Author: David Rutman, Meghan Froy

Discussed in this essay: The Wondering Jew: Israel and the Search for Jewish Identity, by Micah Goodman, translated by Eylon Levy. Yale University Press, 2020. 264 pages. OVER THE LAST FIFTEEN YEARS, the Israeli center has drifted steadily closer to the Israeli right. But the partnership at the heart of Israel’s new government—between Yair Lapid, […]

I often look to poems for alternatives to the organized abandonments that structure this world. So when I first encountered Maryam Ivette Parhizkar’s “Inside the Dream of Another Country,” I assumed it would offer me a readymade otherwise. But the first line swiftly rebuked my facile utopian impulse. “Inside the dream of another country I […]

ON SUNDAY, June 13th, people occupied the intersection of Lake Street and Girard Avenue in Minneapolis to hold a vigil for well-known community organizer Winston Smith, killed by sheriff’s deputies ten days earlier. Shortly before midnight, a car drove into the crowd at high speed, injuring several and killing Deona Marie Knajdek Erickson. The National […]

This interview appears in our Spring 2021 issue. Subscribe now to receive a copy in your mailbox. If you’ve taken public transit in the United States, you may have seen the bumpy yellow tiles on a subway platform. When you’ve crossed at an intersection, you may have heard an automated voice saying, “Walk sign is on” as the light […]

Discussed in this essay: Voices in the Evening, by Natalia Ginzburg, translated by D.M. Low. New Directions, 2021. 144 pages. Family and Borghesia, by Natalia Ginzburg, translated by Beryl Stockman. NYRB Classics, 2021. 128 pages. THERE IS PERHAPS no greater archivist of the family lexicon than the Italian novelist Natalia Ginzburg. As she recounts in […]

This essay appears in our Spring 2021 issue. Subscribe now to receive a copy in your mailbox. Rose Riegelhaupt (1906–1984) grew up in the Jewish community of Poughkeepsie, New York. She wrote this memoir, which was recently discovered in an old box of her papers, sometime in the late 1970s.  IT WAS THE YEAR 1918. It was a year […]

The following letters were received regarding web content published in May, including the article “A Closer Look at the ‘Uptick’ in Antisemitism,” which analyzed antisemitism statistics provided by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and the audio conversation “Organizing Jews and How to Talk to Your Family,“ in which members of Jewish Currents staff debated the merits […]

This piece originally appeared in yesterday’s email newsletter, to which you can subscribe here. IN RECENT WEEKS, as Palestinians rose up in their homeland, in the wider Middle East, and around the world, you probably heard the slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” In cities across the globe, protesters responded to […]

For nearly two years in the mid-1920s, at a site on Greenwich Village’s MacDougal Street that is now a pizza joint favored by NYU students, Eve’s Hangout once stood. There, as Julie Scelfo writes in The Women Who Made New York, patrons “staked out a space for sexual free-thinking.” The eponymous proprietor had arrived in […]

Click here to read the rest of the Paul Celan folio. Introduced and translated from the German by Carlie Hoffman(English follows the German, below) Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger, a younger cousin of Paul Celan, was a Jewish, German-language poet and translator who died in a Nazi labor camp in 1942, at the age of 18. She left behind […]