Jewish Currents

Jewish Currents combines political reporting and commentary with cultural criticism, fiction, and poetry.[5] Its stated coverage includes antisemitism and its political uses, Jewish communal organizations, Israel and Palestine, race and racialization, American left-wing movements, the far right, diasporic culture, labor, climate, incarceration, immigration, and feminism.[1] The publication operates as a nonprofit news organization and maintains both a print quarterly and a daily online publishing program.[1][6]

The magazine’s political identity has changed substantially since its communist beginnings.[2] Its early concerns included opposition to McCarthyism, Yiddish culture, Black–Jewish solidarity, and support for Israel’s founding from a non-Zionist, diaspora-oriented perspective.[2] By the period preceding its 2018 relaunch, its historical position on Israel was described as non-Zionist: supportive of Israel’s right to exist and defend itself while emphasizing Jewish social activism in the diaspora.[3] Later coverage and editorial interventions placed greater emphasis on criticism of Israeli policies and on debates involving anti-Zionism within American Jewish life.[7][4]

In 2023, editor-in-chief Arielle Angel characterized the magazine as firmly left-wing and “multi-tendency,” without candidate endorsements or alignment with a political party.[8] She connected that refusal to follow a party line to its institutional history, while identifying economic and racial justice as enduring elements of its political inheritance.[8]

Jewish Life began its postwar publication in November 1946 under the Morgen Freiheit Association, within the orbit of the Communist Party USA.[2] Louis Harap and Morris U. Schappes were its founding editors.[9] An earlier English-language monthly called Jewish Life had begun in August 1937 under the Jewish Bureau of the New York State Communist Party; the historical account linking it to Jewish Currents identifies Paul Novick as a founding editor and describes the publication’s re-emergence in November 1946.[10] Novick’s newspaper career had included work in Kiev, Minsk, Vilnius, and Warsaw after the March 1917 Russian Revolution, before his return to New York in 1920.[10]

The November 1946 first issue included contributions from Arthur Miller, Marc Chagall, and Ben Shahn.[11] The editors envisioned a Jewish cultural center on the left, linking Jewish concerns with labor and struggles against racial oppression.[11][12] Their founding statement pledged to strengthen ties between Jews, Black Americans, workers, and other oppressed groups in a common struggle against antisemitism, discrimination, lynching, and Jim Crow.[12] Opposition to McCarthyism and attention to Yiddish culture were also prominent in the magazine’s first decade.[2]

Initially, Jewish Life advocated a single democratic state in Palestine with equal rights for Jews and Arabs.[11] Its position shifted following the Soviet Union’s 1947 support for partition and Israel’s establishment in 1948.[11] The January 1948 cover urged readers to “Safeguard the Jewish State!”[11] Support for Israel’s founding subsequently formed part of the magazine’s non-Zionist, diaspora-oriented politics.[2]

The magazine experienced a severe crisis in 1956 after the exposure of Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech denouncing Stalin’s crimes.[2] The resulting collapse of the Communist Party USA sharply reduced its readership.[2] Angel’s 2023 account dates the formal break with the party and the name change to 1956, while the magazine’s official history says the crisis began that year, followed by a gradual evolution into a democratic socialist, secular Jewish publication, and dates the renaming to 1958.[8][2] Angel summarized the transformation as becoming “a magazine for a community, not a party.”[8]

Schappes edited and maintained the renamed magazine from 1958 to 2000.[9] During his editorship it moved toward independent political positions, supporting Israel in the Six-Day War, opposing the antisemitic campaign in Poland, and opposing the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.[9] Its developing outlook also included criticism of repression against Jews and Jewish culture in the Soviet Union, support for US–Soviet détente, Palestinian self-determination and statehood, and the American civil rights movement.[2] Its broader historical orientation was socialist, pro-Israel, and non-Zionist, with literature and political and social commentary central to its work.[13]

Lawrence Bush succeeded Schappes in the magazine’s editorial leadership and remained editor-in-chief during the 2018 transition.[3] His tenure brought greater attention to arts and culture and a more playful, informal tone.[8] In the mid-2000s, the Workmen’s Circle briefly became the magazine’s publisher, bringing together organizations that had previously been adversaries within the Jewish left.[2][3]

Bush sought to retire in 2017, and Jacob Plitman recruited a younger editorial team for the following year’s relaunch.[8] The 2018 team included Plitman, Arielle Angel as literary editor, Maia Ipp overseeing public programs, and Noah Kulwin as news and features editor.[3] The relaunch redesigned the print magazine and website and sought a younger, left-wing, secular readership.[3] Reader contributions and the New Jersey-based Puffin Foundation financed the expansion.[3]

By January 2020, subscriptions had increased from fewer than 2,000 before the relaunch to more than 6,000, with an annual subscription then costing $30.[5] That month the magazine announced five new writers: Peter Beinart as editor at large, Mari Cohen and Joshua Leifer as staff writers, and Lara Friedman and Elisheva Goldberg as contributing writers.[5] In 2023, Angel described the publication as having quadrupled in size “by every metric” since the relaunch.[8]

A June 15, 2026, Berman Archive item reported Angel’s departure as editor-in-chief after eight years, accompanied by a personal essay reflecting on the Jewish left and anti-Zionist organizing after October 7.[14] The item did not identify her successor.[14] As of November 3, 2026, the magazine’s masthead listed Lizzy Ratner as executive editor, Angel as editor-at-large, and Daniel May as publisher; Hebrew Union College’s directory likewise identified May as publisher.[1][15]

