Jewish Life/Jewish Currents

JEWISH LIFE/JEWISH CURRENTS. The oldest left-wing American Jewish magazine in English began publishing in 1946 as Jewish Life, a monthly launched by the Morgen Freiheit Association within the orbit of the US Communist Party (CPUSA). The magazine’s major editorial concerns in its first decade included opposition to McCarthyism and to the espionage prosecution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg; Black-Jewish solidarity in the anti-racist struggle; opposition to the rearming or reunification of Germany; opposition to the Cold War arms race; support for Israel’s founding (from a non-Zionist, diaspora-oriented perspective); memorialization of Jewish resistance against Nazism; and encouragement of Yiddish culture through English translation.

Jewish Life adhered to the positions of the CPUSA on Jewish and other issues. When Joseph Stalin suddenly shut down all Soviet Jewish social and cultural institutions between 1948 and 1952, the magazine explained that these events reflected a natural process of assimilation of Jews into the general Soviet population and should be seen as being a progressive development in the building of a new socialist society in the USSR. These and other apologetics served to isolate Jewish Life from the mainstream Jewish community in the United States, but the magazine was sustained by a readership that peaked at about 6,000, the majority Jewish communists and fellow travelers.

The magazine managed to survive, however, and began a slow evolution into a democratic-socialist, secular Jewish publication (renamed Jewish Currents for legal reasons in 1958). Morris U. Schappes became its full-time editor in 1958 and would remain at the helm until 2002. By 1967, its uneasy peace with the CPUSA ended when Jewish Currents editorially supported Israel’s Six-Day War, in direct opposition to the positions of the Soviet Union and the CPUSA.

In the 1960s-1980s, Jewish Currents was sustained largely by Jewish drop-outs from the CPUSA and other allies, a readership based in the World War II generation. Now critical of the repression of Jews and Jewish culture in the USSR, Jewish Currents remained a voice for US-Soviet détente and supported Israel’s Peace Now movement, Palestinian self-determination and statehood, and America’s civil rights movement. The magazine printed many historical articles (Schappes had become an accomplished historian of American Jewish history after being driven out of the English Department of the City College of New York and jailed for thirteen months by New York State’s Rapp-Coudert Commission, which ran a witch hunt against communists in New York’s educational system in the early 1940s). Jewish Currents also promoted an affirmative, non-religious approach to Jewish identity (featuring Max Rosenfeld’s column, “Our Secular Jewish History”) and gave visibility to Camp Kinderland, the Emma Lazarus Federation of Jewish Women’s Clubs, and other institutions of the formerly Communist Jewish world, which in turn provided the magazine with much of its readership and support.

Jewish Currents switched to a bimonthly format in the 1990s and declined in circulation to fewer than 2,500 readers. Although it paid some attention to the concerns of the baby-boom generation, it remained in the hands and hearts of that generation’s parents. In 2002, however, writer and editor Lawrence Bush, who had served as assistant editor to Morris U. Schappes from 1978 until 1983, took the helm of Jewish Currents and began building a new base of readers among the baby boomers.

The Workmen’s Circle became the publisher of Jewish Currents in 2005, which gave the magazine a chance to step out of the graveyard, suddenly quadruple its readership, and no longer rely on committed readers for its funding. The breathing space ended in early 2009, however, when the Workmen’s Circle was confronting bankruptcy (which it eventually averted). Jewish Currents returned to its status as an independent magazine, and editor Bush redesigned it, adding color, art and humor to its pages. Reduced to a quarterly publication schedule, the magazine also produced seasonal and topical supplements, posters, and art calendars, and gradually grew its website into a popular site featuring “Jewdayo,” a daily chronicle of progressive Jewish history that ran for nearly nine years. Bush worked as a staff of one, with a home office, an active editorial board, and a readership of 4,000. Between 2014 and 2020, Jewish Currents received major funding from The Puffin Foundation of Teaneck, New Jersey, which enabled Bush to move Jewish Currents beyond survival to innovation. Bush edited the magazine for sixteen years, retiring in 2018.

The magazine was taken on by a team of millennials headed by Publisher Jacob Plitman, a former union organizer, and Editor-in-Chief Arielle Angel. Jewish Currents and its website were redesigned, and a new era of outreach to readers was initiated, focusing especially on readers among the national resurgent progressive movement. Since then, Jewish Currents has found a broad audience online, publishing leading voices in the political and literary spheres. The weekly online edition featured timely reporting and analysis on Israel/Palestine in American politics, Jewish communal race relations, and trends and strategies in left movements, as well as reviews, conversations, poetry, translation, and other cultural work. Its print magazine came out quarterly, publishing three full issues a year along with a "winter gift"—typically an artwork, or a discrete literary volume. As of Fall 2020, the magazine had a print circulation of 8,000. It had greatly increased its national visibility as a unique voice for young, radical Jews, challenging communal orthodoxy around Zionism and the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and advancing racial and economic justice. As of 2020, its growing staff included Peter Beinart, a nationally admired writer who served as editor-at-large, and the writers and editors Nathan Goldman, Ari Brostoff, Joshua Leifer and Mari Cohen.

Jewish Currents Reader. New York: Jewish Currents, 1946.

“Jewish Life” Anthology, 1946-1956. New York: Jewish Life, 1946.

The Third Jewish Currents Reader. New York: Jewish Life, 1966.

Jewish Currents Website. https://jewishcurrents.org