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The battle for Jewish hearts and minds returns to the printed page
(JTA) — The last 20 years haven’t been kind to Jewish journalism, with local weeklies shrinking or folding and even big city papers suspending their print publications and going completely digital. Publishing online has allowed these papers to cut costs and given them the potential for a wide reach — albeit a potential undermined by an increasingly siloed and ideologically polarized market for news and ideas.
Yet still there are those who aren’t giving up on print — at least in small, carefully targeted batches. This spring has seen the launch of two Jewish journals — Masorti, a reboot of the former Conservative Judaism, and Fragments, a product of the left-leaning Jewish human rights group T’ruah. The two magazines join a small but scrappy fraternity of journals aiming to steer the Jewish conversation.
“We’re the people of the book. I think print is having a moment,” said Rabbi Lev Meirowitz Nelson, who as director of Emor, T’ruah’s affiliated think tank, edits Fragments. “In the midst of all the [digital] bombardment people experience, there’s something very grounding about picking up a hard copy and being able to mark it up or carry it with you.”
Of course, Fragments and its more established cousins — from a legacy Modern Orthodox quarterly like Tradition to the interdisciplinary journal Modern Judaism — are all available online, and few print more than 1,000 copies at a time. The goal, the editors and publishers of some of the newer publications told me, is to establish a brand and repair what each one said was a broken communal discussion about Israel, domestic politics and religion.
“I hate what’s become of discourse in Jewish life, which largely goes on on Twitter and other places like that,” said Mark Charendoff. “I think Jews like longform discussions, and we’ve become very, very impatient. I wanted to carve out a space for that long type of writing and reading.”
Charendoff is president of the Maimonides Fund, which publishes Sapir, perhaps the best known of the newish journals. It has a high-profile editor — Bret Stephens, the conservative columnist on the New York Times opinion page — and a penchant for hot-button topics that rally conservatives and enrage liberals. Recent issues of the two-year-old journal have focused on “cancel culture” and a campus environment that most of its contributors consider hostile to conservatism and Jewish life.
“I think society and the Jewish community has become so polarized that people are afraid of articulating controversial views. We need to take a breath and say, ‘You’re not going to be harmed by reading something you disagree with,’” said Charendoff.
T’ruah believes there are plenty of controversial views being aired, but mostly on the right: It has explicitly positioned its new journal as a “necessary alternative to well-funded right-wing Jewish publications.” The news release announcing Fragments did not name those publications but presumably they include Sapir; Mosaic, supported by the right-leaning Tikvah Fund; and Tablet, which is published by Nextbook, Inc., whose president, Mem Bernstein, is on the board of Tikvah and is the widow of its founder. Tablet has published writers from across the political spectrum, but has drawn howls from the left for its frequent articles denouncing “wokeness” and cancel culture and a recent piece questioning the motives of donors who support gender-affirming care for trans people.
(Another journal, The Jewish Review of Books, was initially backed by Tikvah, but recently spun off under its own foundation.)
The premiere issue of Fragments includes essays on concepts of freedom by Laynie Soloman, a director at SVARA, an LGBTQ yeshiva based in Chicago, and Joelle Novey, the director of an interfaith environmental group in the Washington, D.C. area.
Nelson sees two audiences for Fragments: “It’s definitely speaking to the left and offering a deepening of language and of conversation around Jewish sources and Jewish ideas,” he said. “And it’s an effort to speak to the center, which often shares our values and can be spooked by the language they see coming from the right.”
Fittingly for a magazine published by a group formerly known as Rabbis for Human Rights, Fragments leans into Jewish text and religious perspectives. That sets it apart from Jewish Currents, a legacy journal of the Jewish left that, after a relaunch in 2018, now aims for an audience of young, left-wing, mostly secular Jews who, when not anti-Zionist, are deeply critical of Israel. Arielle Angel, editor in chief of Jewish Currents, has said that the magazine has become “a reliable and essential space for challenging, rigorous, surprising work that has shifted the discourse even beyond the American Jewish left.”
