The Angst and Sorrow of Jewish Currents

In June, the small left-wing magazine Jewish Currents summoned its donors and close confederates to a private event in a penthouse apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Kathleen Peratis, a stylish human-rights advocate who co-chairs the publication’s board, pressed refreshments on the guests with the warm, fluttering anxiety of a doting Jewish grandmother. This particular crowd, especially since October 7th, isn’t often the beneficiary of such Jewish hospitality, and a few attendees sparred amiably about who among them was the most despised within the broader community. The magazine’s most prominent contributor is Peter Beinart, an observant Jew whose public opposition to a Jewish state has rendered him a moral hero to some and a turncoat to others. A few years ago, Beinart recalled, he turned on his computer after Yom Kippur, a day on which observant Jews abstain from electronics, to find an e-mail calling him a self-hating Jew. He said, with boyish good cheer, “Imagine considering me such a bad Jew that you feel compelled to tell me in a way that desecrates the holiest day of the Jewish calendar.”

The featured guest was the Haaretz columnist and reporter Amira Hass, the rare Jewish Israeli journalist to live in the Palestinian territories—previously in Gaza and now in the West Bank. Hass spoke for almost two hours, and no one so much as glanced at a phone. Her mother, Hass recalled, had been shocked to read in one of Simone de Beauvoir’s memoirs a passage about a pleasant bike ride in the mountains during the Second World War—when Hass’s mother was in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. “I realized that it is possible to live well while a genocide is being committed,” Hass said. Since the Hamas attacks on October 7th and Israel’s retaliation, she had been “filled with the realization that now this was my people doing this. Now we’re the ones riding our bikes.”

Hass had been invited by Jewish Currents not to speak of solutions—for now, she said, any “solution” was fanciful—but to provide her American counterparts with a sober perspective on what could be done. She was aware of the mood among fellow “hard-core leftists,” and she warned them against certain tendencies—joining the “cult of armed struggle,” for example, which glorified violence as a form of resistance. But if they could keep their heads, she continued, they might exert meaningful pressure. She told them, “If Jewish communities in the diaspora care for the future and well-being of Jews in the land between the river and the sea, they should act against Israeli policies and its war of destruction in Gaza.”

Currents offers sanctuary and a place of instruction for a generation of Jews who love their parents but have split with them. This cohort was raised to admire Israel as a beacon of light unto the nations, but has only ever known the regime of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving Prime Minister, and the normalization of settler politics. In 2src21, a survey found that almost forty per cent of American Jews under the age of forty believe that Israel is an “apartheid state.” Polls taken since October 7th reflect a widening generational gyre: many older Jews have grown more intensely attached to Israel, but only about fifty per cent of those under thirty-five support military and financial aid to the country. In the past ten months, even without a paywall, Currents’ subscriber base has nearly doubled, though it’s still only about ten thousand—a circulation close to half that of the right-wing Jewish magazine Commentary, and in line with that of n+1. The magazine’s only authority derives from its commitment to substance and clarity, qualities that have attracted an ardent readership.

The animating spirit of the enterprise is its thirty-nine-year-old editor-in-chief, Arielle Angel. She is of Sephardic descent, with an olive complexion and almond eyes; she wears smart thrift-store clothes and radiates a prickly charisma. A few days after Hass’s talk, I accompanied Angel and her rescue Shih Tzu, Lola, on a walk in Prospect Park, where I watched the dog, in the family tradition, provoke larger animals. Angel had just returned from a series of meetings with Jews in Europe, many of whom regard Currents not just as a media property but as a model of a potential rival to the existing Jewish power structure. Angel often speaks in a prophetic register of fiery gloom; one former staffer matter-of-factly described her as akin to a “medieval mystic.” She told me that left-leaning Jews find the official Jewish world alien, and that “Currents is the thing people are holding on to. People want us to be their day school, synagogue, everything, and sometimes I think we should give up the magazine and just do something to meet those needs, because we have an audience that needs us.” She laughed. “I don’t know if they read us, but they need us.”

The magazine has published extensive reporting on Israeli evictions of Palestinians in the West Bank. Wikipedia editors recently demoted the Anti-Defamation League’s credibility as a source, citing Currents investigations. (The A.D.L. called the decision “deeply disturbing.”) Angel has contributed essays that examine, with rigorous ambivalence, the political and emotional questions that contemporary Jews can be reluctant to ask themselves. Beinart, one of the few Jews able to reach coreligionists who might not otherwise listen, has elaborated arguments for the transformation of Israel-Palestine into an equal binational state. Currents’ core contributors and advisers include many Palestinians. As the contributor Raphael Magarik told me, of the magazine’s ethos, “If it’s not a shared Jewish-Palestinian project, it’s bankrupt. ”

The magazine’s broader ambition, at what feels like an inflection point in American Jews’ relationship to Israel, is to remind readers that Jewish identity has always been in flux. Mainstream Jewish institutions, in the staff’s view, have supplanted an expansive tradition with a narrow ethnic tribalism: Jews can be atheists or Buddhists or connoisseurs of pepperoni pizza, but Israel’s status as a Jewish democracy remains sacred. Currents is an experiment in the cultivation of a Jewish public untethered from Zionism. Readers come for the anti-occupation politics, but they stay for the roundtable discussions of “texts” like “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and the regular consultations with traditional sources. What might we learn, for example, from the Jewish calendar’s cyclical notion of time?