Jewish Currents publishes reporting on Israeli policies and civil rights alongside cultural commentary, fiction, and poetry.[5] Its print and online formats place Jewish communal affairs within a wider field of American politics and left-wing social concerns.[1] In describing the 2018 relaunch, Plitman presented the magazine as a place where a fragmented Jewish left could speak with and among itself.[3]

The magazine’s approach to Israel and Palestine emphasizes the consequences of those politics for American Jewish life and American politics.[8] Its coverage extends to education, lobbying, relations with the United States government, and connections between Jewish communities and other groups.[8] In 2018, its contributors and readers held differing positions on Israel but shared concern about conditions in Israel and Palestine, alongside inequality, racism, and police violence in the United States.[3]

The 2020 expansion sought to include voices sometimes positioned beyond established communal “red lines.”[5] Beinart viewed the publication as an organic creation of progressive young American Jews with the potential to change American Jewish discourse.[5] Other editorial personnel brought experience from related publications and organizations: Joshua Leifer had previously worked as an associate editor at Dissent and at +972 Magazine.[16] Before helping relaunch Jewish Currents, Plitman had been deputy director of J Street U, organized with refugees in Greece, and worked with undocumented students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.[17]

Jewish Currents is organized as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.[6] Its published editorial-independence policy reserves authority over content to the organization and establishes a firewall between editorial decisions and revenue.[6] It follows editorial-independence standards adopted by the Institute for Nonprofit News and publishes information about revenue sources and donors contributing at least $5,000 annually.[6] Reader donations and the Puffin Foundation grant were important to the post-2018 expansion; Plitman described the foundation’s support as its financial bedrock.[5]

W. E. B. Du Bois’s “The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto,” published in the May 1952 issue of Jewish Life, exemplified the magazine’s engagement with solidarity across racial and religious struggles.[8] The essay drew on his travels in Europe and reflections on the Holocaust and Nazi violence.[8]

A 2018 account in the Jewish Review of Books traces the essay to several years of editorial outreach: managing editor Samuel Barron invited Du Bois to write about antisemitism and anti-Black racism in November 1947, and Harap renewed the invitation in 1949, but both invitations were declined.[18] The account recounts that Du Bois accepted a February 1952 invitation to address a Manhattan commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, with his remarks subsequently appearing in the magazine.[18]

That account interprets the essay as both personal testimony and a history lesson, quoting Du Bois’s reflection that the Warsaw Ghetto had moved him “from a certain social provincialism into a broader conception” of struggles against racial segregation, religious discrimination, and oppression by wealth.[18] It also describes continued correspondence, invitations to subsequent events, and a telegram from the magazine on his 85th birthday.[18]

The magazine’s Soviet Jewry coverage offered another expression of its distinctive politics.[8] Its editors supported Jews’ ability to maintain cultural and religious life while treating their situation as part of a wider human-rights struggle affecting people throughout the Soviet Union.[8] They were skeptical of the Soviet Jewry movement’s Cold War politics and implicit Zionism and sought improved conditions that would allow Jews to remain in the USSR.[8]

In 2019, Jewish Currents published Bernie Sanders’s essay “How to Fight Antisemitism,” addressing Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and the influence of his Jewish identity on his politics.[19] Sanders argued that some criticism of Israel could cross into antisemitism, while recognizing Palestinian suffering did not delegitimize Israel.[19] Peter Beinart’s July 2020 essay “Yavne: A Jewish Case for Equality in Israel-Palestine” presented his loss of confidence in a two-state solution and advocacy of a binational Israel-Palestine with equal rights.[20] His article “Could Israel Carry Out Another Nakba?” also appeared on an April 2023 contemporary reading list.[21]

The publication’s renewed reach was closely associated with younger readers of the Jewish left.[3][4] In a 2020 interview, Angel framed its mission as reconnecting with Jewish left-wing traditions that had become less prominent amid changes in American Jewish economic and communal life.[20] A 2026 Jewish Review of Books commentary characterized it as “the flagship periodical of the young anti-Zionist left.”[22]

In December 2021, Jewish Currents apologized for publishing an advertisement for the Dorot Fellowship, a ten-month leadership program in Israel for American Jews.[7] It said the advertisement had been accepted “without proper vetting,” promised to return the payment, and announced a review and publication of advertising guidelines.[7] The magazine considered the advertisement inconsistent with its commitment to reporting on and opposing Israeli human-rights abuses.[7] The apology drew criticism from opposing directions: some left-wing commenters portrayed the advertisement as evidence of concealed Zionist sympathies, while pro-Israel figures mocked the apology.[7]

The magazine’s positions have included support for Palestinian right of return and boycotts of businesses in the West Bank — known by its original, indigenous Jewish name of Judea and Samaria.[7] Its narrative cartoon “When Settler Becomes Native” drew objections in a JIMENA-hosted opinion article, whose author criticized its treatment of Jewish indigeneity and self-determination.[23] These objections represent the opinion author’s assessment of the cartoon.[23]

Its reporting has also participated in debate over the boundary between antisemitism and criticism of Israel.[24] Mari Cohen questioned whether some statements and signs at pro-Palestinian demonstrations included in the Anti-Defamation League’s account of rising antisemitism instead represented criticism of Israel and its policies.[24] Beinart’s 2020 binational-state essay likewise attracted criticism from both the left and the mainstream Jewish community.[20]