From Liberties, by Arash Azizi.
A friend of mine once asked me why I get so worked up about Jewish Currents, a left-wing American magazine known for airing anti-Zionist views. Of all the actors large and small that help shape the narrative about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, why care about a magazine based in Long Island with a few thousand subscribers?
“Because it belongs to us historically,” I said. “It’s one of our own!”
My friend was confused. Why did an Iranian of Muslim background who had moved to the US in his late twenties identify with a small Jewish publication?
My friend had assumed, as our identity-addled-age dictated he ought, that I was talking about an ethno-cultural “us.” No, I told him, I am not secretly Jewish. The community to which I alluded and with which I deeply identify is global socialism – an ideology, a worldview.
Jewish Currents’ first life began in November of 1946, at which time it appeared under the name Jewish Life and was founded and run by affiliates of the Communist Party of the United States. In November 1956, the world communist movement got shaken from head to toe when the Soviet Union outrageously invaded communist Hungary to overthrow the reformist government of Imre Nagy and defeat the country’s anti-Stalinist revolutionaries. That paroxysm was the last in a year-long series for the movement, the first of which began in February when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced his predecessor, Joseph Stalin, as a criminal. Thousands of communists left their parties that year and Jewish Life was among the exiles. After the rupture the magazine broke with the party’s Moscow-aligned leadership and changed its name to Jewish Currents. It identified with a liberal faction in CPUSA led by John Gates (Né Solomon Regenstreif, born to Polish-Jewish parents in New York City, long before he Anglicized his name.) For decades, the magazine was edited by a legendary communist of the same political orientation, Morris Schappes (Né Moise ben Haim Shapshilevich.)
I care about Jewish Currents because it is born from that storied movement begun in 1956 and led by the likes of Nagy, Gates and Schappes, which was dedicated to the essential and important project of democratizing communism. Whatever its negligible contemporary readership and intellectual heft, its origins are lofty and demand respect. My friend was right of course that the magazine was helmed and in some part dedicated to a particular ethno-cultural community, i.e. that of American Jews. But it also belonged to a particular global ideological community with which I did and do identify. And so when I got word in 2018, shortly after I arrived in New York, that its pages had been resuscitated I was enthusiastic and eager.
Alas, it rapidly became clear that the current iteration of the publication is betraying the tradition from which it had emanated in two distinct but related ways.
Arash Azizi is a writer and historian. He is a visiting fellow at Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future and a contributing writer at the Atlantic.