About Midstream

Midstream

Midstream was a New York-based Jewish magazine of opinion, politics, culture and religion, established in 1955 by the Theodor Herzl Foundation. The Foundation was associated with the American Section of the World Zionist Organization, and the magazine it created was described from the start as an intellectual Zionist journal. It began as a quarterly Jewish review, became a monthly in 1965, and continued in print until its final print edition in 2013. Its International Standard Serial Number was 0026-332X, and its later web presence was at midstreamthf.com. Across nearly six decades it occupied a distinctive place among American Jewish periodicals: serious, argumentative and explicitly concerned with Jewish survival, Israel and Jewish life in the United States.

Founding by the Theodor Herzl Foundation

The Theodor Herzl Foundation took its name from Theodor Herzl, the Viennese journalist who founded political Zionism and whose 1896 work Der Judenstaat argued for a Jewish state. The Foundation created Midstream in 1955 with the object, as the Encyclopaedia Judaica account summarized it, of creating a serious Zionist periodical that would have an intellectual impact on American Jewish life. That timing mattered. Israel had been established in 1948, American Jewry was entering a period of suburban growth and institutional confidence, and a range of intellectual journals were competing to define postwar Jewish thought. Midstream was founded in that company. It was not, strictly, the official organ of the Foundation. Instead, it was established as a means for the expression of a wide range of opinions within political Zionism, opinions that did not necessarily reflect the views of the magazine's own editors.

A Quarterly That Became a Monthly

Midstream started publication in 1955 as a Quarterly Jewish Review. Under its founding editor, Shlomo Katz, the Encyclopaedia Judaica noted, it published articles and fiction of merit on various aspects of United States Jewry and Israel. In 1965 it became a monthly, a change reported at the time by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency under the headline announcing Midstream launched as a monthly magazine, with Dr. Neumann outlining policy. Billing itself by then as a leading intellectual Zionist magazine, it settled into the identity it would keep for decades: a monthly Jewish review, published in New York at an address later listed as 110 East 59th Street, covering political, social and religious topics relevant to Jewish communities around the world.

Relationship to Commentary and Its Contemporaries

Midstream to a significant degree saw itself as playing a role somewhat similar to that of Commentary, the intellectual publication of the American Jewish Committee, but with an explicitly Jewish focus. The comparison helps explain both its ambition and its niche. Commentary ranged widely across politics and culture from a Jewish institutional base; Midstream aimed at a comparable seriousness while centering Zionism and Jewish concerns more directly. It appeared at a time when similar publications were being printed, among them Partisan Review, The Reconstructionist and even The New Republic, each offering a forum for argument about politics, religion and identity. In that crowded field, Midstream's distinguishing mark was that Jewish life itself — its politics, its texts, its communities and its state — was not one subject among many but the organizing subject of the whole magazine.

Scope: Politics, Religion and Jewish Culture

The magazine's own account of its point of view, published in a 2007 editorial, described a brief far broader than Zionist politics alone. Midstream, it said, dealt with all aspects of Jewish life in America: the history of Jewish settlement, the problems of adaptation to American life while avoiding total assimilation, and the cultural concerns and achievements of Jews in literature, music and art. All of its articles centered on the Jewish experience and attendant issues; all of its fiction concerned stories of Jewish life; and even its poems were expected to contain a Jewish allusion, if only a metaphorical reference to a character in the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh. Religion had an important place, and all branches of Judaism had their say in its pages, although the editors said they preferred to avoid essays on in-house controversies that belonged in the official organs of the movements themselves.

