On the Nose

A strange fire has consumed the land between the river and the sea. Fiction by Henry Bean from our Fall 2025 issue. " The Event " was written by Henry Bean and edited for the page by Arielle Angel and Nathan Goldman. It was narrated by the author, with sound design and music by Amber Devereux at Tin Can Audio "The Event" was recorded in New York City by Will Coley, with additional recording by Ann...

This episode of On the Nose is for subscribers and members only. Subscribe for $4/month here . If you're already a subscriber, check your email for instructions on accessing this episode. Last week, two videos of constituents aggressively confronting California State Senator Scott Wiener on his stance on Israel/Palestine went viral—one from a World Cup watch party and one from a trans march during...

Last week, the Supreme Court ruled on several issues related to immigration policy. While the court narrowly preserved birthright citizenship, it issued other rulings that will put an untold number of people in danger. One ruling, Mullin v Al Otro Lado , upheld the federal government’s policy of turning back asylum seekers before they can reach the US-Mexico border—a policy also known as “metering...

Over the last couple weeks, there has been an enormous amount written—from The New York Times to Le Monde to Haaretz , among other places—about a controversy centered on Nadav Lapid, an Israeli filmmaker living in France. Lapid has made several critically acclaimed films, including Synonyms , Ahed’s Knee , and, most recently, Yes , and his work has taken home jury prizes at the Berlinale and Canne...

In the latest issue of Jewish Currents , we published a piece called “ Does the Jewish Body Keep the Score? ” by Jon Danforth-Appell, which looks at three recent left-wing books about the relationship between Jewish trauma and Zionism, and challenges the view that Zionism in Jewish communities constitutes a trauma response that will need to be healed in order to be fought. On this episode of On th...

Last Sunday, New York City officials took part in the annual Israel Day Parade on Fifth Avenue. Mayor Zohran Mamdani was notably absent, insisting that this was not a “Jewish pride parade,” as it is often styled, but a celebration of a country committing genocide, and saying he did not need to be present to “ensure the safety” of the parade. His resolve proved prudent, as New York officials found...

In 2021, famed Irish author Sally Rooney declined to publish her book in Israel because there was no BDS-compliant publisher. At the time, she said she would be “pleased and proud” to have her books translated into Hebrew, as long as it was done in a way that respected the principles of the boycott. Last week, Rooney announced that she was publishing a Hebrew translation of her latest book, Interm...

Over the last eight years, streamer and leftist political commentator Hasan Piker has built a following of millions on Twitch, where he streams seven to ten hours a day, discussing current events and interacting with followers in a rapid-fire chat. Lately, Piker, who has hit the campaign trail for Democratic candidates like Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, has become the object of a ragin...

On April 29th in London, an attacker stabbed a Muslim acquaintance before traveling to the largely Jewish neighborhood of Golders Green and stabbing two Jewish men at random. This was only the latest in a string of attacks on Jews, synagogues, or other communal infrastructure in the UK since mid-March; other instances have included arson attacks on three synagogues as well as Hatzola ambulances ....

Harriet Clark comes from a long line of radicals. Her ancestors were gun runners in Minsk. Her grandparents were active members of the Communist Party USA, and the family moved to Moscow for a time, where her grandfather wrote for the Daily Worker . Her mother is Judith Clark, a former member of the Weather Underground and the May 19th Communist Organization, who was given a life sentence for her...

After more than ten years as the rabbi of the anti-Zionist synagogue Tzedek Chicago, Rabbi Brant Rosen is stepping down. On this episode of On the Nose , Rosen speaks with editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents , Arielle Angel—who after eight years is also leaving her post—about what has changed in the building of anti-Zionist institutions over the last decade, what it means to do Jewish left communal...

On this episode of On the Nose , Jewish Currents editor-in-chief Arielle Angel, publisher Daniel May, editor-at-large Peter Beinart, and advisory board member Simone Zimmerman answered listener questions about what accountability looks like for US rabbinic leadership, how American Zionists will respond to Israel’s plummeting popularity, and more. For the very first time, this episode of On the Nos...

