A friend of mine once asked me why I get so worked up about Jewish Currents, a left-wing American magazine known for airing anti-Zionist views. Of all the actors large and small that help shape the narrative about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, why care about a magazine based in Long Island with a few thousand subscribers?
“Because it belongs to us historically,” I said. “It’s one of our own!”
My friend was confused. Why did an Iranian of Muslim background who had moved to the US in his late twenties identify with a small Jewish publication?
My friend had assumed, as our identity-addled-age dictated he ought, that I was talking about an ethno-cultural “us.” No, I told him, I am not secretly Jewish. The community to which I alluded and with which I deeply identify is global socialism – an ideology, a worldview.
Jewish Currents’ first life began in November of 1946, at which time it appeared under the name Jewish Life and was founded and run by affiliates of the Communist Party of the United States. In November 1956, the world communist movement got shaken from head to toe when the Soviet Union outrageously invaded communist Hungary to overthrow the reformist government of Imre Nagy and defeat the country’s anti-Stalinist revolutionaries. That paroxysm was the last in a year-long series for the movement, the first of which began in February when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced his predecessor, Joseph Stalin, as a criminal. Thousands of communists left their parties that year and Jewish Life was among the exiles. After the rupture the magazine broke with the party’s Moscow-aligned leadership and changed its name to Jewish Currents. It identified with a liberal faction in CPUSA led by John Gates (Né Solomon Regenstreif, born to Polish-Jewish parents in New York City, long before he Anglicized his name.) For decades, the magazine was edited by a legendary communist of the same political orientation, Morris Schappes (Né Moise ben Haim Shapshilevich.)
I care about Jewish Currents because it is born from that storied movement begun in 1956 and led by the likes of Nagy, Gates and Schappes, which was dedicated to the essential and important project of democratizing communism. Whatever its negligible contemporary readership and intellectual heft, its origins are lofty and demand respect. My friend was right of course that the magazine was helmed and in some part dedicated to a particular ethno-cultural community, i.e. that of American Jews. But it also belonged to a particular global ideological community with which I did and do identify. And so when I got word in 2018, shortly after I arrived in New York, that its pages had been resuscitated I was enthusiastic and eager.
Alas, it rapidly became clear that the current iteration of the publication is betraying the tradition from which it had emanated in two distinct but related ways.
First: Perhaps the most important intellectual contribution made by the communist movement was its relentless attempt to cut across lines of ethnic and national enmity in order to advance proletarian solidarity. The basic philosophical atom of global communism is the assertion that all working people of all countries have common interests and so owe one another and themselves primary loyalty – hence the slogan: Workers of all countries unite!. Even during vicious national conflicts, members labored to avoid stoking nationalist hate. Legend has it that just before particularly committed French communists were executed by Nazi occupiers they shouted: Long Live the German Communist Party! affirming with their last breaths that they bore no ill will to the German nation, even while falling victim to its dark regime.
Don’t misunderstand me: the communist movement did not model perfect fealty to this ideal. The litany of crimes committed by Stalin’s Soviet Union include targeted killings of Ukrainians, Poles and, in the last years of his rule, Jews. Even after Stalin was gone, antisemitism would surface again in the movement and certainly in the USSR itself. Like everything else in communist history, the heroic and the criminal tango messily. Nevertheless, and especially in the context of Middle Eastern politics, communism strained to honor the “fraternity of peoples.” It was for this reason that the communist parties of the Arab world resisted the antisemitism rife in their societies, nor did they hector for the destruction of Israel. In fact, they often were at the forefront of the frail movement for Arab-Israeli reconciliation and friendship. In the early 1950s, the Tudeh Party of Iran called on Tehran to establish diplomatic ties with Israel and the Iraqi Communist Party advocated for “Arab-Israeli Friendship” in its agitations. Even after 1967, when the Soviet Union cut diplomatic ties with Israel following Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories, the communist parties agitated for a negotiated peace between Israel and the Palestinians. The communist logic was basic: Israeli Jews had the right to self-determination like all other national communities. And if workers of all countries are to unite, Israel was no exception.
Jewish Currents see things differently. A cursory scroll through its young digi-life makes plain that it has abandoned this internationalist legacy in favor of rank, juvenile hostility to Israeli society as a whole. It is quite clear that the magazine’s writers consider the very existence of the Israeli state an “ethnonationalist” sin in direct violation of the old Marxist axiom that all nations have a right to self-determination (which provides for the right of ethno-national communities to form their own state – Jews, like Palestinians, have this right.) And because, according to their anti-Marxist conception, Israel has no right to exist, the Israeli left – which implies that Israel should exist through its commitment to lambasting Israeli crimes and policies – is a priori guilty. Thus, the magazine dedicates sustained effort to dismissing the Israeli protest movements and the Israeli left.
In 2023, as hundreds of thousands of Israelis came out week after week to protest Netanyahu and his attacks on Israeli democracy, the magazine’s editor at large, Peter Beinart, denounced them as offering nothing but “a polite brand of ethnonationalism.” This stood in large contrast to the attitude of Ayman Odeh, the Palestinian citizen of Israel who heads the largest coalition of Arab parties in Israel, who heartily supported the movement. Odeh’s coalition, of course, is supported by the Communist Party of Israel which has held on to the very Marxist internationalism abandoned by Jewish Currents.
