Dear Reader,

In the two weeks since Donald Trump was elected, I’ve found it difficult to wrap my head around this moment. Every day, the headlines announce what it will look like to live in Trump’s America—again: Mass deportations carried out by the US military. An anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist in charge of the country’s healthcare. A disgraced congressman under investigation for sex trafficking in charge of the Justice Department. And while we contemplate the horrors to come, American bombs continue to drop in Gaza and Lebanon.

I wish I could say that I’m writing to you with a clear sense of what we—you, me, the left—should do, an answer to the question of how our rage and our despair can be channeled. But that wouldn’t be honest.

What I do know is this: If we have any hope of fighting back—if we have any hope of stopping the bombs, of holding onto our humanity, of saving our neighbors and ourselves—that hope is rooted in the spaces where people of conscience come together to think, to write, to reflect, and to take action.

In the words of the artist David Wojnarowicz, “history keeps me awake at night”—in my case, thinking about the fact that my grandmother’s expulsion from Germany by a fascist dictator is being used to justify the murder of tens of thousands in Gaza. We need readers, writers, and thinkers who are making connections across history—who are clocking the rise of fascism in the country to which we fled from fascism; who oppose the exploitation of Jewish trauma to inflict more trauma. If you’re reading this, I’m sure you know that this is a crucial part of our work at Jewish Currents.

Throughout his campaign, Trump talked about the “enemy within.” We know he was talking about us, and we know he was talking about many of you. In the coming years, we are going to need each other. And we know that we won’t be able to continue our work without your support.

I hope you’ll join me in making sure that Jewish Currents can continue to provide the vital reflection and truth-telling that we’ll need in this new era.

Onward,
Naomi Gordon-Loebl
Deputy Publisher