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Essay

Does the Jewish Body Keep the Score?

Parts of the Jewish left believe trauma explains attachment to Zionism. But what they call “trauma” is more likely a collective story than a biological fact.

Jon Danforth-Appell
News Desk
A Litmus Test Backfires
Josh Nathan-Kazis
Report
The Many Equivocations of Curt Mills
The MAGA journalist wants to bring respectability to “America First” opposition to Israel. Just don’t ask him about the Groypers at his heels.
Will Alden
News Desk
A Baffling Congressional Report Threatens the Jewish Establishment
A House Republican attack on mainstream Jewish funders reads like a political favor to Netanyahu.
Josh Nathan-Kazis
With “Fighting Factions,” IfNotNow Zeroes in on Mainstream Synagogues
As the left gives up on conventional Jewish institutions, IfNotNow still sees members to mobilize.
Josh Nathan-Kazis
Despite Anti-AIPAC Rhetoric, Congressional Progressives Rally Behind AIPAC-Backed Incumbent
In endorsing Rep. Adriano Espaillat, the Congressional Progressive Caucus protects its own.
Alex Kane
Backed by North American Dollars, A Yeshiva Could Push Palestinians Out of Sheikh Jarrah
An Orthodox yeshiva for non-observant diaspora Jews received long-sought approval to bring hundreds of Jewish students into the Palestinian neighborhood
Charlotte Ritz-Jack
Current IssueSpring 2026
Table of Contents Subscribe
Feature
Dispatches From Catastrophe
Twenty-three Palestinians reflect on the lives they have lost and the political futures that have been foreclosed in the wake of genocide.
Maya Rosen and Jonathan Shamir
Essay
The Death of Asylum
How centuries of efforts to deny refuge to persecuted people paved way for authoritarianism
Tanvi Misra
Conversation
Criminal Governance
Political scientist As’ad Ghanem argues that the rise of crime in Palestinian communities inside Israel is not a policy failure, but the result of decades of state efforts to weaken Palestinian collective life.
Eliyahu Freedman
Report
The Land Registration Campaign Remaking East Jerusalem
Using a revived colonial-era legal process, the Jewish National Fund is quietly transferring long-inhabited Palestinian property into Israeli hands.
Charlotte Ritz-Jack
Conversation
Is Israel’s Economy Collapsing?
Maya Rosen
Conversation
When Jewishness Means Genocide
Philosopher Elad Lapidot discusses how our understanding of antisemitism changes in an era in which Jews and Zionism have been conflated.
Arielle Angel and Daniel May
Review
Wallace Shawn’s Moral Cliffs
While his latest show, What We Did Before Our Moth Days, trades political violence for marital strife, it is still an exercise in audience complicity.
Alisa Solomon
Comic
Running Toward ICE
A record of resistance in Chicagoland
Sarah Lazare
History
Reclaiming the Ladino Left
The early 20th century saw a flurry of left activism by Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jews in the US. Recovering their legacy can enrich the Jewish left of today.
Devin E. Naar
History
Kansionario Sosialista
Selections from a 1919 Ladino Socialist songbook
Devin E. Naar
Report
“Education Cannot Wait”
Gaza’s decimated universities are trying to build an improvised academic life under siege.
Taqwa Ahmed Al-Wawi
News Desk
Support for Settlement of Lebanon Goes Mainstream in Israel
What was once a fringe curiosity is now an organized movement with broad governmental and public support.
Maya Rosen
Memoir
A Body That Outlived Its Heart
The grief that at first flowed with my tears now has calcified in my chest with no release.
Abdullah Hany Daher
Poetry
Fish
Birhan Keskin
Review
The Dream Logic of Fascism
In Charlotte Beradt’s study of nightmares under Nazism, the analysis often seems inadequate to the material.
Raphael Magarik
Minneapolis
Fugitive Sanctuaries
It has only ever been migrant movements, rather than benevolent states, that have granted true safety for the endangered.
Ananya Roy
Minnesota Goddam
In the Twin Cities, the hand of a polluted country reaches to choke the future out of us.
Danez Smith
Sand in the Gears
As the Trump administration draws down its invasion of Minneapolis, the citywide mobilization against ICE offers lessons in fighting the deportation machine.
Daniel May
How Can We Care for Our Neighbors?
With institutions capitulating to the ICE invasion, a Twin Cities medical provider reflects on avenues for resistance.
Muna Hada
Editor’s Picks
  1. 1
    How Support for Palestine Became a Hate Crime
  2. 2
    We Need New Jewish Institutions
  3. 3
    Rhetoric Without Reckoning
  4. 4
    The Making of a Coal Boycott
  5. 5
    Against Zionist Realism
  6. 6
    The Betrayal of Light
  7. 7
    History Lesson
  8. 8
    The View from Evin
  9. 9
    Exile from Gaza
  10. 10
    The Myth of Israeli Innovation
Podcast / On the Nose
On the Nose, A Jewish Currents Podcast
On the Nose is our biweekly podcast. The editorial staff discusses the politics, culture, and questions that animate today’s Jewish left.
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Upcoming Events

