Jewish Currents

About Jewish Currents

Jewish Currents is an American progressive Jewish quarterly magazine and news site whose content reflects the politics of the Jewish left. Founded in 1946, it is one of the oldest continuously published Jewish-left publications in the United States, and its eight-decade history traces the arc of twentieth- and twenty-first-century radical Jewish life: from its origins as a Communist Party-aligned magazine through a formal break with the party in 1956, to its reinvention in 2018 as a home for a new generation of millennial Jewish radicals. Published by the Association for Promotion of Jewish Secularism and based in New York, it appears in print quarterly while its website publishes news, analysis and commentary daily. The magazine's website is jewishcurrents.org.

Founding as Jewish Life

Jewish Currents began its life in November 1946 under the name Jewish Life. It was founded by the writers Louis Harap and Morris Schappes and first published by the Morning Freiheit Association, and it was associated with the Communist Party USA, covering issues concerning Jews and Israel from a communist perspective. According to the New York Times, the magazine was an organ of the Communist Party, its editorial stance aligned with the Soviet Union; in its early years it strongly denied the existence of antisemitism in the Soviet Union. It was, in other words, a magazine of the Jewish communist movement at a moment when that movement still commanded a substantial organized following in the United States.

The magazine's early identity placed it in open conflict with other institutions of the Jewish left. As a communist publication, it clashed with the socialist Workmen's Circle, the fraternal and cultural organization that represented a different, democratic-socialist tradition of secular Jewish life. Harap served as the magazine's managing editor from 1948 to 1957, presiding over a publication that insisted on the party line even as that line grew harder to defend. The tensions of the early Cold War years, including McCarthyist repression of communists in the United States, weighed heavily on the magazine and its readership.

The 1956 Break and a New Name

The year 1956 broke the magazine's world in two. When new information surfaced about the 1952 execution of fourteen Soviet Jews, Jewish Life published the revelations and lost three-quarters of its subscribers. Editor Carol Jochnowitz later said the reason for the decline was that subscribers believed the magazine had Jewish blood on its hands. In the same year, Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech acknowledging Stalin's crimes forced a reckoning across the communist movement, and the magazine formally broke with the Communist Party USA. Harap renamed the publication Jewish Currents and promised it would be more critical of the Soviet Union and of Soviet antisemitism.

The magazine also began to identify with the liberal faction of the Communist Party led by John Gates, and it redefined itself as a magazine for a community, not a party. Its politics remained progressive but lost the party affiliation as the editorial staff undertook a searching reconsideration of the years in which they had followed the party line. In 1967 it broke all remaining ties to the Soviet Union, supporting Israel in the Six-Day War, and it abandoned its communist editorial position entirely, becoming a publication for the broader Jewish left. The years that followed saw it focus on promoting civil rights and Yiddishkeit, the culture of secular Jewish life.

The Long Schappes Era

Morris Schappes, one of the magazine's two founders, became its defining editorial figure, editing Jewish Currents from 1959 until 2000. A veteran of the communist milieu, Schappes steered the magazine through four decades as a serious, dogmatic and intellectually formidable publication of the Jewish left. Under his editorship the magazine retained a certain old-left gravity, publishing political analysis, cultural commentary and historical writing for a readership of aging radicals and their sympathizers. By the end of the twentieth century, however, the magazine's audience was shrinking, and its future was uncertain.

When Schappes retired, the editorship passed in 2002 to Lawrence Bush, who had worked as Schappes's assistant editor from 1979 to 1983 and whose own parents had been part of the same communist milieu. Bush proved less dogmatic than his predecessor and, in fact, rather suspicious of his parents' generation. Under Bush the magazine took on more arts and culture content and became, in the words of later staffers, a little more folksy and playful, a gentler publication that honored the old left while opening its pages to a wider range of voices. Bush remained editor for a decade and a half, guiding the magazine through a period of institutional change that included, in 2006, a merger with the Workmen's Circle, the very organization the magazine had once opposed.

The 2018 Relaunch

As Bush prepared to retire in 2017, he sought a successor who could carry the magazine to a new generation. He found Jacob Plitman, a former organizer, who was tasked with strategizing the transition and hiring a new staff. In January 2018 four young editors were brought on, including the writer Arielle Angel, and the magazine relaunched with a redesigned print edition and website. The relaunch was funded by the magazine's readership and by a major donation from the New Jersey-based Puffin Foundation, and it was aimed squarely at making Jewish Currents the base for left-wing, secular, millennial Jews.

