Our Winter 2022 issue will be arriving in mailboxes soon, and we’re hosting a subscription drive to coincide with its release. If you enjoy reading our coverage online, subscribe now to receive our work in print! Every dollar we receive goes toward supporting our staff, producing the magazine, and building the Jewish Currents community.

We’re excited to offer an exclusive first look at our forthcoming issue on the theme of rest. The concept was inspired by the recent close of the Shmita year, a sabbatical for the land that recurs every seven years on the Jewish calendar. The cover features an unsettling image by Maya Perry, which examines the way the bed shifts from a space of respite to a site of peril under the weight of trauma.

Inside the issue: In a staff Responsa, the editors confront the tension between anti-work politics and the labor of political struggle. Erik Baker calls on the left to fight for a right to grieve. In a manifesto from the threatened Atlanta Forest, the Fayer Collective explores the relationship between Shmita and destruction. In our new Chevruta column, in which activists and Torah scholars use Jewish texts to probe timely ethical questions, The Debt Collective joins Allen Lipson to ask: “What is debt and when can we refuse to pay?” A comic by Avi Garelick and Sol Brager traces the intertwined histories of the fights for Jewish workers to be able to observe Shabbat and for all workers to have a weekend. Maryam Ivette Parhizkar reflects on sleep training her infant son and the entanglements of maternal care. Lyudmyla Khersonska contemplates the strange restfulness of emergency in embattled Ukraine, and Bench Ansfield returns the concept of burnout to the term’s origins in the practice of landlord arson. In reviews, we have Helen Betya Rubinstein on Rest Is Resistance by the Nap Ministry’s Tricia Hersey, Charlie Tyson on the reissue of Paul Lafargue’s controversial 1883 socialist classic The Right to Be Lazy, and Dylan Saba on the tension between productivist and conservationist approaches to the climate crisis. Plus, fiction by Susan Taubes, poetry by Peter Cole and Mario Chard, art by nibia pastrana santiago, and more!

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If you do not yet subscribe, now is the time (and perhaps consider sending a gift subscription to a friend or relative)! Receive our quarterly magazine—three gorgeous issues a year plus a special winter gift from Jewish Currents. Sign up by December 5th to make sure you’re among the first to receive the Winter issue.