Symposia, Midrash and Interfaith Argument

Two recurring features illustrate how that scope worked in practice. Midstream published symposia on Jewish-Christian relations with contributions from a wide variety of representatives, and it treated the persistence of historic antisemitism, alongside hopeful change in some Christian thinking, as a crucial part of its concerns. It also hastened, in its own phrase, to publish frequent interpretations of Biblical texts, which it grouped under the classic title of Midrash. Alongside politics and theology it ran articles on secular figures approached through a Jewish lens: Freud's Jewishness, Shostakovich's relations with Jewish colleagues, and Jewish aspects of Shakespeare and of Cervantes's Don Quixote. A 2010 issue illustrated the range again, commemorating the 150th anniversary of Herzl's birth in 1860, the 62nd anniversary of Israel and the magazine's own 55th anniversary in a single editorial reflection on its founding purpose.

Political Arc Over the Decades

Midstream to a significant degree followed the basic political arc of Commentary, moving from liberal to center-of-the-road to somewhat conservative to neoconservative, reflecting the views of a succession of editors. That trajectory, noted by historians of the magazine, was not the same arc as that of the majority of American Jewry, which remained more liberal than its intellectual journals. The point is central to understanding Midstream: it was a journal of opinion whose center of gravity shifted as its editors changed, while its subject matter — Zionism, Israel, Jewish politics and Jewish culture — stayed constant. In later listings it was characterized as generally conservative politically, in both Israeli and United States terms, and as publishing nine issues a year at one stage of its later life, a reminder that the monthly rhythm of 1965 did not hold unchanged to the end.

Editors, Contributors and Readers

Shlomo Katz, the founding editor named in the Encyclopaedia Judaica account, set the early pattern of articles and fiction on American Jewry and Israel. Later, Leo Haber was identified as the magazine's editor in an account of Jewish writing that praised Midstream as the one publication that actually encouraged and promoted Jewish poets; of the poems selected for discussion in that account, six of eight had appeared originally in Midstream, including two by Haber himself and Marge Piercy's poem The Late Year. The magazine's subscription list stood at 6,500 readers in 2004, a modest figure that nonetheless reflects its character: it was never a mass-circulation title but an intellectual review whose influence ran through its contributors, its symposia and its standing as a record of Zionist thought in America.

Anniversaries and Self-Definition

Midstream marked its milestones in print. In 2004 it commemorated the centenary of Herzl's death in 1904. In 2010 its first issue of the year marked Herzl at 150, Israel at 62 and Midstream at 55, and its editor used the occasion to restate what the magazine had been since its inception in 1955: the intellectual Zionist child of the Theodor Herzl Foundation, a fact described as a matter of pride and a symbol of its self-definition and its reason for being. That habit of returning to Herzl was more than ceremonial. It reminded readers that the magazine's arguments about contemporary Israel and Diaspora life were conducted in the name of the founder of political Zionism, and that the Foundation behind it existed to keep that inheritance in print.

Final Print Edition and Legacy

Midstream's final print edition appeared in 2013, closing a run that began in the first decade of Israel's existence and continued through the transformation of American Jewish politics that the magazine itself had chronicled and, in its editorial shifts, embodied. Its legacy is that of a durable intellectual forum: a quarterly turned monthly that gave Zionist argument a literary and scholarly home, published fiction and poetry held to a Jewish theme, staged interfaith symposia, printed Biblical interpretation under the heading of Midrash, and followed — and helped to lead — the movement of a strand of American Jewish opinion from postwar liberalism toward neoconservatism. Issues survive in library holdings and in the Internet Archive, and its Encyclopaedia Judaica entry remains a standard short reference on the title.

Profile at a Glance

Midstream was founded in 1955 in New York City by the Theodor Herzl Foundation, associated with the American Section of the World Zionist Organization. It began as a Quarterly Jewish Review, became a monthly in 1965, was later described as a bi-monthly Jewish review in its own pages, and issued its final print edition in 2013. Edited first by Shlomo Katz and later by a succession of editors including Leo Haber, it published opinion, politics, religion, fiction and poetry on Jewish communities worldwide, carried ISSN 0026-332X, and described itself as an intellectual Zionist journal — a counterpart, with an explicitly Jewish focus, to the role Commentary played for the American Jewish Committee.