Jun

27

2025

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): One of the best things I’ve read since Zohran Mamdani’s momentous win in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary was this essay by Abdaljawad Omar in Mondoweiss, which explores the shifting role of Israel in American politics. Since Andrew Cuomo conceded to the 33-year-old socialist Tuesday night, much of the left has been in a state of euphoria; everyone I know is gorging on hope, stuffing it into their cheeks like chipmunks before a long winter. I’m not generally the hopeful sort—I find it more bearable to resolve to keep on without it—but I have rationed myself some happiness this week, and I have felt irritated by the rumblings of those for whom nothing is ever good enough. There were many who criticized Mamdani for what I believed to be a brilliant solution to that age-old shibboleth, the question of Israel’s “right to exist”; Mamdani asserted that he believes Israel has a right to exist “as a state with equal rights,” an unassailable answer that is only enhanced by the way it undoes itself, exposing the impossibility of such a prospect. Others were annoyed with the space he devoted to validating Jewish fear, even as he maintained his commitment to Palestinian freedom. Yes, this whole setup is irredeemably racist! Mamdani shouldn’t be dogged by this question everywhere he goes. But he is, and it’s refreshing to see him handle it with grace, and then win.

Omar never equivocates on the significance of Mamdani’s victory. On the contrary, he identifies it as a “monumental” sea change in American politics. But he also helped me better understand the anxieties of those who are not sated by Mamdani’s performance, who critique “not out of cynicism but historical memory,” while also offering an illuminating analysis of just what has changed. This is not an overnight transformation from the hegemony of support for Israel to the embrace of Palestinian liberation, but rather a gradual arrival to a place where the issue has become “contested terrain—one in which candidates can engage, hedge, affirm, or deflect without automatic disqualification.” If there is opportunity here, there is also a risk: that “the system, unable to fully neutralize Palestine as a politics, will instead absorb it as discourse—sanitized, defanged, and made legible only through the grammar of ‘balance.’”

Where the piece shines brightest is in its apt descriptions of Zionist excess, and the symptoms we are witnessing of an America increasingly chafing under its weight. “When every critique becomes a potential hate crime, when every call for ceasefire is labeled incitement, and when every protest is framed as an antisemitic gathering—something begins to shift in the symbolic order. The very machinery meant to preserve Israel’s hegemonic position in American moral life begins to unravel it,” he writes. The electorate is exhausted by the badgering about “Israel’s right to exist,” by “the politician’s obligatory fealty, the ritualistic declarations of support.” They have become stale in repetition, drawn too much attention to the coercive machinery. We are not, Omar asserts, “in the presence of a victorious counter-hegemony, but in the ruins of a narrative that exhausted itself by insisting too much, too often, and at the expense of everything else.”

This analysis resonates, and while it comes as some relief, it also opens onto some anxiety of my own. Omar leaves mainstream American Jews outside the frame of his analysis, and yet they are everywhere in the piece, insisting on narrative supremacy. Since Tuesday, many of them have been caught in an embarrassingly public racist meltdown, expressing hysterical delusions that the principled Mamdani is going to do 9/11 or shut down all the synagogues. It is not hard to see how an exhaustion with the demands of Zionist fealty inevitably leads to exhaustion with those Jewish communal enforcers who are requiring it, often at the expense of a focus on the material issues that immiserate their neighbors. This is exactly what right-wingers like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens are picking up on when they offer up anti-interventionism with a side of antisemitic conspiracy. But the appeal is not limited to the right. It is a condition ripe for the proliferation of antisemitism, and for its utter disregard, from which all of us will suffer.

