Thirty five years ago, a handful of students came together in opposition to the rightward shift of the American Jewish community following Israel’s 1967 War. As the Jewish State amassed inhabited lands and American Jews attained professional and social advancement, the students felt they could no longer depend on their community’s onetime commitment to social justice.
These students, the founders of the Jewish Student Press Service (JSPS), came of age in a country violently rebelling against the integration of black and white students. Race and ethnicity were politically charged, and Jews of all backgrounds were figuring out where they fit into the shifting spectrum.
One medium they had for puzzling through such questions was the Jewish student press. Within just a few years, the JSPS wire service connected over three dozen Jewish campus publication across the US. Over the decades, as American Jews felt more integrated into their communities and more complacent about the abandonment of the “love the stranger” values, the dissenting students graduated, Jewish campus papers folded, and fewer young Jews heard each other’s voices.
Fifteen years later, New Voices, the offspring of JSPS, finds itself in a very different world than that of its founders. American Jews are integrated into the highest rungs of the achievement ladder and most have abandoned the tensions of the city for the blandness of the suburbs. What are our responsibilities today, in a country where the vast majority of us are woven into the fabric of the educated upper classes, but where racial, class and other injustices are as present as ever? How are our histories being told, and whose stories are overlooked?
These are the questions explored in this issue of New Voices, “The Minority Report.” True to its name, it looks not only at Jews’ relations with other minorities, but at some of the minorities within our own communities. This extra-long issue features over a dozen personal accounts from within various Jewish minority groups, be they geographical or political (how tickled the JSPS founders would be to see a Republican counted among them!).
Racially, sexually, religiously, musically, what do you see when you picture Jewish community? “The Minority Report” suggests it might be time to re-imagine.
