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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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Northwestern agrees to pay $75M, void encampment deal to end Trump’s antisemitism investigation
(JTA) — Northwestern University will pay $75 million to the Trump administration to recover nearly $800 million in federal funding frozen by an ongoing antisemitism investigation, in the second-largest agreement of its kind.
The deal, which will last for three years, also means the Chicago-area private university will no longer abide by an earlier agreement it struck with pro-Palestinian protesters that included a commitment to dedicate space on campus for Muslim and North African students.
“The cost of a legal fight was too high and the risks too grave,” the offices of Northwestern’s interim president Henry Bienen posted in a lengthy statement explaining why the school capitulated to Trump’s demands. “If our $790 million in federal research funding remained frozen, the freeze threatened to gut our labs, drive away faculty, and set back entire fields of discovery. Our overarching goal is to protect people and preserve the institution, and to enable life-saving research to continue.”
Northwestern’s deal with the Trump administration was announced late Friday, the day after Thanksgiving.
“The Northwestern agreement is a huge win for current and future Northwestern students, alumni, faculty, and for the future of American higher education,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement praising the agreement. “The deal cements policy changes that will protect students and other members of the campus from harassment and discrimination, and it recommits the school to merit-based hiring and admissions.”
Northwestern is the sixth university to strike an agreement with the Trump administration to end investigations and free up federal funding; its payout is second only to Columbia’s $221 million. Trump’s team has continued to apply pressure on schools like Harvard and UCLA to compel them to sign similar agreements. Critics of the agreements have compared them to shakedowns, questioned their relevance to fighting antisemitism, and claimed they threaten academic freedom.
Northwestern denied that final allegation, with Bienen stating, “Northwestern runs Northwestern.” Yet the terms of the agreement also address other conservative culture-war topics unrelated to antisemitism, including policies on race-based hiring and transgender athletes.
Unique to Northwestern’s deal is its voiding of what the school refers to as the earlier “Deering Meadow agreement” with its protesters, which dated back to 2024. The school’s former president Michael Schill, who is Jewish, had struck the agreement in order to compel the pro-Palestinian encampment to disperse peacefully without involving law enforcement.
Schill received vociferous criticism from some corners, including Jewish staff and prominent alumni such as Jonathan Greenblatt, who felt the agreement was rewarding antisemitic behavior. He was soon forced to testify before Congress, and this fall stepped down from the presidency.
Now, following the agreement with the Trump administration, Northwestern is no longer offering what had been billed as a temporary space for Muslim and North African students that it created as a result of the encampment agreement, and it is no longer committing to building a promised permanent space for those students.
The school’s leading pro-Palestinian student groups did not immediately respond publicly to the deal with the Trump administration. A request for comment to the school’s Jewish Voice for Peace chapter, which was a member of the encampment coalition that struck the now-invalidated Deering Meadow Agreement, was not immediately returned.
The Chicago Jewish Alliance, the Coalition Against Antisemitism at Northwestern, and other Jewish activist groups praised the agreement. CAAN, a primarily alumni-driven group that also lists Northwestern Hillel and Chabad as partners, thanked what it called “our federal partners” for “their continued commitment to protecting Jewish students and faculty.”
Under the new agreement, Northwestern has agreed to implement a climate survey of the type that has surfaced concerns about antisemitism on other campuses. A detailed section of the agreement dealing with Jewish students reaffirms a host of other policies that the school says it was already implementing, including specific prohibitions on protest activities and on-campus demonstrations. A Jewish advisory council to the president, established after the dissolution of a similar advisory council effort under Schill, will continue as well.
“Over the past two years, Northwestern has implemented numerous measures to strengthen our campus environment: new training requirements, expanded reporting systems and greater support for Jewish students. All of those measures predated this agreement,” the school’s FAQ page states. “Incidents have significantly declined as a result.”
But even following the leadership change, Northwestern’s campus has experienced tensions around antisemitism. This fall a few dozen incoming students refused to take a new mandatory antisemitism training session, saying the framing was “unscholarly” and “morally harmful.” Those students were blocked from enrollment following a federal judge order.
The post Northwestern agrees to pay $75M, void encampment deal to end Trump’s antisemitism investigation appeared first on The Forward.
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How a troublemaking private school dropout became the Johnny Appleseed of tech
David Lerner was a difficult mensch.
Lerner passed away on Nov. 12 at the age of 72 and in the days that followed some who were close to the man recounted his kindnesses but they also used the word “difficult” to describe him.
“He was a difficult man but he was still my guy,” his wife Lorren Erstad told me.
