Professor and literary critic Josh Lambert serves as a judge for two major prizes for American Jewish literature, meaning he reads as many new American novels by and about Jews as possible each year. In this annual column for Jewish Currents, he reflects on some of the previous year’s most compelling works of fiction that […]
Continue ReadingThe recent Jewish Currents staff roundtable on “intermarriage,” “Jewish continuity,” and the fraught institutional discourse on these topics occasioned a wide variety of responses, including the question: How might the conversation look different if it included non-Jewish partners of Jews? So we decided to find out! In the second episode of our new podcast, On […]
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Translated from the Hebrew by Yaron Kaver This short story appears in our Spring 2021 issue. Subscribe now to receive a copy in your mailbox. LATE LAST NIGHT, a bird ate Mom’s pansies. I was sitting on the sweltering radiator by the window, trying to count fifty passing cabs. Maybe I’d see Marco’s car, back from his trip. Sometimes […]
Continue ReadingTranslated from the Arabic by Sinan Antoon(English follows the Arabic, below.) Some violences are regenerative: a sprout pressing up through the dirt, a colonized people overthrowing a colonizing regime, farmers burning the straw from fields so plants might grow again. Other violences—prisons, detention centers, and other contrivances of human cruelty—constrict futures. One of global capitalism’s […]
Continue ReadingI’ve been following di rozeve pave (Yiddish for Pink Peacock), a queer, Yiddish, anarchist space in the Govanhill neighborhood in Glasgow, Scotland, with fascination and delight since they opened their social media accounts in the summer of 2019. As they’ve been preparing to open their pay-what-you-can café, they’ve also built a vibrant online community where […]
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This artist feature appears in our Spring 2021 issue. Subscribe now to receive a copy in your mailbox. IN THE BOTTOM LINE, textile artist Rachel Breen attached thin strips of blue and gray cloth to a wall, staggered as if describing to a curve on a graph, the movement of the line evoking a stock market chart. Breen says […]
Continue ReadingIt’s almost midnight. I continue to toss and turn on my thin prison pad of a bed, exhausted from smoldering for days in extreme heat with no reprieve. My little 12-inch fan is working overtime to bring relief. Many other prisoners’ fans have already burnt out; I pray mine doesn’t. The tier is quiet. There’s […]
Continue ReadingLAST OCTOBER, the expert panel appointed to write Florida’s Holocaust education standards—a group composed of scholars and Jewish communal leaders—received feedback on a draft of the standards from the Florida Department of Education (FLDOE) provided by the right-wing Christian Zionist organization Proclaiming Justice to the Nations (PJTN). The group had inserted lessons that defined Jewishness […]
Continue ReadingFor the past several decades, mainstream Jewish institutions have obsessively studied and worried over Jewish marriage patterns, which have gradually tilted away from favoring in-group relationships. The latest large-scale findings, from a 2020 Pew study, were released last month. Unsurprisingly, they showed that the trend toward “intermarriage” has continued: 61% of American Jews who tied […]
Continue ReadingWelcome to the first official episode of the Jewish Currents podcast, On the Nose. After a brief conversation about the show’s title, editor-in-chief Arielle Angel, publisher Jacob Plitman, managing editor Nathan Goldman, and assistant editor Mari Cohen discuss the Anti-Defamation League’s recent survey of American Jews about their perceptions and understanding of antisemitism, in the […]
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