Category: Local

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 […]