After October 7th, the magazine found itself in an agonizing double bind. On October 13th, it ran a piece by the Israeli historian Raz Segal, who was already prepared to identify Israeli reprisals as a “genocide.” This past winter, Yehuda Kurtzer, an influential liberal Zionist, wrote, in the Forward, that Currents appeared to be “entirely disinterested in the claims of Jewish peoplehood and solidarity.” The editors are accustomed to such censure from Jews to their right but remain sensitive to Palestinian reproach. Amid the suffering in Gaza, the magazine hesitates to prioritize Jewish feelings. Still, this spring, Kaleem Hawa, who has written for Currents, criticized its disposition as narcissistic. The task at hand, he wrote, is not “a ‘redemption’ of Judaism, not the salvation of the Jewish kids spiritually disfigured by their parents—it is Palestinian freedom, which necessarily requires a militancy in withdrawing, confronting and creating contradictions within these institutions.” Daniel May, the magazine’s publisher, said, “No matter what we do, it’s a given that we’ll be called either Hamas supporters or Zionist apologists—and most likely both, simultaneously.”

Hass, in the end, gave in to a reluctant fatalism: Jewish-Palestinian solidarity might be too fragile to withstand the war. But even Jewish-Jewish coalitions have proved ungovernable. At times, the Currents masthead has seemed on the cusp of disintegration. Angel has fought to keep it intact. “It’s difficult, in the most intense moment of our lives, even to get people into the room for the conversation,” she said. She has led with her own vulnerability: “The period after October 7th was the most acute grief I’ve ever felt, before my father died. And my unequivocal orientation post-October 7th was that I had to keep everyone in.”

The Jewish literary critic Alfred Kazin once wrote, “The ‘people of the book’ are now the people of the magazine.” By the middle of the twentieth century, American Jews had developed an almost compulsive habit of starting periodicals. They were characteristically quarrelsome and delusionally self-confident, certain that their parochial disagreements would prove relevant to the wider culture. For early generations of Yiddish radicals, these arguments revolved around the Communist Party. In 1946, Party members founded Jewish Life, a journal that ritually commemorated the birthday of Stalin, ran ads for “holiday rates” at Catskills retreats, and included interminable essays denouncing the “Big Lie” that antisemitism existed in the Soviet Union. By the fifties, however, Stalin’s crimes could no longer be rationalized. The grand tradition of Jewish politics is patricide, the historian Yuri Slezkine has observed, and by then magazines such as Commentary and Dissent had been founded by a new generation eager to repudiate their parents. Jewish Life was rebranded as Jewish Currents, and it withdrew into shame and recrimination.

Some early issues of Currents are preserved at yivo, a Jewish cultural institute, which is bountifully staffed by archivists who help elderly Jews log in to genealogy Web sites. I recently visited with May, a former organizer and lapsed academic in his forties with an athletic build, horn-rimmed glasses, and a dry sense of humor. The contrast with Currents’ relative destitution was a little, to echo the title of the magazine’s podcast, on the nose. The archival parcels were yellowed and frail. We turned their pages with a slender “microspatula,” which resembled the silver yad, or hand, used to track one’s position while reading Torah. Our table was soon littered with paper fragments and dust.

After the magazine’s belated break with the Party, May said, its management had to wrestle with the fact that “the bedrock of American Jewish politics was an immoral regime.” Currents redirected its radicalism into civil rights, and paid homage to the old Yiddishkeit with schmaltzy nostalgia. As Mitchell Abidor, a longtime contributor, told me, “Every June there was an article about the Rosenbergs, every April one about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.” Enthusiasm for Israel generally focussed on the country’s early socialist ethos. “I was a Zionist for twenty minutes in 1974,” Abidor said. “I went over to the Jewish Agency and said, ‘Send me to the most left-wing kibbutz you got,’ which was the one that Chomsky went to.”

In 2src17, a labor organizer named Jacob Plitman was walking a picket line in Manhattan when a friend told him that he’d been paid five hundred bucks to recruit Jewish millennials for an unspecified event with free beer. Plitman told me, “I went up to the old garment district in my filthy suit to meet Larry Bush, who told us this very crazy story about a magazine I’d never heard of.” Bush, a writer and a former puppeteer, had long been Jewish Currents’ steward, and didn’t want it to die with him. Plitman said, “It was, like, ‘Here’s this thing I love that’s like my house. You wanna come live here?’ ” Plitman wrote a “ludicrous” seven-page application about how the energy bottled up in his group chats required “a place to think.” Bush threw him the keys to the magazine. Plitman soon stumbled on a digressive essay about hallucinogens, Torah, and the sublime, written by Arielle Angel.

Angel had grown up in a liberal home in the conservative and fervently Zionist Jewish environment of Miami. Her mother was a judge and, later, a prominent reproductive-rights activist, and her father was a serial entrepreneur who struggled to reckon with the darkness of his childhood. His parents came from Salonika, Greece, where ninety per cent of the Jewish population was deported and exterminated. Angel’s grandparents survived, but they both lost virtually their entire families. They rarely spoke about it, and Angel’s father never questioned them. At one point, he asked Angel, “Do you really think the Holocaust affected me?” She told me, “To have had his childhood and ask that question is insane,” adding, “I spent my whole life microdosing this enormous loss, this entire thing taken from me—history, culture, stability—that destroyed my family.” She daydreamed about killing Nazis: “My childhood was so deep in fear. I was afraid of gas chambers everywhere, I couldn’t get into an elevator, I had night terrors, I used to pull out my hair.”