Jan Albert, who met Lerner when they were both teenagers volunteering at the countercultural radio station WBAI, posted on Facebook: “I will always remember David for his immense generosity and the fact that he was an unfailingly fair and ethical (if difficult) human being.”
And Harold Berkowitz, who volunteered with Lerner at the Lifelong Peer Learning Program (LP2), offered perhaps the most eloquent description of how he was difficult. Berkowitz wrote that Lerner was “gruff but kind, curmudgeonly but sweet, blunt but tactful, modest yet very knowing.”
As for the mensch that was David Lerner, Ruth Mackaman, another LP2 volunteer, recalled that during the COVID lockdown Lerner got the organization up and running on Zoom, then shelled out his own money to buy iPads for at least ten members who didn’t have computers. He then proceeded to pedal around Manhattan and Brooklyn on a Citibike and give them away. This prompted one of his friends to joke about Lerner being the Johnny Appleseed of tech.
From time to time, Lerner would ask me about the radio stories I was working on. When I told him I had just finished a piece about a young woman in the South Bronx afflicted with cerebral palsy who had no voluntary movement of her arms and legs, the Johnny Appleseed of tech sent her a new iPad.
He was a baal tzedakah, a master of charity, and lived his life by the most important line in our holy texts: Justice, justice, thou shalt seek. The line comes from the Torah, specifically the Book of Deuteronomy, chapter 16, verse 20. Go look it up.
Most New Yorkers know Lerner from Tekserve, the independent Macintosh computer store he cofounded in Chelsea and helped to run for close to 30 years. Over the course of that time the business grew from occupying half of his partner Dick Demenus’ loft to a cavernous 25,000-square-foot storefront on West 23rd Street.
After news of Lerner’s passing reached them, former Tekserve employees and customers all over these United States shared memories of Lerner the mensch online. Former Tekserve workers thanked Lerner for being such an uncommon boss. And not just because he and Demenus provided health insurance and free lunch to their employees.
One Tekserve alum recalled that when his father passed away, Lerner offered to cover his airfare to North Dakota to spread the man’s ashes. Another who now runs a store in Scranton, PA wrote: “He taught me more about business than anyone.” A former Tekserve customer praised Lerner for dispensing advice on the NY Macintosh Users Group (NYMUG) bulletin board before the web existed. Another remembered that Tekserve printed and gave away the booklets Lerner wrote with answers to Frequently Asked Questions about keeping a Mac running.
Perhaps Lerner’s Tekserve partner Demenus put it best in a poem he wrote and posted on Facebook — “So many of us have counted on you for so much.”
Lerner and Demenus ran Tekserve as a capitalist enterprise — in 2011, the store had $100 million in revenue from sales and services — but the impact of their years at WBAI was apparent in the diversity of Tekserve’s workforce.
In the 1970’s, WBAI was housed in a church where it became home to a bunch of Jewish troublemakers. Bob Fass, who helped start the Yippies, referred to his radio audience as “The Cabal.” Margot Adler, the granddaughter of Austrian psychotherapist Alfred Adler, went to Mississippi to register African-American voters during the civil rights movement. And the Yeshiva of Flatbush graduate Paul Fischer anchored the station’s legendary Vietnam War summary before moving on to write for Dan Rather at CBS.
In 1969, Lerner dropped out of an elite private school on the Upper West Side and joined the fun at WBAI. He was 16 at the time. He and Demenus worked out of the tiny engineering office at the church which was identified by a sign that read “Department of Redundancy Department.” Back then, the only thing to indicate that Lerner was another troublemaker was the letter of reprimand sent to his parents from the management of the Peter Cooper Village housing complex. Young David was cited for unauthorized use of a water gun on the premises. The framed letter hung on the wall of his Manhattan apartment many years later.
There is no doubt that there are some who feel that it was a subversive act to run a profitable business like Tekserve and treat your workers like they were family.
Derek Davis, who started the pro audio division at Tekserve and is now the head archery coach at Columbia University, described Lerner as “the most honest and fair person” he has ever worked for. The day Davis came into the store for an interview Lerner hired him on the spot.
“It was years later,” Davis wrote on Facebook, “that I figured out that David wasn’t hiring workers. He was hiring family members.
David Lerner sent financial support to an eclectic assortment of non-profits. He contributed to the Hebrew Free Loan Association and, it turns out The Forward. But his wife Lorren said his favorite charity was the Catholic Worker, which may seem an odd entity for a Jew to support.
But Lerner knew that the Catholic Worker fed, sheltered and clothed the poor less than a mile away from his West Village home.
