Not infrequently, I get a smirk or a giggle when I tell people I edit a magazine for Jewish college students. And more often than not it’s a Jewish college student doing the smirking. But the last time the laugh came from a young black man whom I met playing tennis. I responded, “If I said I edited a magazine for black or Latino college students you wouldn’t have laughed, you’d have said ‘right on.’” He thought for a second and said, “That’s true.”
Once, I overheard my friend introduce New Voices to her younger brother, a Jewish junior at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “But you should check it out,” she told him. “It’s actually a really cool magazine.” I was happy she liked the publication, but frustrated that I had come to expect the disclaimer.
Why does a Jewish student publication carry such a stigma? When I asked my sister, a junior at Washington University in St. Louis, she responded immediately, “We’re like a fake minority—and the Jewish voice is already so overexposed. It’s part of the establishment.”
It wasn’t always this way. In the late ’60s and early ‘70s, Jewish student activists, influenced by the Vietnam War, the Black Power movement, and the Six Day War, took pride in the relation between their Judaism and their concern for social justice. Driven by a sense that the organized Jewish community did not represent their point of view, particularly with reference to the Middle East, they created an alternative Jewish press. \t\t
Dozens of independent Jewish student publications, including the Jewish Radical, ACIID (A Critical Insight into Israel’s Dilemma), Chutzpah, Doreinu, and Response, flourished on campuses across North America, with a combined circulation of over 300,000. Editors of these publications united to create the national, independent Jewish Student Press Service (JSPS).
In 1971, The New York Times reported on the rapid growth of the independent Jewish student press from the first national JSPS conference. The Times noted certain themes: a rejection of the anti-Zionist stand prevalent in the New Left; a repudiation the uncritical view of the organized Jewish community toward Israel (one editor told the Times, “Criticism of Israel, yes. Criticism of the existence of Israel, never!”); a commitment to alleviating the plight of Soviet Jews; a dissatisfaction with the priorities of the “Jewish Establishment”; and contempt for the “chopped liver and mah-jong” culture of adult Jews.
Today, while JSPS has reinvented itself with the publication of New Voices, barely a handful of campus-based independent Jewish student publications exist.
What happened? The most influential shift was increased assimilation; many Jewish college students began channeling their activism and interests out of the Jewish community.
But it remains undeniable, especially with the ever-intensifying intifada and War on Terrorism, that young Jews have a unique perspective and potential influence on Middle East and domestic policy. It is time for us to recreate a Jewish youth culture in which we can take pride in our Jewish heritage and take our place at the Jewish communal table. For if we don’t speak out in our own diverse voices, the “established” Jewish community will rarely say anything we want to hear.