Daniel May (publisher): No one knows how to make magazines work. The algorithms that once had a knack for getting articles you might want to read in front of your scrolling eyeballs now just feed you “influencer content” and advertisements for whatever shoe you last looked at. As traffic has slowed, online advertising that once generated real money has dwindled. Growing a substantial subscriber base requires putting content behind a paywall, which makes the work less accessible, which means it gets to less people, which makes it harder to grow a subscriber base. To say publishing is not a business I would recommend implies it’s a business. But magazines do not make money, almost ever. They lose money, which means that magazines, especially smaller magazines, exist because people with excess capital believe that they should. But magazines are a hard sell for philanthropists. It’s hard to measure the “impact” of a magazine, and any serious one is likely to publish at least some work that any donor, just like any reader, is sure to take issue with—a truism that is even more true for magazines of the left.

All this to say that a rather small number of donors enable most magazines to exist. Many of the good ones rely on one supporter in particular, the Ideas Workshop of the Open Society Foundation, which seems to have taken upon itself the charge of single-handedly keeping alive the world literary political journalism: the work of places like n+1, Lux, The Baffler, Africa Is A Country, and some dozen others (including, of course, Jewish Currents). In doing so, the workshop has made itself indispensable for those invested in such enterprises. Recognizing the potential inherent in its role as a hub of literary criticism and analysis, in the fall of 2023 they launched The Ideas Letter, a newsletter/online magazine that brings together work by the prodigious network of writers, editors, and intellectuals connected to the workshop.

It sounds like faint praise to say that The Ideas Letter is way better than it needs to be, but it’s way better than it needs to be. Most foundations highlight the work they support, and every biweekly issue does feature a selection of curated essays, some of which are written by authors or appear in publications supported by the workshop. But each issue also includes two or three (or sometimes, in special issues, more) original essays and reviews. While issues contain a certain eclecticism, there is, I think, a central preoccupation that guides the Letter as a whole. Both befitting and betraying its host, perhaps the single most influential (and controversial) liberal philanthropy in the world, many of the issues and essays touch in some way on how to understand the collapse of the liberal order as we have known it over the last half-century. You might encounter a probing essay by longtime Amnesty International senior staffer Nicolas Bequelin on whether the infrastructure of human rights can survive the end of the Western hegemony upon which it is built—and whether it should; or Jewish Currents contributing editor David Klion on whether liberalism can survive the decline of liberal institutions (including the aforementioned world of magazines); or the Tunisian political psychologist Nadia Marzouki on the limitations of anti-imperial politics in her home country.

For perhaps obvious reasons, I took special note of last week’s issue, which featured the best review I’ve read of my colleague Peter Beinart’s Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, by Jewish Currents contributing writer Linda Kinstler. In that review, Kinstler puts Beinart’s book in conversation with Pankaj Mishra’s The World After Gaza, and wonders whether in all their darkness both books might not in fact be overly hopeful. Both, she notes, implicitly assume that the devastation in Gaza marks a definitive break; but what if the lesson we end up learning is that there is no lesson, that the world will in fact accept such violence and move on to the next horrific episode?

In that issue, Kinstler’s essay sits alongside a personal essay by Liberties managing editor Celeste Marcus on a lifelong attempt to understand the nature of the Jewish God, and an analysis of Beinart’s work and career by longtime Nation columnist Eric Alterman. As a trio, the pieces offer a good example of the publication’s (and the workshop’s) approach to its term of self-description: “Heterodox.” Consistently surprising in form and rigorous in content, The Ideas Letter invites readers into the extended community of the Ideas Workshop; in doing so, it makes a strong case for all the “little magazines” the workshop supports, including its own.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Let me begin by saying that the Catalan director Albert Serra’s documentary Afternoons of Solitude is a film that not only is not for everyone; it’s a film that will morally upset many of you. Its subject matter, bullfighting, toward which Serra takes no clear position, is a sport—if I might call it that—that is viewed by many as the equivalent of cockfighting, an undisguised form of animal cruelty. In come places the rules and the cruelty have been modified, but Afternoons of Solitude is about bullfighting in its purest form, in Spain, during the day, with the matador facing the possibility of death and the bull, after being stuck with banderillas, facing near certain death.