Bay Area Issue Launch Party

Thursday
June 4, 2026
7:00 pm - 11:00 pm ET
Tickets

The Death of Asylum: Tanvi Misra in conversation with John Washington

Friday
June 12, 2026
1:00 pm - 2:00 pm ET
Register

An Evening of Ladino Song

Monday
June 15, 2026
7:00 pm - 8:30 pm ET
Tickets
Past Events
Office Hours
Elaine Mokhtefi
“There was a current of confidence and warmth between all of us who were in Algiers working with liberation movements.”
Ari M. Brostoff
Report
Degrees of Separation
Israel’s new international college programs offer American students an escape from campus activism while training them as state cheerleaders.
Maya Rosen
Chevruta
How Should We Engage in Communal Rebuke?
An investigation through Jewish text on moving fellow Jews
Aron Wander
Essay
Higher Ed’s Bad Bargain
Erik Baker
Essay
The Line Between Affinity and Conspiracy
Epstein relied on Jewish in-group bonds to cultivate the network that facilitated his crimes.
David Klion
Report
Why Hungarian Jewish Institutions Are Embracing Orbán and Netanyahu
Since October 7th, Hungary’s Jewish federation has backed away from criticism of its right-wing prime minister, prompting an increasingly vocal anti-Zionist Jewish response.
Larkin Cleland
Memoir
Crying Is Not Surrender
In wartime, expressions of sorrow are pushed away. But our grief is sacred. It demands to be felt.
Abdullah Hany Daher
Report
An Educational Crusade in East Jerusalem
Under the pretext of “national security,” Israel is ramping up its longstanding attacks on Palestinian education in the city.
Jonathan Shamir
Poetry
about the rich and only the rich
“the rich keep telling us this is the best possible world. they kill and we die, but this is all we get to hope for. some rich people put on dresses and what splendor.”
Roque Raquel Salas Rivera
Excerpt
Memoirs of a Palestinian Communist
Najati Sidqi’s reminiscences, which chronicle the upheavals of the early 20th century, resonate with shocking familiarity today.
Najati Sidqi
Report
Cryptocurrency Comes to Gaza
With formal banking infrastructure in ruins, Palestinians in Gaza are forced to rely on unregulated digital currencies for survival.
Hani Qarmoot
Analysis
The Genocides The New York Times Forgot
The paper’s Gaza coverage continues its pattern of downplaying US-backed atrocities in Bangladesh, East Timor, and Guatemala.
Zachary Jablow
Shabbat Reading List
Weekly Parshah Commentary
May
29
Parshat Naso from Aron Wander

This week’s parshah, Naso, offers instructions for how to become a nazirite—a person who consecrates themselves to God by taking a temporary vow to refrain from shaving their hair, imbibing intoxicants (or even consuming grapes), and coming into contact with...

more Parshah Commentary

May
21
Shavuot Torah Reading

In the Torah’s description of the revelation at Mount Sinai, which we read this Shabbat in an interruption of the weekly parshah cycle due to the holiday of Shavuot, the experience of God’s presence is not one of bliss or...

more Parshah Commentary

Letters from Our Readers

On “Hasan Piker’s Politics of Appeal”
In a recent episode of On The Nose, Arielle Angel and Hasan Piker dismissed congressional candidate Scott Wiener’s decision to start calling Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide. “Nobody believes him,” they both concur. I’ll tell you who does believe him: the Jewish establishment. Wiener’s switch in language is causing... more
Sonja Trauss
Berkeley, CA
On “Joe Kent’s Resignation Was Brave. His Analysis Is Faulty.”
In his March 24th article “Joe Kent’s Resignation Was Brave. His Analysis was Faulty,” Peter Beinart conflates speculative statements concerning Israel’s actions with antisemitic claims about “Jewish conspiracy” that have been historically mobilized to justify the displacement, disenfranchisement, and mass murder of Jews. Near the end of the article, Beinart... more
Lisa Cerami
Rochester, NY
Report

Portrait of a Campus in Crisis

UCLA capitulated to its own hardline pro-Israel activists long before President Trump came calling. As a result, its students have repeatedly become targets of vigilante and police violence.

Will Alden