by Lawrence Bush on January 28, 2012
On the very first day I came to the Jewish Currents office as the newly hired assistant editor in 1978, the veteran editor Morris U. Schappes handed me a pamphlet reprint of Louis Harap’s 1975 series, The Zionist Movement Revisited [PDF]. Jewish Currents magazine, Schappes explained, was not Zionist because it did not view Israel as the Jewish homeland, nor did it consider Jews living in other lands to be in a state of “exile” or living in a “diaspora.” The magazine had been shaped ideologically, he continued, by a pre-state, Marxist view of Zionism as a “bourgeois nationalism” that ignored issues of class and depended upon European imperialism for its success. Nevertheless, Jewish Currents had always supported Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, viewed the country as a kind of global affirmative action for Jews after the devastations of the Holocaust, and was happy, he said, to express pride in Israel’s achievements. In short, JC was “non-Zionist, pro-Israel.” [click to continue…]
by Lawrence Bush on September 20, 2011
Jewish Currents Has Always Promoted a Non-Religious Outlook. What Kind of American Jewish Identity Has This Produced?
I spent a good part of the Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend this year at Limmud, a gathering of some seven hundred Jews at a resort in my neighborhood in New York’s Mid-Hudson Valley. Limmud (the word means “learning” or “study”) is an informal movement that convenes conferences like this around the world, throughout the year. Driven mostly by young volunteers, it has become the place to go to encounter what is current in Jewish education and, to a lesser extent, Jewish social activism.
I saw some friends, led three workshops and handed out scores of copies of Jewish Currents — but I also struggled, as a secular Jew, with a familiar feeling of marginalization. I saw no distinctly secular Jewish workshops listed in the program, and the first workshop I led, about the radical essences of Jewish identity, was scheduled as the sole alternative to Friday evening shabes services — as though the organizers had realized, late in the game, that not only did they need to offer a variety of prayer services (egalitarian, sex-separated, etc.), they also might need an alternative to prayer services for some of the participants. They shouldn’t have worried: Only a handful of folks showed up for my workshop, while the several rooms for davening were wall-to-wall with people. These were Jews who want to pray at the start of the sabbath, who bond together that way.
Over the course of the weekend, I found them to be a diverse crowd, interesting and lively, mostly liberal-minded — and filled with young people who were notably enthusiastic about their Jewish identities. By contrast, I felt uneasy about my own alienation from religious practice, a feeling that was mostly self-critical. On Sunday evening, however, the self-criticism became self-righteousness as a gigantic television screen in the hotel lobby was turned on for the Jets football game, and Limmudniks gathered to watch and cheer.
Jews, I thought, is this the best we can do on the Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend? Is this the way to celebrate our values in the context of worldliness: Go, Jets, go? [click to continue…]
by Lawrence Bush on January 21, 2011
Jewish Currents Has Always Cultivated Solidarity between Blacks and Jews. Is that Bond Still Vital and Real?
Jewish Currents has always capitalized “Black” in reference to African-Americans. When I came to the magazine as assistant editor in 1978, this typographical quirk was explained to me as more than a mark of respect: It testified to the status of African-Americans as an “oppressed national minority,” a status that the Communist Party in the 1930s had extended into a proposal for a post-revolutionary, five-state African-American “territory” in the Black Belt of the South that would resemble Birobidzhan, the “Jewish Autonomous Region” of the USSR.
This “Black Belt Thesis” may sound far-fetched today, but it accurately reflected the concentration and severe oppression of Blacks in the lynching-crazed, sharecropping South of the 1930s. I was reminded of this reality when I recently read not only part of JC’s back catalogue of articles about African-American struggles, but Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns (Random House, 2010), an authoritative yet intimate new study of the seven-decade migration of some six million Blacks from the former slave states to the free states beginning at the turn of the 20th century. “Across the South,” Wilkerson notes, “someone was hanged or burned alive every four days from 1889 to 1929.” As Jim Crow became the legal and cultural backbone of the South, these were “the facts of [Black] lives . . . carried out with soul-killing efficiency . . .”
The year of our magazine’s birth, 1946, was hardly different, until one particular lynching in Georgia sparked national outrage. [click to continue…]
by Lawrence Bush on October 29, 2010
Jewish Currents began its life as a Communist-Oriented Magazine.
What Should I Make of that Heritage Today?
When Jewish Currents and the Workmen’s Circle joined forces in 2004, I heard through the grapevine that a muckety-muck at the American Jewish Congress had described me as a communist. While I was tickled that the guy even knew my name, I was appalled by his gossip, particularly since I thought it likely that to him, as to most Americans, being a communist is seen as morally equivalent to being a Nazi.
I’m not a communist, but I’m a red-diaper baby and have known, admired, and loved plenty of communists, including my own parents and grandmother. I count these people as important contributors to the social good in America, particu
larly in the fields of labor organizing, anti-racist activism, folk music, and popular culture — and I have known many of them to be human beings of exceptional conscience, courage, and idealism.
Yet I’ve also spent a good deal of energy wrestling with the fact that these very people were in thrall, at least during the more youthful part of their lives, to a virtual religion, with fundamental beliefs that deserve fundamental reexamination. Among those beliefs: that Marxism is a science; that a planned economy will exceed capitalism in both productivity and egalitarianism; that working-class rule will be enlightened and humane; that rulers of the capitalist system are selfish and benighted, while rulers of communist systems are good guys who sometimes make errors; that ‘bourgeois democracy’ is expendable; that human nature is highly malleable, and our personalities, outlooks and ethics are shaped almost exclusively by social influences; that class strug
gle is the motor force of history. To all of which I variously say, maybe, no way, could be, who knows?
Reexamination was, in fact, one of the features of Jewish Currents that drew me to serve as its assistant editor back in 1978. In 1956, for example (when I was 4), Jewish Life, the predecessor magazine to JC, had issued a brave mea culpa for failing to recognize and acknowledge the Soviet repression of Jewish culture: [click to continue…]