The aspiration that the “discourse can be shifted” by gladiators writing for small magazines harkens back to the post-World War II period, a sort of golden age of Jewish thought journals. Jewish and Jewish-adjacent publications like the Menorah Journal, Partisan Review, Commentary and Dissent provided a launching pad for an ideologically fluid cohort of “New York intellectuals” that over the years included Sidney Hook, Hannah Arendt, Lionel Trilling, Saul Bellow, Irving Howe, Delmore Schwartz, Norman Podhoretz, Paul Goodman, Midge Dector, Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Alfred Kazin.
Partisan Review was among a spate of magazines that offered a platform for Jewish intellectuals in the years immediately after World War II. (Open Culture)
While writers like these tackled Jewish issues, or general issues through a Jewish lens, many of them influenced the wider national conversation. Angel has said she has drawn inspiration from Commentary: Founded in 1945 by the American Jewish Committee, the magazine became hugely influential in promoting neoconservative ideas and thinkers in the 1980s and ’90s.
The “golden age” was an explosion of Jewish creativity, and political influence, that would be difficult to replicate today. Benjamin Balint, a former editor at Commentary and author of a history of the magazine, says the flowering of Jewish journals in the mid-20th century was the result of “terrific pent-up pressure among the children of immigrants who were pushed down for so long and were able to explode into the mainstream.” Small magazines “provided that release — pushing critics and writers into the larger culture,” said Balint, who previously edited Sources, the journal of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America.
A long piece in Tablet recently argued that such Jewish influence is in steep decline “anywhere where American Jews once made their mark,” from academia to Hollywood to government. Author Jacob Savage doesn’t blame the loss of the immigrant work ethic, however, but rather “American liberalism” for marginalizing Jews.
Whatever the cause, few of the newer journals aspire to that kind of influence on the larger culture, and acknowledge that they are trying to shape the conversation within the Jewish community.
“We believe that Jewish leaders need great ideas to do their work well,” said Rabbi Justus Baird, senior vice president for national programs at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America and publisher of its journal Sources, launched in 2021. “The way we invest in ideas is by cultivating a large group of Jewish thinkers and scholars who are doing not just the scholarship for its own sake, but really trying to work collaboratively on how Jewish thought can apply to the challenges facing the Jewish people.”
The Hartman Institute (which also counts the Maimonides Fund among its long list of major donors) is a religiously pluralistic, liberal Zionist think tank with outposts in New York and Jerusalem. Recent essays in Sources include lengthy essays by Yale religious studies professor Christine Hayes on the ethics of shaming and Hartman scholar Mijal Bitton on how relationships can heal the breach between the Diaspora and Israel.
Part of Hartman’s goal in publishing the journal is to provide a space for such long-form articles, filling what Baird calls “a gap between the quick, super-responsive, news-oriented Jewish publication landscape, the hot takes about what is going on, and the academic Jewish work.”
“It’s a space where ideas can really percolate,” said Claire Sufrin, who now edits Sources. “The written word, the printed word is there and can be shared in that way and people can engage with it over and over again.”
Masorti, the relaunched journal of Conservative Judaism, is also trying to bridge a gap, in this case between Jewish scholarship and the synagogue.
“Rabbis have responsibilities to serve as congregational leaders, and also the obligation to engage in Jewish learning and scholarship,” said Rabbi Joseph Prouser, the editor of Masorti.
The original Conservative Judaism was published from 1945 through 2014. The reboot is sponsored by the movement’s Rabbinical Assembly and its five seminaries, including the Jewish Theological Seminary, the New York flagship. Its readership base is rabbis and cantors affiliated with the movement.
Masorti arrives at a critical time for the Conservative movement: In an essay in the first issue, its associate editor, Rabbi Jonathan Rosenbaum, says what was once America’s largest Jewish denomination is at a “precipice.”
“At its summit, the plurality of [North American] Jews identified with the Conservative movement, something like 40%,” Rosenbaum said in an interview. “There was something like 1.6 million Jews who were thought to be part of the Conservative movement up to maybe the late ‘80s, early ‘90s. Today, there are about 500,000.
“Part of the goal of the journal,” he said, is to “look at the problems and the means of solving them.”
