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Oct
8
2024

Facing Ourselves in 5785

Dear Reader,

During the High Holidays, one of the mandates for Jews is teshuvah. The word literally means “return,” and it’s often interpreted as a return to the self. Who have we been in this past year? How have we shown up in the world, and what has the impact been? It’s a time, in other words, to face ourselves.

This year, facing ourselves seems excruciating. In my book Doppelganger, I write about the impulse to project that which we cannot face onto others, our doppelgangers. And throughout the past twelve months, we’ve witnessed so many people attempt to deny their responsibility for, and complicity in, the destruction of Gaza by displacing attention and responsibility onto others. It is not American bombs falling on hospitals that are the greatest threat to human lives, they tell us, but students on campuses calling for Palestinian liberation.

It is hard to see such mendacity and cynicism and not fall into despair. But in the past year, I have felt such profound kinship in Jewish Currents, in whose pages I see the real work—challenging, complicated, unflinching—of facing ourselves. I am beyond grateful. And as we go into this new year, determined to find hope among so much devastation, this is a magazine, and an intellectual community, that I deeply cherish. When Jewish Currents is strong, we are all stronger.

Will you help Jewish Currents continue its vital reporting? Contribute this week, and your gift will be doubled.

I hope you’ll join me these High Holidays in supporting the urgent work of Jewish Currents. For the rest of this week, thanks to a generous donor, your gift will be matched—so now is the time to give. Here is to a year of returning to ourselves; here is to a more just, more peaceful world, in which everyone can live in safety and freedom.

Onward,
Naomi Klein