Author: David Rutman, Meghan Froy

As climate change-induced flooding and wildfires wreak havoc across the globe, and the Delta variant brings us into another perilous phase of the pandemic, the Jewish Currents staff is thinking about political depression—and how to cope with it. What does it mean to bring political feelings into therapy? Editor-in-chief Arielle Angel, publisher Jacob Plitman, culture […]

On Tuesday, Ohio’s heavily Democratic 11th Congressional District, which includes much of metropolitan Cleveland and Akron, held a special primary election to determine the likely successor to retiring Rep. Marcia Fudge. The more centrist, establishment-backed candidate, Cuyahoga County Council Member Shontel Brown, defeated former State Senator Nina Turner—a champion of Medicare For All, a critic […]

I’m often skeptical of how etymologies appear in poems. All the ways of knowing and being with language not privileged in official historical records—vernaculars, slangs, the riffs and revisions intimacies encourage—are cast aside as the poet unveils an etymology with the self-satisfied flourish of exposing a latent Truth. But when I encountered Maya C. Popa’s […]

Adam Serwer, a staff writer at The Atlantic, is one of the most astute observers of the tide of nativism and hatred that powered Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency. (He’s also a fellow product of Temple Sinai in Northwest Washington, DC, which my parents still attend, and a mensch.) His essays dismantle the argument that economic anxiety […]

A few years ago, I watched the writer Menachem Kaiser deliver a presentation on Holocaust writing as a genre at a retreat for grandchildren of Holocaust survivors—often called “3Gs”—planned by Jewish Currents Contributing Editor Maia Ipp. Kaiser, who had just begun working on a memoir about his attempt to reclaim a building in Poland that […]

It’s been a rough few weeks for the “pro-Israel” establishment, from a pitiful showing at the “No Fear” rally against antisemitism (whose “big tent” excluded non-Zionists), to the release of a Jewish Electorate Institute survey of American Jewish voters showing surprisingly prevelant left-wing attitudes about Israel, to last week’s announcement that Ben & Jerry’s will […]

LAST WEEK, a joint investigation by 17 media outlets—including The Washington Post, The Guardian, and Haaretz—revealed that Israeli intelligence firm NSO Group had licensed military-grade spyware known as Pegasus to a long list of authoritarian regimes. The report drew on a leaked list of more than 50,000 phone numbers; a close forensic analysis of some […]

When Ben & Jerry’s announced on Monday that it will no longer sell its ice cream in the occupied Palestinian territories, Israel’s defenders immediately jumped into action. Some 35 US states have laws on the books that prohibit their governments from doing business with companies that boycott Israel, and Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid took […]

IN 2012, when a joint alumni group for the Jewish social justice organizations Avodah and American Jewish World Service announced it would hold a service trip to Israel without bringing participants to the Palestinian territories, the move caused a furor in the Avodah network. One hundred program participants and alumni signed a petition criticizing the […]

IN JUNE, three Republicans in the House of Representatives—Michael Waltz, Jim Banks and Claudia Tenney—introduced a resolution censuring Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Presley, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for, among other things, “inciting anti-Semitic attacks across the United States.” House Democrats accused their colleagues of Jew-hatred as well, just less explicitly. Rep. Ted Deutch did not […]