” said Weissman. “If you look at the statistics of mass shootings, it should be physically impossible for this to have happened to me twice. And that’s a fact I used to use to comfort myself.”
Another Brown student, junior Mia Tretta, was shot in the abdomen during a 2019 attack on Saugus High School in California.
Weissman left Brown before the communal Hanukkah lighting, but she lit the first candle with a few friends at a house off-campus.
“It’s a tradition I’ve grown up with, so it’s something that makes me feel really comfortable,” she said. “It wasn’t something that I wanted to skip for the first time ever because of this.”
The shooting began in the last hour of Shabbat, when over 30 students were gathered at Hillel, many without their phones. They were ordered to shelter on the third floor with the lights off.
Bolton arrived about an hour later with water and food for the night. He wanted the group to mark havdalah, the ritual to note the end of Shabbat traditionally performed once three stars can be spotted in the sky. Bolton and the students did havdalah in a windowless room, whispering over candles in the dark.
Aaron Perrotta, a junior who was there, said that some jokes mixed in with the panic. “It was nice to have a little sense of normalcy and be able to close out Shabbat like that,” he said.
“I think a lot of us bonded and got closer together, just being in such a tight space upstairs,” said Max Zimmer, a sophomore.
Filus was blocks away from Barus and Holley at the Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship on Saturday night. She and nine other students rotated sleeping shifts, as Brown’s Department of Public Safety advised having one person alert until the lockdown ended.
Filus went to the candle lighting on Olive Street after sitting with friends at the neighboring Hillel building.
“It’s a safe space,” she said. “I don’t really want to be alone right now. I don’t want to be in my room.”
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