The new staff articulated a mission of gathering a fragmented Jewish left, reaching millennials active in socialist organizations, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, and anti-occupation and Israel-Palestine groups. They set out to build a public programs calendar, to develop institutional partnerships, and to expand the magazine's digital presence, all while honoring the history and legacy of a beloved institution. Angel, who became editor, has described the magazine's trajectory as the product of an intergenerational effort, with the older board handing over creative, financial and visionary control to a staff ranging in age from twenty-five to thirty-five. Since the relaunch, the magazine has grown rapidly, quadrupling in size by every metric, in Angel's account.

Editorial Identity and Content

Today's Jewish Currents publishes news, political commentary, analysis, and Jewish arts and literature, with its politics rooted in the Jewish left. The print magazine appears quarterly, while the website operates as a daily news and commentary operation. Its coverage ranges across American Jewish life, Israel and Palestine, antisemitism, labor, immigration, and the cultural production of a new generation of Jewish writers and artists. The magazine has become known for long reported features, sharp opinion writing and cultural criticism that speaks to younger progressive Jews, and for creating a venue where the left can argue with itself about the hardest questions in Jewish politics.

The relaunch also brought new marquee names to the masthead. In 2020 the magazine announced a round of high-profile hires including the writer Peter Beinart, the longtime Forward columnist known for his outspoken criticism of Israel's right-wing government, who joined as editor at large. The move was reported as a power shift in the politics of American Jewish media, and Beinart said he had come to see the publication as an organic creation of progressive young American Jews responding to the same impulses he had been writing about. The magazine's pages have since hosted some of the most consequential debates in American Jewish life, on Zionism, antisemitism, and the boundaries of Jewish identity.

Community and Continuity

For all its transformations, Jewish Currents has retained a remarkable sense of continuity. In its early years, reading circles gathered in cities across the United States to discuss and argue over its contents, and longtime readers have described the magazine as their shul, their congregation. The 2018 relaunch deliberately drew on that history, framing the magazine as a communal home for a secular Jewish left that had lost many of its institutional anchors. The magazine organizes public programs and events that extend that communal function into physical space, bringing readers, writers and activists together in New York and beyond.

The magazine's institutional home, the Association for Promotion of Jewish Secularism, reflects its commitment to a secular Jewish identity rooted in culture, politics and history rather than religious observance. Its merger with the Workmen's Circle in 2006 closed a circle that had begun with the magazine's founding as the Circle's communist rival, and the combined organization now works to sustain the infrastructure of the Jewish left. The magazine's archive, stretching back to 1946, constitutes one of the most complete records of the American Jewish left's internal debates across eight decades.

Notable Voices and Debates

Across its transformations, Jewish Currents has been defined by the writers it has published and the arguments it has hosted. The long Schappes era gave the magazine a reputation for serious, historically grounded political analysis, while the Bush years opened its pages to arts, culture and a more playful sensibility. The 2018 relaunch brought a new generation of staff writers and editors, and the arrival of figures such as Peter Beinart as editor at large in 2020 signaled the magazine's ambition to shape the central debates of American Jewish life. Its pages have hosted searching arguments about Zionism and anti-Zionism, about the meaning of antisemitism, and about the future of secular Jewish identity.

The magazine's willingness to publish sharp internal disagreement has been one of its distinguishing features. Rather than enforcing a single line, the relaunched Jewish Currents has presented itself as a place where the Jewish left can argue with itself, a forum for a community rather than a party. That posture echoes the magazine's 1956 reinvention, when it broke with the Communist Party and redefined itself around open debate. For readers, the result is a publication that can be bracing even for those who share its politics: it does not merely confirm the views of the Jewish left but tests them.

Legacy

Few publications have mirrored the convulsions of the Jewish left as faithfully as Jewish Currents. It was born as the magazine of the Communist Party's Jewish movement, broke with the party over the revelations of 1956, outlived the Soviet Union, merged with its old adversaries, and reinvented itself for a generation that came of age after the Cold War. Each transformation required a reckoning with the last, and the magazine's willingness to undertake that reckoning in public, to admit error and change course, has become part of its institutional character.

Today it stands as both a historical artifact and a living publication: a quarterly magazine and daily website that continues to publish the politics of the Jewish left for a new century. Its history offers a case study in how a small, ideologically committed magazine can survive the collapse of the movement that created it, and its present offers a window on the arguments, anxieties and aspirations of young progressive Jews. Readers can find the magazine's daily coverage, its quarterly issues and its archives at jewishcurrents.org.