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The Harvard Kennedy School’s Anti-Palestinian Bias

The elite institution reversed course on refusing a fellowship to a prominent Israel critic, but for students, its suppression of Palestine speech is ongoing.

Joseph Leone
Report
How a Giant of Responsible Investing Agreed to an Israel Exception
After a multi-year campaign by Jewish groups, Morningstar—a major firm known for socially responsible investing—is softening its approach to Israeli human rights abuses.
Mari Cohen
Responsa
Days of Rest
On anti-work politics and the meaning of Shabbat
The Editors
Analysis
Antisemitic Zionists Aren’t a Contradiction in Terms
Pundits express surprise when antisemitism and Zionism overlap, but the ideologies share much in common—and many adherents.
Peter Beinart
Report
The Gamified Occupation
A Fauda-themed escape room in Tel Aviv gives customers a taste of military rule.
Sophia Goodfriend
Chevruta
What Is Debt and When Can We Refuse to Pay?
An investigation through Jewish text.
Allen Lipson
Conversation
The Most Wonderful Time of the Year
The Jewish Currents staff takes on Christmas.
Jewish Currents
Poetry
Song of the Scent of the Beloved
“No one sensory mode sufficed. No / one / sense was enough.”
Nathaniel Mackey
Report
Palestine Is a Proxy Fight in a Fractious DSA
With a sizable gap between the left’s demand for Palestinian liberation and the pro-Israel tack of national politics, Palestine takes center stage in arguments about discipline and electoralism.
Alex Kane
Newsletter
The Israeli #Resistance Demands a Return to Normal
Domestic backlash to the incoming far-right government ignores its plans to further entrench the occupation.
Joshua Leifer
Essay
Edifice Complex
Restoring the term “burnout” to its roots in landlord arson puts the dispossession of poor city dwellers at its center.
Bench Ansfield
From the Newsletter
Biden’s Education Department Delays Defining Campus Antisemitism
To the relief of Palestinian-rights advocates, the department’s Office for Civil Rights did not adopt the controversial IHRA definition of antisemitism this past December.
Alex Kane
The State of Antisemitism Reporting
How America’s major newspapers have stumbled in covering a serious phenomenon
Mari Cohen
The Nationalist Heresy of Temple Mount Activism
For Israel’s right-wing religious Zionists, ethnonationalism has overwhelmed the commitment to Jewish law.
Joshua Leifer
“We Don’t Want Bad. We Don’t Want Worse.”
Historian Lior Sternfeld discusses the Iranian Jewish community’s response to the ongoing political protests in Iran.
Sophie Levy
Current Issue Winter 2022
Table of Contents Buy
Editor’s Picks
  1. 1
    Playing Jewish
  2. 2
    The Passion of 964 Park Place
  3. 3
    Point of No Return
  4. 4
    Terms of Entry
  5. 5
    Deborah Lipstadt vs. “The Oldest Hatred”
  6. 6
    Bela’s Pilgrim
  7. 7
    Revisiting Recitatif
  8. 8
    More Life
  9. 9
    The Many Oblivions of Babi Yar
  10. 10
    Eric Adams’s Moral Panics
Responsa
Beyond Grievance
Though it may be a potent political tool, grievance can also maintain our investment in our own oppression.
Arielle Angel
Justice You Shall Pursue
The religious tenor of public mourning for RBG reveals a conflation of Jewishness with American liberalism, which forecloses the possibility of reckoning with either.
The Editors
How Not to Fight Antisemitism
By appropriating the right’s strategy on antisemitism, the Jewish left has trapped itself in an empty discourse—and a counterproductive pose of victimhood.
The Editors
Past Events
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.
Listen Now
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Review
Activestills
Freed from Israeli Prison, Palestinian Returns to His Village
Photographer:

Oren Ziv/Activestills
Maher Younis, one of the oldest Palestinian prisoners, arrives in the village of Arara on January 19th after his release following 40 years of imprisonment. Israeli authorities arrested Younis in 1983 on the charge of killing an Israeli soldier. On... more
Review
Attention Must Be Paid
Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt expects us to shed fresh tears at a worn out conclusion.
Alisa Solomon
Analysis
For the Biden Administration, There Are No Red Lines On Israel
At the J Street Conference this past weekend, Secretary of State Antony Blinken delivered a speech fit for AIPAC.
Peter Beinart

Letters from Our Readers

On “The Sanitizing of Conservative Judaism”
Allen Lipson’s article thoughtfully charts how Conservative synagogues were used as tools for the deradicalization of Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants in America. Partly as a result of this push to assimilate... more
Guy Tabachnick
New York, NY
On “A Pantomimed Reckoning”
Without diminishing Hazem Fahmy’s overarching analysis and conclusions in “A Pantomimed Reckoning,” I would like to offer two points that complicate the issues under consideration, and perhaps suggest that the... more
Asaf Koliner
Jerusalem
Report

The Fight for the Future of Israel Studies

Donors view Israel studies as a vehicle for countering Palestine activism on campus. But many of the scholars they fund don’t toe the line.

Mari Cohen