The most inflamed, revolting manifestation of this ideology was on full display in the direct aftermath of October 7th of 2023. Like all decent people who were unlucky enough to take note of it, I was outraged by the magazine’s refusal to condemn Hamas’s attacks. The publication’s editor, Arielle Angel, explained this decision in a recent piece published in the New Yorker. She was explicit: her magazine is not interested in mobilizing people or working out practical political responses. What Jewish Currents aims to do is provide space for self-expression of the magazine’s writers, among them a Palestinian Jewish editor who, on the morning of attacks, tweeted: ““I could not be more proud of my people.” The tweet naturally shocked not only many of its readers but even some of its editors. Joshua Leifer, who had previously used the magazine to lambast the anti-Netanyahu movement, departed from the masthead.
Long before these events, the magazine had attempted to account for the jettisoning of its own history. In May 2021, I was saddened to see Dorothy M. Zellner, something of a legendary New York leftist of the old era, write for the magazine to account for what she considered to be the Jewish Life’s mistaken position in 1948, due to its support, alongside the world communist movement, for the foundation of the State of Israel.
“Historians do not say “what if?” but luckily I am not a historian,” Zellner wrote. “So I can wonder what might have happened had the USSR stayed true to its original support for a single state.”
Among the oversights in the article was Zellner’s failure to consider why the USSR, in 1947, gave up on its decades-long opposition to partition of the historic Palestine. The historical record shows that Moscow did so for the same reason that other binationalists, including Zionist groups such as Hashomer Hatzair, had done so around the same time: they came to the conclusion that there was no constituency for this solution and that given the bad blood between the two communities, separation had become inevitable. The USSR wasn’t alone in this. Communist parties around the world came to the same begrudging support for partition. Unlike Zellner, and her young editors, the communist parties knew enough about the conditions on the ground and were committed enough to actually affecting policy outcomes, that they could tailor their proposals to meet the needs. In contrast, one often has the feeling while reading Jewish Currents, that intimate knowledge of how Israelis and Palestinians actually live is not of primary concern to the people putting out the magazine. Between the Hudson and the Atlantic lies Brooklyn – from the river to the sea solipsism is an editorial philosophy.
The folks at Jewish Currents seem to have skipped the crash course on communist history that the ghosts who founded their magazine surely would have insisted upon before launch. Had they sat through it, they too would have been horrified by Beinart’s bizarre, infamous declaration, penned in 2020, that since the “two-state solution [was] dead,” Israel/Palestine must now be turned into “a binational state” modeled after Belgium and Northern Ireland. As Israeli columnist Anshel Pfeffer put it in response: “I’d love to live in Beinart’s peaceful hyphenated state of ‘Israel-Palestine.’ But I can’t vote for it. No one actually living here is proposing it. And that’s exactly where his thesis unravels.” Strange, isn’t it, how knowing about the place about which you insist on pontificating can affect the content of your thought?
I was initially baffled that someone serious like Beinart would propose this as a political program. Soon after, I realized that I was making a category mistake. Alongside much else the magazine publishes, Beinart’s article shouldn’t be understood as politics as such. Increasingly on the American Left political discourse has been replaced with pseudo-politics or even anti-politics. This explains the preening title of Beinart’s forthcoming book: Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza. Like his colleagues, he doesn’t want to change the world, he simply wants to feel deeply and publicly. Which brings me to the second way in which this magazine is eschewing the tradition of its political ancestors.
The end of politics is to elicit material change. This requires wielding power. Wielding power cannot be done without developing a base within a community. This was the very reason the old communist had launched Jewish Life in the first place. They wanted to mobilize their Jewish neighbors. Building power within the American Jewish community could indeed be an important part of any attempt to bring about peace and justice in the Middle East. As historian Geoffrey Levin has shown in his recent Our Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948-1978, such attempts had been more important than is often recognized.
The Old Left’s modus operandi was to achieve material change via community engagement, organizing, and political agitation. Karl Marx once quipped that communists must be “Fortier in re, suaviter in modo” (Bold in content, Mild in manner.) The best of the Old Left operated on this principle. Old leftists weren’t trying to be the most radical person in every room – radicalism wins popularity contests not political elections. Thus, they took on issues that could animate their base and offered workable solutions in a manner that could appeal to the ordinary people. They wanted to help people, not make headlines.
This also explains the strange posture of the magazine toward Israeli society. If one engages in politics, one must cultivate a constituency. But the project of many American Jewish Anti-Zionists is not to build a constituency in Israel but to distinguish themselves from Israeli society all together. They write for the slim number of American Jewish leftists who are ashamed of their association with fellow Jews in Israel.
Well, so what? Why not use an organ to emote? It’s been done before. It’s done all the time, actually. And who am I to tell this community of Jewish writers that their feelings don’t matter? Sometimes their feelings even elicit good writing which is why I still read it.
But even so, using the horrors and heartbreaks of other people as accouterments in your own political identity is a debased exercise. And people who spend their days writing about Gaza and the West Bank and all that lies between should care more about how the people over there actually live. And this is even more true when the pontificators in question have even a modicum of social and cultural capital. If the New Yorker has deemed you significant enough for a twenty page spread at the top of its Table of Contents, maybe some of that space should be spent advocating for political outcomes for people who desperately need them.
The destruction of Gaza demands a political response, not a therapeutic one. Alas, a magazine that could have been an incubator for much political promise is bold in manner but extremely mild in content.
