ON JUNE 11th, Mohammad Kana’neh joined a few hundred protesters at a weekly demonstration against settlement expansion in Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood in East Jerusalem that has become a flashpoint for protests against Palestinian displacement. Kana’neh, a Palestinian citizen of Israel and prominent leader of the secular Arab nationalist Abnaa el-Balad movement, stood under the […]
Continue Reading
Responsa is an editorial column written by members of the Jewish Currents staff and reflects a collective discussion. This responsa appears in our Fall 2021 issue. Subscribe now to receive a copy in your mailbox. AMID THE LATEST CONFLAGRATION in Israel/Palestine, we heard frequently from liberal Zionist readers who were deeply troubled by our coverage. In a representative message, a leader in […]
Continue Reading
This review appears in our Fall 2021 issue. Subscribe now to receive a copy in your mailbox. Discussed in this essay: Out of Many, One: Portraits of America’s Immigrants, by George W. Bush. Crown, 2021. 208 pages. NOVEMBER 7th, 2020, was a day of public exuberance in the United States. Friends and family across the country exchanged videos of […]
Continue ReadingThis Saturday marks the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. The trauma of the event and its aftermath—for New York, the United States, and the world—remains largely unprocessed, which makes ongoing debates around memory and memorialization emotionally fraught. At Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan, the National September 11 Memorial & Museum occupies much of the […]
Continue ReadingTranslated from the Russian by Valzhyna Mort (English follows the Russian, below.) “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” philosopher Theodor Adorno famously wrote. To which poet Paul Celan (in Pierre Joris’s translation) retorted: “What concept of the ‘poem’ is being presented here? The arrogance of the one who dares hypothetically-speculatively to contemplate or poetically describe […]
Continue ReadingYesterday, Texas enacted its six-week abortion ban, Senate Bill 8 (SB8), effectively banning some 85% of abortions taking place in the state. Republican-controlled state legislatures have attempted to pass six-week abortion bans across the South and the Midwest for years, but all previous efforts were either vetoed by governors or struck down by the courts. […]
Continue Reading
HANNAH WILKE MADE HER FIRST VAGINAS in the early 1960s. They were small vulval shapes formed from clay or pliable kneaded erasers—sometimes bearing irreverent, punning titles (“Needed-Erase-Her”)—that Wilke described variously as “one-fold gestural sculptures” or “wounds.” She affixed the sculptures to postcards and other surfaces. In some cases, she arranged them according to the geometric […]
Continue ReadingRecently I spoke with David Renton, a British socialist and historian who is the author of the newly published book Labour’s Antisemitism Crisis: What the Left Got Wrong and How We Can Learn From It. We discussed the British Labour Party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, who was ousted last year following dismal election […]
Continue ReadingTHE RAPID FALL of Kabul to the Taliban earlier this week has been covered in the US media as a trauma for Americans, akin to the fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese in 1975. In this conventional telling, it is Americans who have fought and spent and sacrificed in Afghanistan for the past two […]
Continue ReadingOn Monday, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a horrifying report warning that human-caused carbon emissions are rapidly heating the planet and causing flooding, wildfires, droughts, and extreme weather events that threaten human civilization as we know it—and that much of the damage is already irreversible. While none of that is […]
Continue Reading
