Dear Reader,

We’re excited to offer an exclusive first look at our forthcoming Summer issue—a themed issue on the state of Florida. The cover photo is a tribute to Miami’s otherworldliness by Robby Campbell.

For the next two weeks only, renew your subscription for 25% off to receive this issue in your mailbox! Use code RENEW24 at check-out.

Inside the issue:

• In a staff Responsa, the editors take Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s attacks on queer and anti-racist education as a starting point to consider how mainstream Jewish groups’ attempts to suppress the truth about Palestine have made them accomplices to conservatives’ autocratic ambitions.

• Alex Kane’s profile of the bombastic Florida state representative Randy Fine shows how the Jewish, pro-Israel power broker is navigating antisemitism and rising neo-isolationism within the America First right.

• In photographs from 1977–1986 and a new accompanying essay, Gary Monroe contemplates the end of old Jewish Miami Beach and the rise of Little Haiti.

• Eight organizers—working on issues from immigration to climate to reproductive justice—provide dispatches from the frontlines of American autocracy, introduced by Zaina Alsous.

In addition, a pair of pieces examine two left experiments in South Florida: The co-owners of Paradis Books & Bread remember the life and death of the radical bookstore, while Marina Magloire looks back on the Third World Feminist School. Gavriel Cutipa-Zorn traces violent parallel histories of orange cultivation in Florida and Israel, which have set the stage for a present-day agricultural partnership. Sasha Wortzel speaks with Shoog McDaniel about photographing queer life in rural Florida amid widespread repression. In an illustrated guide to the vegetation of subtropical South Florida, Monica Uszerowicz explores how plant wisdom connects the region’s Indigenous and diaspora communities. Max Freedman’s portrait of a Miami Jewish community suffused with hardline Zionism asks: Is this the future of American Jewish life? Arlo Haskell details the little-known history of the Jewish cell of the Cuban Revolutionary Party. Fargo Nissim Tbakhi reflects on a session with a Florida medium in a time of genocide. Samantha Schuyler reviews DeSantis’s presidential campaign memoir, which details his expansion of executive power—and foreshadows the possible shape of a second Trump term. Plus, fiction by Ryan Alan Boyle, poetry by Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, art by Beatriz Chachamovits, and more!

Be sure to renew today for 25% off to receive this issue in your mailbox! Use code RENEW24 at check-out.

We hope you enjoy the issue.

Sincerely,
Jewish Currents