A memorial for David Lerner will take place on Dec. 8 at Poster House, the museum that now occupies Tekserve’s home on West 23rd Street.
When a Jew like David Lerner leaves us, it is customary to say May his memory be a blessing.
The expression comes from the Book of Proverbs 10:7. Go look it up.
The post How a troublemaking private school dropout became the Johnny Appleseed of tech appeared first on The Forward.
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Pro-Israel Event Was Cancelled at Brooklyn Law School, While Palestinian ‘Celebration’ Was Allowed to Proceed
Brooklyn Law School. Photo: Wiki Commons.
The Jewish Law Students Association (JLSA) at Brooklyn Law School recently attempted to host an on-campus event featuring Hillel Fuld, an Israeli tech columnist, global speaker, and pro-Israel advocate.
Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) then sent a letter to the administration that also circulated around campus, accusing Fuld (and by extension JLSA) of such extreme Islamophobia that his mere presence would pose a threat to Muslim and Palestinian students. While a few other student groups endorsed SJP’s statement, these claims are categorically false. The administration effectively caved to the angry mob, and members of JSLA let them off the hook.
Ultimately we were forced to cancel the event in all but name, supposedly because the national accreditation committee was visiting the same day, and the school could not offer adequate safety resources or administrative support. Specifically, they explained that our event required administrators to be present to support sensitive students and make immediate decisions, but that none were available due to the accreditation committee.
The problem with this explanation is that no other group’s events were given the same treatment. What’s worse is that when SJP went ahead with their now celebratory “protest” — itself arguably a violation of the Time, Place and Manner school policies — not only did the school provide security, but multiple administrators showed up to monitor the situation. When I spoke with one of them, she rebuffed my concerns about Jewish students being afraid to be on campus due to this sort of behavior. So much for neutrality.
SJP boasted in an email to their list-serve that “this outcome is exactly the kind of awareness and action our coalition was created to achieve.”
There is a pervasive double standard at my school that has emboldened the local anti-Zionist ideological movement on campus. The latest incident involving the Jewish Law Students Association has shown that it doesn’t matter if pro-Israel Jewish students follow all the rules and SJP actively breaks them.The outcome is predetermined: SJP is supported, and we are marginalized and pushed off campus.
Before SJP hosted a vigil on October 7, 2025 that disregarded Hamas’ war crimes, JSLA requested to move it to another day so our community could mourn, but they refused and the school said nothing. Last April, they hosted a so-called “Passover Liberation Seder” on campus featuring a woman in a keffiyeh — an act of cultural appropriation mocking an important religious holiday to demonize Zionist Jews.
That same month, multiple bathrooms were vandalized with “Free Palestine” and nothing substantial seems to have been done about it.
If the school considered Hillel Fuld’s Tweets too controversial, there are dozens of National SJP tweets that fall into the same category. But that doesn’t matter to school administrators.
Unfortunately, this situation isn’t unique to Brooklyn Law School, and Jewish students across the country have responded in various ways. I believe that our community needs to fight this head on to ensure that antisemites like SJP are not permitted to discriminate with impunity, and to prevent incidents like this from becoming the status quo. But there are some who have chosen a more passive route. They believe that trusting the administration and taking a soft stance on SJP’s behavior will eventually ease the targets on our backs.
While I sympathize with that line of thinking, it is ultimately a mistake.
It is easy to believe that if you behave in a respectable manner, then people will respect you in return. As someone who believes in the inherent goodness of people, I would love to be able to assume that others would treat me fairly. Unfortunately, SJP will not stop antagonizing us, and we cannot expect the administration to stop them for us.
Thankfully, some members of JLSA agree with me. We have upcoming events and will continue hosting speakers. Each one of these will be a test for the administration to prove that they aren’t a bunch of cowards or low-key antisemites. We will not stay silent in the face of these inconsistent applications of policies and seemingly arbitrary constraints.
Instead of trying to personally reassure alumni that there isn’t a systemic antisemitism problem, maybe Brooklyn Law School should come out with a statement admonishing SJP for their behavior.
The discrimination Jewish students like me are facing will continue until the pressure to abandon it exceeds the pressure to maintain it. There’s a fundamental difference between imposing censorship and demanding equal treatment, which is exactly what I’m calling for. As it says in Pirkei Avot ,“If I am not for myself, who will be?”
Robert Dweck serves as Vice-President of the Jewish Law Students Association and the Federalist Society at Brooklyn Law School. A second-year law student and CAMERA Coalition member, his work focuses on antisemitism, campus climate, and freedom of expression.