On the Nose

Over an election night that brought big wins for Democrats across the country, Abdul El-Sayed comfortably won his Michigan Senate race against Mike Rogers, despite prognostications that many Jewish Democrats would flip to Rogers because of El-Sayed’s unapologetic pro-Palestine stance and the eleventh-hour endorsement of Rogers by the staunchly pro-Israel Democrat Haley Stevens, who lost to El-Sayed in the primary. Some heavily Jewish Michigan districts did post softer numbers for El-Sayed compared to the 2024 vote for Kamala Harris or this election’s vote for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jocelyn Benson, but the mass defection did not materialize, with El-Sayed garn...

From the Shoah to McCarthyism to the failures of the New Left, it has been a long 20th century for radical Jews. Each new iteration of the Jewish left finds itself building on a legacy that has been largely buried, learning from a history of defeat at the hands of much more powerful forces. Given those losses, what do we inherit from both our movement ancestors and our actual kin? How does their example shape the way we organize in the present? Are there models from which we might learn? Or must we create something new for every new...

Seasons of Fury, a new book by the journalist Rozina Ali, tells a sweeping history of American Islamophobia through narrative reporting on four American Muslim families with varied backgrounds. The book reveals that American Zionism is integral to the story of anti-Muslim bias in the US. The legal structures for surveilling and criminalizing Muslims originated in US officials’ preoccupation with Palestinian militants in the 20th century, and Zionist organizations have been key participants in a broad civil society ecosystem pushing Islamophobia in the American mainstream. In this episode of On the Nose, senior politics editor Mari Cohen guest hosts to...

On July 9th, PEN America published an article called “A Silent Moratorium,” which asserts that Jewish and Israeli writers face “blatant hostility, discrimination, and hate” and attempts to chart the “impact on their freedom of expression.” The PEN article affirms a narrative advanced across Jewish media and mainstream press alike that—as the headline of a piece by James Kirchick in The New York Times put it—“a chill has fallen over Jews in publishing” amid the war on Gaza. The article has since been joined by other attempts to quantify the damage to Jewish letters: An article by the writer Meg Keene...

Naza, a film by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, features interviews with 24 members of elite intelligence units in the Israeli military describing the mechanics of carrying out remote, indiscriminate mass killing in Gaza. Since news spread of a 25-minute standing ovation for the film at the Venice Film Festival, it has provoked intense debate, with some Palestinians expressing criticism of the way that Israelis’ confessions have made the genocide more “real” in the West than Palestinians’ own testimony. Meanwhile, in Israel, the film has elicited disturbing incitement against the filmmakers (who currently remain abroad), and Prime Minister Benjamin...

Slam Frank—the satirical play about a Latina “Anita Franco” stuck in the attic with a colorblind cast (à la Hamilton) of daft identitarians—reopened last week Off-Broadway at the Orpheum Theatre in Manhattan. While some audience members have reportedly been shocked by its irreverent take on a child hero of the Holocaust, some viewers on both the left and the right are convinced that the play reflects their sensibilities and political leanings. The play’s author, Andrew Fox, has declined to say anything about his personal politics, but touchstone books of Jewish reactionary grievance like David Baddiel’s Jews Don’t Count a...

As we make our way through the Days of Awe, On the Nose is turning over our feed to an episode of Ways of Awe, an exploration of the high holiday liturgy written by artist and educator Maia Brown and writer and organizer Shelby Handler, and based on translations originally shared with the Kadima Reconstructionist Community in Seattle, WA. This episode explores the “Kol Nidre” prayer recited on Erev Yom Kippur, in which all vows from the year before are nullified. In this episode, the hosts spoke with Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg and Rabbi Xava De Cordova.

This epis...

On September 8th, the UK announced sanctions against Israeli settlements in the West Bank, including an import trade ban, sanctions on companies and individuals, bans on advertising the sale of stolen land, and restrictions on arms export licensing. They were joined in the adoption of these policies by France and Canada, and nine other European countries released a statement announcing intentions to support the effort. This unprecedented raft of policies was largely framed as an attempt to salvage the two-state solution and to counter planned settlement expansion into the E-1 Corridor, which would split the West Bank in two.<...