In the past the Conservative Judaism journal had been a forum for debate within the movement. It published dueling papers, for example, on the decision to ordain women and what is and isn’t permissible on Shabbat. Prouser says he’ll uphold that tradition of dissent: The current issue features an essay by Michal Raucher, a Jewish studies professor at Rutgers University, who criticizes the movement’s establishment for embracing a justification for abortion that doesn’t go far enough in recognizing the bodily autonomy of women (an argument she also advanced in a JTA oped).
And Prouser does hope these arguments are heard beyond the movement, positioned between traditionalist Orthodoxy and liberal Reform. “One of the beauties of the Conservative movement is that we can talk to people to our right to our left right, we can talk to the entire spectrum of the Jewish community,” he said.
The editors of the new journals agree that there are fewer and fewer spaces for civil conversation among Jews, blaming the filter bubble of the internet and the take-no-prisoners style of current political debate. And each said they would like to be part of the solution.
Sufrin, the editor of Hartman’s journal, calls it a “bridge, because people can talk about it together, they can engage with the ideas together, and it’s in that conversation that they can develop a relationship and ultimately, talk together more productively.”
The question is whether it is too late: At a time when algorithms reward readers with the kind of material they are likely to agree with, will even an elite reach across ideological divides and listen to what the other side is saying? When institutions — from government to religion — regard compromise as surrender, who dares to concede that your ideological opponent might have a point?
“Difference and disagreement are productive when we engage with the best versions of those with whom we disagree,” Hayes writes in Sources. That sounds like a call to action. Or is it an epitaph?
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A radical idea to bridge Chicago’s Black and Jewish communities
I have strong Southern roots. Both sets of my grandparents, with the exception of my Philadelphia-born maternal grandmother, were descendants of enslaved people who later became sharecroppers. I visited the South often as a child, and being different in a place like that could be difficult. There was no Black Jewish community there at the time. I was usually its sole representative.
Or so I thought.
I was a teenager when I first learned about Julius Rosenwald‘s philanthropic efforts that helped build thousands of schools for Black children throughout the rural South, including many of the places I grew up visiting. After that, I began looking for Rosenwald schools whenever I traveled. I was always happy to find them. They were old and mostly dilapidated, but somehow still seemed to quietly defy time and the elements.
This was the first time I remember understanding how Black people and Jews could do meaningful work together. Those faded clapboard buildings, once whitewashed and full of possibility, had housed the education system that helped generations of Black children and laid part of the groundwork for the civil rights movement that would follow.
I was born in the late 1970s. I have no memory of the storied alliance between Blacks and Jews during the civil rights era. By the time I came along, much of that coalition had faded, and people were already asking how those bridges might be rebuilt.
I never experienced the Black-Jewish relationship that the teachers and staff at my Jewish day school recalled so fondly. But whenever I traveled through the South, I saw those schools. They stood as proof that the two communities I come from had once worked together to accomplish something extraordinary. They filled me with hope and pride, and with the certainty that if it happened once, it could happen again.
That is why, at a time when antisemitism and racism are once again on the rise, I find myself returning to the example set by earlier generations of Jewish philanthropists and community leaders. They understood that investing in Black communities was not simply an act of charity. It was an act of solidarity. They recognized that prejudice thrives when people remain strangers to one another, and that real change requires shared investment in a common future.
Today, we find ourselves confronting many of the same challenges. Distrust is growing. Division is growing. Fear is growing.
Which is why I want to build a Jewish Community Center on the south side of Chicago.
Not in a neighborhood where many Jews already live, but in a neighborhood where they can come to build new relationships, and new solidarity. A neighborhood where children from the two communities I hold in my heart can grow up seeing one another as neighbors instead of strangers.
The groundwork for this kind of bold community building is already in place. More than a decade ago, I started Mothers and Men Against Senseless Killing on the south side, as a response to violence, hopelessness and despair. From the beginning, that work was shaped by Jewish values, and Jews from across the Chicagoland area have stood alongside me in that work.
What began as an effort to keep children safe, based on the corner of 75th Street and Stewart Avenue, has evolved into an open air community center where children receive hot meals after school, where they can play safely throughout the summer, and where parents can find diapers, formula and other necessities for their families.
Our corner has also become a place where we can have open and sometimes difficult conversations about race, and life in America. Those conversations are often also about Judaism. We host Yom Kippur services, Passover seders, and an annual Christmahanukkwanzukah toy giveaway.
