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 […]
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NEW YORK (JTA) — Like many New Yorkers, Dara Horn remembers the weeks after Sept. 11, 2001, unfolding like a surreal nightmare. Sitting in her Manhattan apartment, watching the second tower go up in smoke on live TV. Walking down streets plastered with posters bearing the faces of missing people. Crying every day for six […]
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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 […]
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(JTA) — The Atlanta Jewish Times has removed an op-ed by a former Georgia state legislator who has associated with figures on the far right. The piece by Vernon Jones was titled “How one Jewish family shaped my views: Vernon Jones recalls the family that inspired him to speak up for Jewish Americans.” It was […]
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(JTA) — Any rabbi seeking to connect his or her High Holiday sermons to current events has plenty to draw from this year. There’s the global public health crisis that has claimed more than 4 million lives. There’s the recent conflict in Israel and Gaza. There’s the cloud of climate change and its accelerating impacts […]
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(JTA) — Eleven years ago, the Anti-Defamation League surprised many by opposing an Islamic center planned for Lower Manhattan, blocks from the World Trade Center site the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, even as its leader denounced anti-Muslim bigotry. Now, the ADL’s CEO says the position, taken four years before he joined the civil rights organization, […]
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(JTA) — Meryl Jaffe says she’s like any Jewish parent keeping track of her kids on social media, except it can be terrifying. When she heard President Joe Biden deployed 3,000 Marines to Afghanistan, she had a gut feeling that her son Matt — she calls him Matthew — was among them. Her family was […]
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. […]
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