Just Like Brian Wilson
by Marc Jampole DO NOT believe in kings. When others sing, In Jerusalem next year, shunning David’s city, chant instead Wherever you want to be: in Paris or another European hub studying the texture of...
View ArticleOpEdge: Who is Black? Who is a Woman? Who is a Jew?
by Marc JampoleAS A JEW, I come to the current controversies over who is a woman and who is an African-American with a special perspective. The defining of who is a Jew has haunted the Jewish religion,...
View ArticleMameloshn: On the Road Stands a Tree
by Lawrence Bush In the video below, a Hungarian Jew is singing Itsik Manger’s “Oyfn Veyg Shteyt a Boym” (On the Road Stands a Tree). Watch it for three verses or so and you’ll understand the meaning...
View ArticleMy Jewish Question, My Father
by Dale M. Kushner TWENTY YEARS AGO, I was completely unaware of any relationship between my writing and my experience of being Jewish. Ten years ago, I might have felt a vague stirring of the...
View ArticleDecember 16: “Who Is a Jew?” in a British Day School
The Supreme Court of Great Britain found on this date in 2009 that the Jewish Free School in Northern London, which is financed by the state but permitted to give admissions preference to Jewish...
View ArticleIrving Howe and Secular Jewishness
Socialism, Zionism, and Jewish Identity by Gerald Sorin From the May-June, 2005 issue of Jewish Currents IRVING HOWE rose from Jewish immigrant poverty in the Depression-ridden East Bronx of the 1930s...
View ArticleMay 8: Oedipus-Shmoedipus, As Long as He Loves His Mother
President Woodrow Wilson signed a Proclamation designating the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day on this date in 1914. The holiday had been launched by Appalachian activist Ann Jarvis (not Jewish)...
View ArticleWhat Remains
Finding Yiddish by Janice Segal Weizman YIDDISH TALES. The book lies casually, almost coyly, on my desk. It’s a hardcover bound in fading blue cloth, a 1946 reprint of a 1912 collection of Yiddish...
View ArticleA Symposium on the Jewish Future
AT ONE OF THE SITES WHERE THAT FUTURE WAS CREATED by Elliot B. Gertel THIS IS THE THIRD and (at least for now) final installment in a series I’ve done about noteworthy discussions of Jewish religion...
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A Symposium on the Jewish Future
AT ONE OF THE SITES WHERE THAT FUTURE WAS CREATED by Elliot B. Gertel THIS IS THE THIRD and (at least for now) final installment in a series I’ve done about noteworthy discussions of Jewish religion...
View ArticleEditor of “Jewish Child”
Elma Ehrlich Levinger, the editor of Jewish Child magazine and author of more than thirty books for children about Jewish history and identity, was born in Chicago on this date in 1886. “Levinger used...
View ArticleRose Pesotta, Champion Organizer
Rose Pesotta (Rakhel Peisoty), union organizer, anarchist, and the first female vice president of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, was born in the Ukraine on this date in 1896. Pesotta...
View ArticleA Homecoming, with Apartheid in Tow
by Allan Lichtenstein OFTEN WITH FRIENDS, when they learn that I grew up in South Africa, lived sixteen years in Israel, then moved to the United States thirty years ago, I joke that with each move,...
View ArticleA Conversation with Bernard-Henri Lévy
by Mitchell Abidor Shortly after undertaking my review of Bernard-Henri Lévy’s The Genius of Judaism, but before completing it, I was able to interview Lévy before his conversation at the 92 Street Y (...
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A Taxonomy of Stupid Shit the Jewish Establishment Says to Millennials
by David A.M. Wilensky and Gabriel T. Erbs from the Spring 2017 issue of Jewish Currents ALL SORTS OF ARTICLES have been written and published about the millennials, with headlines that ask “Are...
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Running for Congress at 24
AND GETTING ATTACKED BY NEO-NAZIS A CONVERSATION WITH ERIN SCHRODE From the Spring 2017 issue of Jewish Currents Erin Schrode, 25, has been an environmental activist her entire life. In 2005, at age...
View ArticleO My America: Will Jews Still Be Liberal in 2050?
by Lawrence Bush from the Spring 2017 issue of Jewish Currents 1. AS FUTURE GENERATIONS OF JEWS TAKE OVER, SO MAY ORTHODOXY IF THERE IS any solace to be found after the Republican takeover of the U.S....
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Yiddish in the Age of Identity
AN ALTERNATIVE TO ASSIMILATION AND ZIONISM by Lina “Khave” Morales From the Spring 2017 issue of Jewish Currents LATE LAST December, I went to an event that promised to do something I’m always striving...
View ArticleCommunity Plus: Moving Beyond “Jewish While Doing Something Else”
by Lex Rofes from the Spring 2017 issue of Jewish Currents WHEN YOU’RE in your mid-twenties, as I am, and work for a Jewish non-profit organization, as I do, you hear a lot of questions from your...
View ArticleNaming and Renaming
By Ann Cheng WHEN MY mother’s mother fled Eastern Europe for the U.S., she was on her fourth last name — the Jewish one she was born with, the non-Jewish one her family chose in the late 1930s, the...
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