Organizing is hard, not just for the ways we are knocked down by our opponents, but also for the ways we often turn on our comrades in anger and despair. In the recently published book For Louder Days, Yotam Marom—a veteran of Occupy Wall Street, co-founder of IfNotNow, and movement facilitator who has worked with Sunrise, Dream Defenders, Uncommitted, and more—diagnoses how the left’s ambivalence about power leads to a number of bad habits. We tear down our leaders or pretend there are no leaders at all; we avoid conflict and hard choices, which leads to bad st...

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A recent article in Haaretz announced that a left-wing youth group called Hamahanot Haolim, part of the socialist Zionist movement, is planning a kibbutz-style settlement in the Jordan Valley, in the occupied West Bank. According to the article, organization director Ilan Gazit said that “he is aware of the damage West Bank settlements do to Palestinian rights, but argued that since new settlements will be built in t...

After a few years of seeing Jewish plays “debating” Israel/Palestine, Jewish Currents editor-at-large Arielle Angel and theater critic Alisa Solomon explored the phenomenon through an exchange of letters, which were published this week. On this episode of On the Nose, they discuss the plays that fall into this category: most recently, the critically acclaimed Birthright by Jonathan Spector, but also including The Zionists by S. Asher Gelman, Giant by Mark Rosenblatt, The Ally by Itamar Moses, and Prayer for the French Republic by Joshua Harmon. They detail the compulsive repetition of these plays and they explore why Jewish hand...

Progressive outsider candidate Abdul El-Sayed narrowly prevailed over establishment pick Haley Stevens to win the Democratic nomination for Michigan’s open Senate seat, though AIPAC spent tens of millions of dollars to defeat him. The narrative that has emerged before and after the primary is one that stresses El-Sayed’s weakness with Black and Jewish voters.

As Jewish Currents senior reporter Alex Kane wrote earlier this month, Black and Jewish centrists are teaming up in key races to defeat progressive candidates, whom they portray as fixated on Palestine at the expense of their Black constituents. As Darius Jone...

In early June 2024, the Holocaust historian Raz Segal was offered a job directing the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota after roundly impressing an academic search committee. But as soon as the offer was extended, donors, politicians, and Jewish advocacy groups mobilized against his hire due to his public advocacy against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which included his Jewish Currents article “A Textbook Case of Genocide” from October 13th, 2023. Within a week, the university’s interim president intervened to rescind Segal’s offer. Now, two years later, Segal, an associate professor of Holocaust and genoci...

The resounding success of Here Where We Live Is Our Country, Molly Crabapple’s vividly told and extensively researched history of the Jewish Labor Bund—a socialist group founded at the end of the 19th century on principles of internationalist solidarity, doikayt (or hereness), and Jewish national-cultural autonomy—has improbably brought the Bund, decimated in the Holocaust, into the 21st century. In this interview, Arielle Angel speaks with Crabapple about what it means to see the Bund from this vantage, from the other side of a century where Jews have gone from victims of genocide to genocidaires. What can we lea...

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 Annie Bennett. It was produced and directed by Ella Watts and Arielle Angel, with Executive Production by Arielle Angel.

...

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 Pride. Wiener, the likely replacement in the House for the retiring Nancy Pelosi, has joined commentators in labeling the incidents as antisemitic harassment. But pro-Palestine constituents have some basis for being wary of...

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”—hollowing out the right to asylum enshrined in both domestic and international law. In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor referenced the St. Louis, the ship of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany turned away from the US, wh...

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 Cannes.

The recent controversy was focused on the FIDMarseille international film festival. There was a planned retrospective of Palestinian films at the festival this year. Meanwhile, Lapid was invited to head the ju...

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 the Nose, Arielle Angel speaks with the author of one of those books, Wendy Elisheva Somerson, known as Wes, a somatic healer who helped found the Seattle chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace and...

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 themselves scrambling to distance themselves from the far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who is responsible for the creeping annexation and violent ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, and who took...

