On the Nose

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,...

“Real life conspiracies pose a certain challenge for political analysis,” wrote Jewish Currents contributors Noah Kulwin and Ari Brostoff in their 2019 piece on Jeffrey Epstein, the child sex trafficker, financier, and international rainmaker. As recently reported in a series of articles at Drop Site News , Epstein had close ties to the Israeli intelligence community, and frequently brokered meeti...

On November 11th, Israeli soldiers who had admitted to raping a Palestinian detainee at the now infamous detention camp Sde Teiman were met with applause and a standing ovation as they entered an Israeli courtroom. The scene ricocheted around the world, the latest portrait of the depravity that has gripped Israeli society. Accounts of the torture taking place at Sde Teiman were among the first thi...

Last week, the Holocaust-denying, white nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes sat down with former Fox News host turned podcaster Tucker Carlson on The Tucker Carlson Show , where the two discussed Fuentes’s trajectory, the evolution of his “America First” ideology, and the ways his rejection of the neoconservative common sense on Israel put him at odds with parts of the right-wing establishment. Fo...

Last week, a group calling itself The Jewish Majority published a “ Rabbinic Call to Action ” aimed at New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani in the last weeks of the campaign. “We cannot remain silent in the face of rising anti-Zionism and its political normalization throughout our nation,” the letter reads. Signed by over 1,100 rabbis, the letter quotes New York rabbis Ammiel Hirsch and...

For the second year in a row, Rabbis for Ceasefire held a Yizkor service on the streets of Brooklyn, using the traditional Yom Kippur memorial service as a means to mourn the dead in Gaza, to atone for American and Jewish communal participation in the genocide, and to refuse further complicity. After the Yizkor service—attended by 1,500 people and watched online by ten times that number—rabbis and...

Last week, President Donald Trump announced that Israel and Hamas had reached a ceasefire deal. A series of momentous events followed the announcement: First, Israel halted its military assault on Gaza—widely considered by international legal experts to be a genocide. Then, 20 Israeli captives who had been held by Hamas for two years were returned to Israel, while Israeli authorities released arou...

As media figures reacted to the assassination of right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk last month, a movement to purge those critical of President Trump and his MAGA movement found success. The most prominent censorship case came when ABC, bowing to pressure from the head of the Federal Communications Commission, pulled late-night host Jimmy Kimmel off the air for his anti-MAGA remarks during his op...

Charlie Kirk, influential right-wing commentator and founder of Turning Point USA, was assassinated on September 10th. Since then, he has been made into a martyr on the right, and the Trump administration has vowed to crack down on the left, despite details about the shooter’s motivation remaining hazy. Among liberals, there has been a baffling rush to hold Kirk up as a paragon of democracy—despit...

In this episode, Jewish Currents editor-at-large Peter Beinart interviews the philosopher, activist, author, and educator Angela Davis, whose writing and organizing have shaped Black liberation, feminist, queer, and prison abolitionist movements for more than 50 years. In a wide-ranging conversation, the two discuss how Jews shaped Davis’s formative years, analyze the Jewish role in the civil righ...

In this episode, Jewish Currents editor-in-chief Arielle Angel, editor-at-large Peter Beinart, associate editor Mari Cohen, and senior editor Nathan Goldman answer reader questions. They discuss the challenge of sustaining Jewish social reproduction outside of Zionism; the attachment to putting out a print magazine; the difficulties of comparing genocides; the discomforts of subscribing to the fre...