As right-wing streamers like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens have become more outspoken against Israel and against Zionist influence in American politics, their content has found new audiences online, even in a Palestine movement traditionally more associated with the left. Though the fracture on the right around Israel is a welcome development, the anti-Israel right’s racist, misogynist, anti-tr...

The US and Israel began a joint strike on Iran on February 28th, with the US immediately striking a girls’ elementary school , killing more than 180, the vast majority of them children. The Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, was assassinated the very same day, and later replaced by his son Mojtaba; the US and Israel have continued to kill high-ranking figures in Iranian leadership. The human to...

On March 12th, 41-year-old Ayman Ghazali rammed his car into the front of Temple Israel, a synagogue in West Bloomfield, Michigan. He engaged in a shootout with synagogue security, injuring one guard before turning the gun on himself. Thankfully, no one else was injured. Earlier in the month, Ghazali’s two brothers, niece, and nephew had been killed in an Israeli airstrike in Mashghara, Lebanon. (...

In early February, clips began circulating from Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission hearing, where the former Miss California Carrie Prejean Boller challenged Jewish activists Yitzhak Frankel and Shabbos Kestenbaum about the killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and the conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism. Notably, Prejean Boller framed her opposition to political Zionism in terms of h...

Last weekend, the United States and Israel started a war with Iran. The Trump administration has offered no real or convincing reason why they have dragged the country into war except “Israel was going to do it anyway,” and the president has no discernible war plan . Many have commented that this war seems to be an expression of pure power, undertaken by Trump largely because he can. Have we enter...

Recently, the Jewish Federation of North America released a poll they conducted last year that shows that while 88% of respondents said they “believe Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish, democratic state,” only 37% identified as “Zionist.” A small number identified as “anti-Zionist” and “non-Zionist,” 7% and 8% respectively, with a plurality answering “not sure” (18%) or “none of these” (30%...

Recently, the Department of Justice released millions of files from disgraced financier and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Since their release, part of the discussion has revolved around the way Jewishness appears in the files. Epstein and his friends make clannish jokes about Jews and “goyim,” many of them simultaneously self-deprecating and chauvinistic. Epstein himself is extremely interested in ge...

In December, ICE agents began arriving in Minneapolis under the Trump administration’s “Operation Metro Surge.” As of late January, 3,000 agents are on the ground in the city, outnumbering local police officers three-to-one, pursuing a campaign defined by its cruelty: ICE has abducted children as young as two , and agents have used those children as bait to draw out and arrest their families. To c...

On Christmas, director Josh Safdie released his new film, Marty Supreme , starring Timothée Chalamet as a young table-tennis player bent on global recognition. Like Safdie’s previous film— Uncut Gems , co-directed with his brother Benny Safdie— Marty Supreme focuses on an American Jewish antihero and unfolds in a deeply Jewish milieu. But while Uncut Gems takes place in present-day New York, Marty...

On Saturday, January 3rd, President Trump announced that a military raid on Caracas had captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, and brought him back to the US to face drug charges. The operation followed months of deadly US strikes against boats purportedly ferrying drugs from Venezuela and a military buildup off its coast. But even after Maduro was seized, the administration still could not, o...

On December 14th, two gunmen opened fire on a celebration marking the first night of Hanukkah at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, killing 15 and injuring more than 40. The gunmen, a father and son, have since been linked to the Islamic State. Immediately, as observers near and far were just beginning to process and mourn, bad actors rushed in to claim the narrative. Israeli Prime Minister Benjami...

This year saw the release of two memoirs concerned with the Palestinian diasporic experience. Tareq Baconi’s Fire in Every Direction is a story of queer adolescent unrequited love, braided together with a family history of displacement from Haifa to Beirut to Amman. Sarah Aziza’s The Hollow Half is a story of surviving anorexia and the ways that the body holds the intergenerational grief of the on...

In spring 2023, journalist and filmmaker Antony Loewenstein published The Palestine Laboratory , a book tracing the way that Israeli military technology and weaponry, battle-tested on Palestinians, is exported around the world. Lowenstein argues that as Israel’s surveillance and combat technologies are sold far and wide, we can expect to see the forms of violence carried out in Gaza, for example,...