About Jewish Frontier

Jewish Frontier

Jewish Frontier was a New York monthly magazine that served for seven decades as the English-language voice of the American Labor Zionist movement. Founded in 1934, it published commentary on Jewish life, the Zionist project and, after 1948, the State of Israel, together with literary and cultural writing, from a progressive, labour-oriented perspective. Its founders were the Labor Zionist leader Hayim Greenberg, who became its first editor, the writer and teacher Marie Syrkin, who edited it for more than two decades, and Dr. Haim Fineman of Temple University in Philadelphia. Published first by the Labor League for Palestine and from May 1938 by the Jewish Frontier Association, the magazine survived into the twenty-first century; library records of the run describe publication from 1934 through 2005.

Origins in American Labor Zionism

The magazine grew out of Poale Zion, the labour Zionist movement that had organised in the United States since the early twentieth century, and out of its support organisations, including the Labor League for Palestine, which published the Frontier from its founding until April 1938. Labor Zionism sought to combine Jewish national revival with socialism: its adherents argued that a Jewish homeland in Palestine had to be built by Jewish workers, organised in collective settlements and trade unions, rather than left to private capital. An English-language monthly was an essential tool for that project in America, where the movement needed to explain itself not in Yiddish but in the language of a younger, American-born generation and of the wider public it hoped to persuade.

The founders

Hayim Greenberg (1889–1953) was born in Bessarabia, headed Poale Zion in America, and became the magazine's founding editor. Marie Syrkin (1899–1989), born in Bern, Switzerland, and brought to the United States in 1907, was the daughter of Nahman Syrkin, the first major theoretician of socialist Zionism, whose 1898 essay on the Jewish question and the socialist Jewish state had helped define the movement. She was educated at Cornell University and taught in New York City high schools from 1925 to 1950 while helping to found the magazine in 1934 and joining its editorial staff. The third founder, Haim Fineman, was an academic at Temple University. Between them, the founders combined movement leadership, literary ability and scholarly standing — the mixture the magazine aimed to project.

Greenberg's editorship and ideas

Under Greenberg, the Frontier published leading figures of the Zionist world, including David Ben-Gurion, the future first prime minister of Israel, Moshe Shertok, later known as Moshe Sharett, the novelist Sholom Asch and the critic Maurice Samuel. Greenberg used the magazine to recast Zionism in an American idiom. Labor Zionists of his generation compared the halutzim, the movement's pioneers in Palestine, to the Pilgrim settlers of New England and to the cowboys of the Wild West, presenting the settlement of the ancient homeland as a frontier story of independence, industry and youthful optimism that American readers could recognise. His best-known essay, "Patriotism and Plural Loyalties," addressed the charge of dual loyalty directed at American Zionists — an argument later compared with modern multicultural theory — and his writing circled consistently back to the question of how Jews could situate themselves in modernity.

The 1930s: persecution, immigration and Palestine

The magazine's first decade was dominated by the catastrophe unfolding in Europe. From 1937 to 1942 Syrkin reported in its pages and elsewhere on the Nazi persecution of European Jewry, and she advocated publicly for opening Jewish immigration to British Mandate Palestine and for liberalising the quota system that restricted immigration to the United States. The Frontier argued the Labor Zionist case within the Zionist movement as well, defending the Histadrut labour federation and the collective settlements against their Revisionist Zionist rivals, whose strikebreaking and attacks on organised Jewish labour the magazine documented and condemned in detail in issues of the period. It was, throughout, a movement paper: partisan, argumentative and committed to the proposition that the Jewish future would be built by workers.

The Anthology of 1934–1944

The magazine's importance in its first decade was recognised during the Second World War with the publication of Jewish Frontier: Anthology, 1934–1944, a hardcover collection issued by the Jewish Frontier Association gathering a decade of its writing. Contributors included the British peace campaigner and Nobel laureate Norman Angell, the jurist and historian Norman Bentwich and Greenberg himself, alongside many others. An anthology of that kind was a statement of intent: the editors believed the magazine's essays on Zionism, Jewish culture and world politics constituted a record worth preserving in book form, and the volume remains one of the most accessible surviving windows into American Labor Zionist thought between the rise of Hitler and the end of the Second World War.