Serra, whose films until now I’ve found pretentious and dull to the point of suffocation has, with this film, produced a mesmerizing work, a film that does nothing to disguise the murderousness of tauromachy on both sides. The focus of the film is the young Peruvian torero Andres Roca Rey. We are told nothing about him, his antecedents, or the trajectory of his career. We join him and his team of toreros as they are on their way to a corrida, with the discussion mainly about the route. Several of them are in costume, the famous traje de luces. These occasional scenes in the van going to or from an arena are our only moments of respite from the deadly artistry of the bullfight.

Serra’s cameras place us right in the heart of the action. Every cry, every shout of advice from Roca Rey’s people, his cuadrilla, can be heard—their warnings, their encouragement, their counsels to the matador as to how the fight should progress through its foreordained stages and when it’s time to end it. In two of the fights, Roca is butted but not gored by the bulls, and in both cases, he returns to the arena. Machismo can reach no more crazed or exalted heights. The posturing of the matador during the fight, his almost insane taunting of the animal, as if it can understand it’s being taunted, are shown to us in closeup. After especially successful corridas, his cuadrilla praise his cojones. An entire society’s vision of masculinity is laid out for us. And yet, Roca Rey, preternaturally slim, is wearing the absurdly ornate bullfighter’s costume. We are shown all that is required in order for him to don it: with pantyhose as a foundation, pink knee socks, and the donning of the knickers requiring him to be lifted off the ground by his wardrobe master.

Roca Rey is full of bravery and bravado; his bulls only occasionally explode in rage. The traje de luces ends a bullfight covered in blood, none of it Roca Rey’s. Afternoons of Solitude is a film from which you will at times want to look away, but won’t be able to. I expected, even wanted to hate this film. I didn’t. Not in the least. As much as any deep film on human relationships, this film has led me to question why I didn’t and what that says about me.

In our parshah, Korach, a Levite and a relative of Moses and Aaron, joins with other communal leaders to mobilize the majority of the Israelites against the two brothers. Korach argues that Moses and Aaron have unjustly lorded themselves above the community, condemning their rigid, hierarchical leadership over a people “that is itself entirely holy.” So Moses appeals to God to weigh in on the truth of this dispute—i.e., whether he and his brother are serving at God’s will or acting for their own personal gain. God’s answer is decisive: Korach, his fellow leaders Datan and Aviram, and all those in their immediate vicinity are swallowed up by the earth; an additional 250 people who had protested Aaron’s right to the priesthood are consumed by divine fire while offering incense; and another 14,700 others are killed in an ensuing plague.

This story proves challenging for many leftist readers. What’s so unjust about Korach’s resistance to the established hierarchy? Should we not be on the side of those who rebel in order to try and advance a more egalitarian society? The rabbinic tradition attempts to answer these questions by classifying Korach’s dispute as one “not for the sake of heaven,” arguing that it was undertaken instead for personal gain; they understand Korach as pursuing the priesthood for himself, rather than advocating a radical democratization. They even imagine him pulling together a coalition of other parties who have their own unrealized claims to power—the firstborns demanding the return of their sanctity that was transferred to the Levites, the Reubenites seeking the firstborn privileges that Reuben was denied, Korach’s fellow Levites also clamoring for the priesthood. In this view, theirs is not a righteous uprising for the people, but rather a demagogue’s power-hungry coalition.

Strikingly, Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum (1887-1979), the famously sectarian founder of the Satmar Hasidic dynasty, paints a much more sympathetic portrait of Korach in his Torah commentary, Divrei Yoel. He writes that Korach was among the “gedolei hador,” one of the greatest men in his generation. He concurs that Korach sought to lead, but claims this desire stemmed from misinterpretation of a prophecy that connected his line and the priesthood. According to Teitelbaum, Korach didn’t seek this post on account of its grandeur; rather, he aspired toward a vision of holiness and perfection, and simply erred in his understanding of God’s plan.