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, Intermezzo, with November Books and +972 Magazine. The publishers had been vetted by PACBI, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, and deemed BDS compliant. This means November Book...

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 raging debate about the direction of the Democratic Party. For many progressives, establishment attacks on Piker and the candidates he supports are evidence that the party is out of touch with its base, especially young people...

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. The British Jewish community—already on edge since the Yom Kippur attack on a Manchester synagogue that killed two and injured three—is in a state of rising alarm. Predictably, Jewish communal leaders, politicians, and the...

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 participation in the Brinks robbery in 1981 that killed three people. (Judith was paroled in 2019.)

Harriet Clark’s debut novel, The Hill, tells the story of a girl who vo...

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 work in a time of crisis for Judaism, and whether we must believe we will win.

Thanks to Jesse Brenneman for editing and to Nathan Salsburg for the use of his...

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 Nose was recorded live in front of an audience, which gathered at Littlefield in Brooklyn.

Thanks to the Littlefield staff for hosting and recording the event. Thanks to Jesse Brenneman for editing and to Nathan Salsburg for the use of...

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-trans, anti-immigrant, and antisemitic views raise questions about how the left should relate to this development, and what it can offer instead.

On this episode of On the Nose, Jewish Currents editor-in-chief Arielle Angel speaks with Izz al-Din Mustafa, co...

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 toll of this war is already being felt in Iran. Almost 1,500 Iranians have been killed since the war’s start, and more than three million have been displaced. On March 6th, Israel struck thre...

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. (The Israeli military claimed that one of the brothers was affiliated with Hezbollah, but offered no proof to The New York Times; Hezbollah denied his affiliation.)

After spending years insisting on the ab...

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 her Catholicism: “I’m a Catholic and Catholics do not embrace Zionism,” she said. She raised the charge of deicide, reading the New Testament verse about the Jews killing Jesus and questioning a panelist about whether he would have tech platforms censor the Bible on...

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 entered a new phase in malignant American foreign policy or is this just a striking “mask off” moment? In this episode of On the Nose, Jewish Currents editor-at-large Peter Beinart speaks w...

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%). These numbers are confusing; they seem to indicate that while Zionist identification is waning—perhaps due to the stink of the term amid the genocide—the underlying commitment to a Jewish state, albeit one paradoxically imagined as “democratic,” is not.

At the recent Conference on th...

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 genetics, sending out a number of DNA Kits to Jews and non-Jews alike, and referencing a natural Ashkenazi intelligence. The files also show close—and sometimes criminal—relationships to a number of prominent Jewish men. These details, along with information about Epstein’s role as...

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 counter these efforts, locals have organized vast mutual aid and rapid response operations, with block-by-block networks mobilizing to deliver supplies and run errands for undocumented people who can’t leave their homes without fear of detentio...

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 Supreme transports us back to the Lower East Side of 1952, examining American Jewish ambition in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust and amid assimilation into whiteness. This mid-century setting is complicated by various anachronistic elements, including a sound...

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, or would not, clearly explain its intense interest in Venezuela any more than it could explain its plans for the country. And beyond the practicalities of “running” Venezuela, as Trump said the US would be doing...

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 Benjamin Netanyahu offered a rebuke of Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, linking the antisemitic attack to Albanese’s call for a Palestinian state. Australian antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal similarly linked the attack to a pe...

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 ongoing Nakba. In this episode of On the Nose, Jewish Currents editor-in-chief Arielle Angel speaks with Baconi and Aziza about what it means to claim Palestinianness as a political identity, not just a fa...

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, appear elsewhere in the world. Last month, Jewish Currents published an article by Rhys Machold called “The Myth of Israeli Innovation,” which takes a critical look at what Machold has termed “the laboratory thesis” and examines how it obscures Israel’s d...

“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 meetings for former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, including meetings that resulted in the establishment of security ties with Mongolia and the sale of mass surveillance infrastructure to Cote d’Ivoire’s authoritarian government. What do these revelations tell us about the flows of...