Marie Syrkin's long editorship

Syrkin became editor-in-chief of Jewish Frontier in 1948 — the year of Israel's founding — and led the journal for more than two decades, until 1971. She thus edited the magazine through the consolidation of the State of Israel, whose labour-led governments embodied much of what the Labor Zionist movement had worked for. In parallel she pursued an academic career, joining Brandeis University in 1950 as an associate professor of English literature and teaching there until 1966, among other subjects the literature of the Holocaust — possibly the earliest such university course — and American Jewish fiction. Her wartime and postwar reporting fed her book Blessed Is the Match (1947), an account of Jewish resistance to the Nazis built on interviews with survivors in displaced-persons camps and in Palestine. She was a close friend of Golda Meir, whose biography she later wrote, and she also served on the editorial boards of Midstream and Middle East Review.

Scope and character of the magazine

Across its long run, the Frontier mixed political analysis with culture. Syrkin published regular articles on Jewish cultural and political life and current issues, and the magazine's pages carried essays on Zionism and Israel, responses to antisemitism, literary criticism, translations of Yiddish and Hebrew poetry — a field in which Syrkin herself worked — and discussion of American Jewish life, which she frequently criticised from a Zionist standpoint. Its successor organisation, Ameinu, which was established in 2004 in the tradition of the Labor Zionist Alliance, described the magazine's mission as exploring, advancing and, where appropriate, reshaping the humanistic ideas and progressive values underlying modern Labor Zionist thought. That formulation captures the magazine's tone: ideological but literary, committed to a movement yet willing to argue within it.

The magazine in its later decades

The journal continued long after the heroic age of Labor Zionism had passed. An issue from the summer of 2004 — volume seventy-one, number one, the 647th issue, headed "Since 1934" — still listed Greenberg and Syrkin as founders, was published by Nahum Guttman with Ari M. Chester as managing editor, and had an editorial board chaired by the historian Henry L. Feingold, including figures such as the columnist J. J. Goldberg and the scholar Mark Raider. Its contents ranged across the magazine's traditional territory: an essay re-examining space-age Zionism, a history of the Magen David as a symbol, an introduction to Greenberg's thought reprinting Syrkin's preface, and articles on the Geneva Initiative peace plan, the position of Israeli Arabs and the idea of tikkun olam as Israel's democratic mission. Seventy years on, the agenda — Israel, Jewish symbols, peace politics, social repair — was recognisably the one set in 1934.

Final years and succession

Library and movement records describe the Frontier as published through 2005, a run of more than seventy years that carried it from the Depression, through the Holocaust and the founding of Israel, to the era of the peace process and its collapse. Its organisational world changed around it: the Labor Zionist Alliance, the movement's American umbrella, gave way in 2004 to Ameinu, founded explicitly in its tradition as the United States affiliate of the World Labor Zionist Movement. Ameinu preserved the magazine's archive and its self-understanding, presenting the Frontier as the movement's historic English-language forum. Few American movement magazines of the 1930s survived as long, and fewer still kept the same title, city and mission for the whole run.

Legacy

Jewish Frontier matters to historians for three reasons. First, it is a continuous record of American Labor Zionism in English, written by participants — Greenberg, Syrkin and their contributors — rather than by outside observers. Second, its editorial history embodies a notable chapter of American Jewish intellectual life: a woman, the daughter of the movement's founding theorist, edited one of its central journals for over twenty years while helping to build Brandeis University's curriculum. Third, its back run, preserved in research libraries such as the New York Public Library's Dorot Jewish Division, documents in detail how American Zionists argued about Palestine, socialism, immigration and Jewish culture at each crisis of the twentieth century. For students of any of those subjects, the Frontier remains a primary source of the first rank.