Religion: The New Jewish Press

Israel ignores her poor. Jewish women are robots. Reform Jews are rubber-stamp leftists. Synagogues are sterile shells. These outspoken, sometimes outrageous statements are not the howls of angry Gentiles or even anti-Semitic Jews. They are the assertions of new voices in a combative array of Jewish magazines and newspapers that are blooming across the U.S. like kibbutzim in the desert. Some 50 publications with a combined press run of 400,000 now heckle Establishment Judaism from California to New York, even in such unlikely places as Norman, Okla., and Albuquerque, N. Mex.

The great majority of the new journals are campus or community papers, usually put together by small, zealous groups of students who want to question and criticize the comfortable Jewish world they grew up in. Last week 35 of the young editors were in New York for a three-day conference designed to make them into better journalists. The conference sponsor: the Jewish Student Press Service, a precariously budgeted wire service created two years ago to serve the new journals.

Ignoring Issues. The new Jewish press seems to have originated in the fall of 1966 in Manhattan, when Columbia Sophomore Alan Mintz and Yale Sophomore James Sleeper founded the quarterly Response. “We thought Jewish intellectuals were ignoring important Jewish issues,” explains Mintz today. “But we also wanted to publish poetry, fiction, even satire.” At first, Response took only undergraduate material. Now it welcomes contributions from Jews of all ages and the quality has improved markedly.

The Six-Day War of 1967 created competition for Response. As Israel stayed longer and longer in conquered Arab territories, it came under fire from Arab organizations in the U.S., from black militants and the New Left, including some Jewish-born radicals. In Montreal, a paper set itself up as the other stand and took issue with the most virulent critics. The editors said they would condemn Israel’s policies when they were “oppressive” but would never “work for her destruction.”

Others followed, few of them in the liberal mold of most existing Jewish journals. Berkeley produced the ultraprogressive Jewish Radical, Long Island University the conservative Dawn, Boston the polished, thoroughgoing genesis 2. The Jewish Liberation Journal, one of the few with a national circulation, began to bestow a nose-thumbing “Uncle Jake Award”; one in 1971 went to a Philadelphia Jewish group that gave a $50-a-plate dinner for then Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo, the hard-line law-and-order man who is now the city’s mayor. At Washington University in St. Louis, a periodical appeared under a catchy acronym, ACIID, for a pretentious name: a critical insight into Israel’s dilemmas. But ACIID has tried to live up to its name. It has run an article by an Arab attacking Israeli expansionism, and for a while had two Arabs on its editorial board.

The journals are not devoted exclusively to politics. Some have delved into the intricacies of Jewish religious law, Halakhah, as they apply to contemporary problems, genesis 2 printed an angry sermon on a Boston slumlord, urging that the Jewish community not ignore Halakhic prescriptions about a landlord’s obligations to tenants. Response published a provocative piece by Rabbi Everett Gendler, suggesting that groups of believing families could find an alternative to the traditional synagogue by sharing their homes for services and celebrations.

Touchy Subjects. Some older Jews have been quick to see that such controversial editorial tactics could help to revitalize the thinking of less radical communities too. The best new Jewish journal on the market today —and arguably the liveliest Jewish periodical in the U.S.—is a slim, stapled biweekly called Sh’ma, from the Hebrew confession of faith, which begins “Sh’ma Yisrael” (Hear, O Israel). The eight-page offset sheet was started in 1970 by Reform Rabbi Eugene Borowitz, professor of Jewish thought at the Manhattan campus of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. Scholar Borowitz, 48, who edits Sh’ma in his home, is himself a staunch but critical supporter of Israel and an advocate of more rigorous theological interpretations of modern issues, but he uses his paper as a forum for argument rather than a platform. His list of contributing editors is a Who’s Who cross section of North American Judaism, including such names as Conservative Historian Arthur Hertzberg, Orthodox Philosopher Norman Lamm and Novelist Elie Wiesel.

Sh’ma’s contributors, who are not paid, delight in attack and counterattack. Many of the debates, like those in Sh’ma’s youthful prototypes, revolve around how religious law applies to such touchy subjects as homosexuality, legalized gambling and the conspicuous consumption involved in weddings. One article by Novelist Cynthia Ozick charged that any Jew who marries a Gentile is an apostate, however unwitting.

The ability to tolerate vigorous dissent is one of the best characteristics of the new Jewish press, whether the dissent is of the left or the right. One fairly new journal, founded by post-college Jews in 1968 but only now making real gains in readership, is Ideas, a self-styled “journal of conservative thought” aimed at intellectuals. Its conservatism extends to politics as well as theology. One article last year by Editor Michael S. Kogan was called “Ignorance Abroad”—and turned out to be a fierce anti-Communist tract warning of the dangers of policies of accommodation with China.