This corner has become an oasis that welcomes both Black people and Jews, and of course Black Jews, and invites them to spend time together.
I grew up watching my friends go to the JCC, even though my family could never afford it. It was important to me that my own children had that experience. At a JCC far from the neighborhood where we live, they deepened their Jewish identities, learned to get along with people different from themselves, got exercise, and made lifelong friends.
It’s time to bring that opportunity to the area where we live, and where MASK has already begun to serve some of the purposes that JCCs often fill — primarily that of giving children a safe place to learn and play.
It’s time to take things to the next level. We need a place where Black and Jewish families can gather with intention to build more communal services that help us all. Yes, we need bridges between our communities.But those bridges also need to lead somewhere. And I cannot think of a better destination than a place where Black and Jewish children can learn, grow, and build a future together.
The post A radical idea to bridge Chicago’s Black and Jewish communities appeared first on The Forward.
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Fight wildfires and other climate crises with this spiritual guide to catastrophe
As smoke from Canadian wildfires blankets much of the Northeast and Midwest in a hazy fog, some Jews are observing this Tisha B’av by mourning a different kind of destruction: that of a planet in crisis.
Tisha B’av, the saddest day on the Jewish calendar that commemorates the destruction of the First and Second Temples, deals with themes of grief and resilience relevant to today’s climate crisis, said Rabbi Laura Bellows, director of spiritual activism and education at Dayenu: A Jewish Call to Climate Action.
In advance of Tisha Ba’av, Dayenu this week released a spiritual guide for the aftermath of extreme weather — including floods, storms, heatwaves and fires. It was a grim coincidence, Bellows said, that the guide’s publication coincided with a time when those prayers would be of particular use.
“The grief is real,” Bellows said. “Jewish tradition is really good at encouraging us not to ignore it, but actually to make space and time to be with that grief.”
The guide includes an adapted version of Mi Shebeirach, the prayer for healing, written by Rabbi Daniel Scher at Kehillat Israel in the Palisades. Scher wrote the prayer for his congregation after wildfires caused significant smoke damage to the synagogue’s building, leading it to close for several months. Roughly 250 synagogue members — and all three clergy — lost their homes.
“The fire has seared through our homes and hopes, yet we stand together in our pain, trusting that new life can blossom in our midst,” the prayer reads.
Other texts in the guidebook offer hope for rebuilding. Rabbi Zoe Klein of Temple Isaiah in Los Angeles adapted the daily prayer, “May it be your will that the Temple be speedily rebuilt in our own time,” into a plea for wildfire survivors: “May it be Thy will that homes be rebuilt in our own time.”
Another ritual offers a hand-washing ceremony for survivors of water-related natural disasters. Participants wash their hands and recite the Birkat HaGomel, a prayer traditionally said after surviving a life-threatening event.
It’s not the first year rabbis have linked the climate crisis to Tisha Ba’av. More than a decade ago, Rabbi Tamara Cohen, chief of program and strategy at the Jewish youth group Moving Traditions, co-wrote “Eikha for the Earth,” which adapts the Book of Lamentations traditionally read on Tisha Ba’av as a “lament for the Earth.”
“Checkerspot butterflies flee their homes; polar bears can find no rest. Because our greed has heated Earth,” the text reads.
The adapted text aims to “welcome in Jews who are not so connected to the idea of mourning for the ancient temple, which doesn’t necessarily move lots of people today,” Cohen told the Forward.
But the timing of this year’s Tisha B’av makes the text feel eerily relevant, she said, pointing to the line “forest fires reach down and spread like fury.”
Jakir Manela, CEO of the nonprofit Adamah, which leads immersive Jewish experiences grounded in nature, said he’s also feeling particular grief for the earth this Tisha B’av. Manela lives in Baltimore, where he and his kids have been unable to go outside due to the unhealthy air.
“This is destruction in front of our very eyes, and affecting the largest population centers on the planet,” Manela said. “If folks have trouble connecting with Tisha B’av and the grief and mourning that it calls us to do, maybe this year is the time when it will hit home.”
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Why am I the only one troubled by an Anne Frank House shot glass?
