These haven’t been the easiest two years in which to edit a national Jewish student magazine. When the current intifada broke out in the fall of 2000, we were beginning work on my second issue as editor of New Voices. Its theme was to be “Post-Jewish Israel,” and it was to deal with what seemed only weeks before like some of the cutting-edge issues facing Israel: post-Zionism, the use and abuse of foreign laborers, the challenges of integrating Russian immigrants into Israeli society, etc.
As the violence in the Middle East dragged on, it quickly became clear that the concerns that we were addressing had suddenly become much less urgent. Still, we had an issue to get out, so we tacked on a hastily composed intifada-related editorial and that was that. I had no idea at the time that the violence would drag on as long as it did, or become as grave as it is today.
Then, of course, there was that morning in September when I awoke to the sight of the World Trade Center burning. We scratched a planned cover story on anti-Israel activism on campus, and instead cobbled together a section on student reactions to the terrorist attacks. To be honest, although I’m a firm believer in the tremendous value of New Voices, working on a Jewish student magazine that September, in the wake of such an enormous tragedy, seemed like so trite an activity that it sometimes made me feel sick.
I am now writing in the aftermath of the terrorist bombing in Netanya that killed at least 25 Jews celebrating Passover, the subsequent Israeli military incursions into Palestinian cities, the isolation of Yasser Arafat in his Ramallah office, and unprovoked Katyusha rocket attacks from Lebanon that threaten to provoke a war along Israel’s northern border. As these events have unfolded, Western Europe has seen a spate of attacks on Jews and synagogues, and anti-Israel and anti-American protests are sweeping the Arab world.
Deciding how to best cover the intifada–and its repercussions on campus–has been a real challenge. It’s a complicated, and tremendously bleak, situation. What does it mean at a time like this to uphold New Voices’ tradition of being a progressive, critically pro-Israel publication? How can New Voices convey solidarity with Israel during a war that–I firmly believe–was imposed on it by the Palestinian Authority, while still leaving the door open to criticize Israel when it not infrequently behaves in ways that are deplorable or foolish.
Fortunately, New Voices has been blessed over the years with talented and enterprising Israel correspondents, and the past two years have been no exception. Former Israel correspondent and my current co-worker, Daniela Gerson, contributed a probing article last year on the controversy over Israeli soldiers refusing to serve in the Occupied Territories, many months before several hundred reservists made international headlines with their collective refusal to serve in the territories. And New Voices’ current Israel correspondent, Ben Klafter, has contributed a pair of insightful articles on the situation on Israel’s northern border and North Americans studying at Israeli universities.
Over the course of the intifada, I contributed two opinion articles on the situation in Israel and the Occupied Territories. Both were somewhat critical of the Israeli government, but focused mainly on blaming the Palestinians for the current state of affairs. I’m still haunted by doubts as to whether I did justice to the situation’s complexity and ambiguity. Some of my more left-leaning friends feel I let Israel off way too easy. They’re probably right. I don’t know if I adequately conveyed the callousness, destructiveness, and shortsightedness of many of Israel’s actions. (Pro-Israel New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has quite rightly described Israel’s settlements in the Occupied Territories as “threaten[ing] the entire Zionist enterprise.”)
But I also think I failed to adequately convey the vileness of Palestinian behavior. For instance, Red Crescent ambulances have been used to transport bombs, and polling data from December shows that 64 percent of Palestinians support suicide bombing attacks against Israeli civilians. And no, there’s no moral equivalency between Israeli misdeeds, and Palestinian attacks intended to kill as many civilians as possible–which if not directly abetted by the Palestinian Authority, as some evidence suggests, are at the very least enabled by it.
New Voices did also manage to run quite a few non-wretchedness related articles in the past two years. My former co-worker, Lea Winerman, contributed an innovative article on recent genetics studies and their implications for Jewish peoplehood, which was picked up by Beliefnet.com. Our writers completed in-depth reports on the state of living wage campaigns, pro-Israel activism, Kabbalah, and Yiddish on campus. And students contributed articles from 15 foreign countries on all 6 regularly inhabited continents.
On the quirkier side, my first co-worker, Lisa Keys, and I managed to land interviews with “the other two” Jewish running mates in the 2000 elections: the Green Party’s Winona LaDuke and the Natural Law Party’s Nat Goldhaber. (Don’t feel bad if the names draw a blank, it’s healthy.) New Voices published what I believe to be the first-ever talmudic-style review of the first-ever-talmudic-style novel, featuring the novel’s author commenting on the review of his own book. And if New Voices isn’t the first magazine ever to publish a Jews in hip-hop issue or a “Chinese Issue” (although I assume it is), it’s certainly the first magazine to do both. Whew! And that’s just two years of a magazine’s history that’s now going on eleven.