And it was precisely his piety that inspired many to join him; they believed in the sincerity of his religious vision. This, Teitelbaum tells us, is why Moses and Aaron protest when God announces a plan to destroy the entire people in punishment: “When one member sins, will You be wrathful with the whole community?” they ask. At first glance, this is a startling plea: Far more than one person has sinned! In fact, Korach has the majority of the community on his side. But Teitelbaum explains that because many of the people were drawn into sin precisely because of the transgression of one great man—a person they respected and trusted—they should not be held liable for their sins (at least not at the cost of their lives). Teitelbaum contrasts Korach and his followers with those rallying behind Datan and Aviram, whom he depicts as protesting exclusively for the purpose of division and material gain. According to Teitelbaum, this explains why Rashi, citing the Midrash Tanchuma, states that God, unlike an earthly king, is able to divine people’s thoughts and discern who is truly a sinner. Why, Teitelbaum asks, does God need divine insight in this instance? Is it not abundantly clear who has rebelled? Rather, the midrash explains that God can discern between those who have been led astray through holy motivations versus those who pursued power and influence, even if both are joined in coalition.

All of this is a surprisingly positive portrayal of Korach and his supporters from Teitelbaum, who was notorious for his vehement excoriation of ideological opponents (particularly Zionists). And yet he doesn’t hold back from ultimately condemning Korach’s project. In fact, Teitelbaum maps our parshah’s lessons onto his own sectarian concerns, arguing that Moses pleads with God to not accept the rebels’ offerings because any project undertaken with evildoers—even if the project itself is worthwhile—will ultimately lead to devastation. Referencing the Yom Kippur prayer in which we request permission “to pray with the transgressors,” Teitelbaum asserts that one can only be in community or coalition with transgressors if it’s in order to bring them toward teshuva; in the absence of such a goal, alliance with transgressors brings only moral and material ruin.

Writing on this parshah last year, Aron Wander reflected on the idea that we are all transgressors, or have the capacity to be, and suggested that such an acknowledgement may be the only way to move others. This is a helpful corrective to the impulse to position ourselves as uncritically righteous when decrying the moral failure of so many establishment Jewish communities. In his work Tzidkas HaTzadik, Rabbi Tzadok HaKohen (1823-1900) points out that righteous people who view righteousness in absolute, binary terms are incapable of viewing themselves as sinners. A world in which Korach is either all revolutionary or all demagogue is likely one in which we’re incapable of acknowledging our own moral complexities and failures, and incapable of moving others not already within our envisioned realm of righteousness.

And yet it often feels that such humility and moral integrity are at odds with one another. As the story of Korach and its interpretations point to, it can be hard to acknowledge moral complexity without slipping into moral relativism; the binary of entirely righteous or entirely sinister rebellion seems reductive, but that insight can sometimes lead to a hands-in-the-air abdication of rendering any moral judgment. How do I acknowledge my own moral imperfection and possibility for growth while confidently believing that there are positions I hold that are vital and true? Teitelbaum’s reading of the story of Korach further complicates a simple division of the virtuous from the vicious by distinguishing between those who are misled by leaders and arguments they thought to be righteous and those who act cruelly in bad faith. In Teitelbaum’s view, those who are simply led astray by bad leaders don’t merit God’s punishment, but that doesn’t spare them from his category of “reshaim”—sinners we can only share community with if we actively strive to move them away from transgression. Does such a distinction hold in the context of the current genocide?

Korach may not lend itself to a binaristic analysis of good and evil, but the takeaway doesn’t have to be that we are all, on any given topic, equivalently righteous and transgressive, that we can never discern between disputes that are holy or profane. While there may not be any neat answers, I hope that contemplating this story and Teitelbaum’s interpretation can be mobilizing rather than paralyzing; that we can acknowledge the complexity of human motivation in a way that prompts us to examine our own flaws and blind spots while still holding firm moral lines.

Rabbi Lexie Botzum is a Torah learner, teacher, and organizer based in Washington Heights.