Readers, how many of you have ever looked at the Anne Frank House and thought: “Wow, I wish I had a miniature version I could drink alcohol from” ?
Probably very few of you. And yet a ceramic replica of the historic house filled with approximately 1.7ozs of Bols Dutch gin is available from KLM Dutch Airways as part of a gift series for business class passengers on international flights.
The airline first launched the Delft Blue miniature house line in 1952 as gifts for business class passengers on intercontinental flights. I first discovered them last month, when I was flying with my dad to Maputo, Mozambique, to cover the centenary celebration of a local synagogue. My dad and I initially thought these would make good Christmas gifts for my cousin’s kids until we heard the liquid sloshing inside. We ended up keeping these recreations — which included the house of aviator Anthony Fokker and one of the last wooden houses left in Amsterdam — for ourselves.
While researching these unique souvenirs, I quickly discovered that one of the historic recreations is the Anne Frank House, aka “KLM miniature number 47,” which the Dutch airline added to the collection in 1975. My initial reaction was shock: How could the airline take a place that represents such a tremendous tragedy and turn it into a shot glass?
I reached out to KLM and asked if they had ever received a complaint about the item. A representative wrote back to say that, from what he knew, there had only ever been one critical Instagram comment: that KLM tried to make money off of everything. Collectors shared the souvenir online, but nobody I could find on the internet expressed the surprise and revulsion I felt.
My request to chat on the phone for further comments on why KLM included the Anne Frank House in their collection didn’t garner the response I expected. The representative responded via email that the house is historic and if I wanted to know more about it, I could just Google it. The subtext of my question — that it feels like a strange and possibly inappropriate choice to turn a solemn landmark into a cutesy flask — didn’t seem obvious to him.
So why did it feel so obvious to me?
For so many, Anne Frank is the symbol of how horrendous the Holocaust was. The fact that she is an innocent child exposes the depraved nature of the Nazis. Most Americans are first introduced to the Holocaust through the story of her confinement in that house in Amsterdam.
Even though it is not where Frank died (that was Bergen-Belsen, at the age of 16), it feels like the place where her fate was sealed. It is not just a landmark included in a famous book; it was her prison and the last stop on the way to her death. Although some may associate it with Frank’s enduring spirit of hope, filling it with alcohol still feels obscene.
Frank’s image has been co-opted over and over again. Two years ago, a Norwegian artist used an image of Frank in a keffiyeh to bring attention to children being killed in Gaza. More recently, Frank has become a symbol for anti-ICE protesters of the dangers of letting law enforcement target people based on their ethnic background. Then there’s the viral satirical comedy musical Slam Frank, which reimagines Anne Frank as a queer Latinx girl with a Black mom and gay, neurodivergent dad in order to poke fun at woke culture.The KLM house feels like a less charged appropriation of Anne Frank’s legacy; it’s not pushing any sort of political agenda.
The ceramic house is also part of a larger kitsch culture that blurs the fine line between commemoration and trivialization. So many tragedies have been commodified in this way that there’s a term for it: “dark tourism.” There are plenty of 9/11 related objects out there — a Twin Towers Christmas tree ornament, stuffed search and rescue dogs — that feel like they border on exploitation.
But what makes the KLM Anne Frank house stand out is its contents. To use a house of such suffering as the container for gin feels minimizing. (It is worth mentioning that a New York winery did at one point produce a 9/11 commemorative wine, although some of the proceeds were donated to the National September 11 Memorial and Museum.) Once the Anne Frank flask is emptied of its contents, it will just be a ceramic trinket that could help keep the memory of the landmark alive. Does the fact that it was originally made to carry alcohol negate that power?
I asked a similar question nearly one year ago in my very first Looking Forward column when I wrote about a recording of Nazi marching songs and speeches made by a Jewish producer. Since that piece was published, I haven’t found a satisfying answer to when memorialization becomes inappropriate, but I have become more comfortable acknowledging how complex this issue is.
This will be my last Looking Forward, as my last day as an employee of the Forward (at least for now, as I embark on a new pursuit) will be July 31. It feels fitting that my time with this newsletter will end similarly to the way in which it started: scratching my head about Holocaust kitsch. But having to grapple with such a topic in my writing is just another day at the Forward.
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