Starting in 2018, New Voices has offered year-long, paid fellowships for Jewish college students. In 2019 and 2020, New Voices partnered with other progressive Jewish media outlets to offer four joint fellowship positions: Jewish Currents, The Unsettled Podcast, and Judaism Unbound. As the fellows close out the 2020 fellowship year, each have written reflections on their experiences with New Voices Magazine and their partnered media organization. Chaya Holch and Miriam Saperstein, our fellows at Jewish Currents, reflect on their year at the magazine in this revised conversation.
As part of our year-long fellowship at Jewish Currents, we wrote a history of the 74-year-old magazine. The piece examines how Jewish Currents, a spinoff of an earlier, communist paper in Yiddish, became the publication it is today. To tell that history, we combed through the digital archives and interviewed Jewish Currents community members and historians about the magazine. The interviews were conducted over Zoom and phone calls throughout the year.
These interviews stood out to both of us as a meaningful shared experience from our fellowship year. For our year end-reflection, we wanted to provide a window into those conversations. Befitting the process, we decided to record a conversation between the two of us–a conversation about our conversations. We ended up talking about the complexities of writing history with living memory. This transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Miriam: As yearlong interns, we were both pretty new to Currents when we started delving into the magazine’s business, past and present. We were doing these interviews as interns who aren’t from New York, where much of the history happened.
Chaya: I remember one conversation with someone who had been a writer since the 1980s and is still technically a contributor to the magazine. He told me that he thought Currents would never publish anything by him ever again. The emotion and interpersonal complexity underlying that sentiment really caught me off guard, and I didn’t know how to respond.
He’s been watching the sort of trend happening as the magazine has been changing. There’s been this explosion of the magazine’s readership and this incredible response, and they’re reaching this new audience. Still, there’s some hurt in the community. It felt like we were sent in to assess the damage, but also to offer healing in some way by even just asking: What did it used to be like? How was it for you?
I don’t think that was the intention of the assignment. Maybe if you and I were different people, that’s not what would have happened. But I did often feel like we were interceding in this dynamic between the current cohort and these older folks as potential mediators. I felt like this project was definitely more than just documentation. More than something archival. I think we had an interpersonal role that we were stepping into.
Miriam: We were tasked with going back to understand how Currents was made. We took a pretty open-ended project, and focused on the interpersonal angle. What did those editors/writers/readers create together? What did it mean to them? And why do people feel upset or excited about what it is now?
We started interviewing people in April, and just finished up the last of the interviews this December.
Chaya: Were you on that call with Diane, a longtime staff member from the older iteration of Currents? We called her and she was having such a variety of technological issues. And that felt so of the moment. That was in the beginning of the pandemic in the spring, with everyone transitioning to this new mode of communication. She was involved with the magazine for so long, and she gave us so many of the details that we ended up including in the piece. I just remember trying to connect all the information she was sharing about being gathered together, this in-person Currents community that just felt so far away from the isolated moment we are currently in. That was so often what we were hearing about: parties, meetings on the Upper West Side, the gatherings at Sylvan Lake.
The heart of this process for me was getting to talk to people about their positive Jewish memories, although they were definitely not all positive. I would qualify 1956 as a deeply traumatic year for a lot of our interviewees. Khrushchev’s secret speech in 1956 basically revealed Stalin’s violence and shattered, to borrow Vivian Gornick’s phrase, the “romance of American communism.” However, beyond that, I was really surprised by how rarely some of the more obvious Jewish traumas of the last century came up in our interviews. We barely heard anything about the Holocaust.
You and I are of a generation where it’s been decided by Ashkenazi, American Jewish institutions that the Holocaust should be the center of our Jewish memory, and we’re just going to be sad about it and focus on protecting ourselves from this happening again. This spring and summer, it meant a lot to me to talk to people who didn’t center their personal Jewish history as having anything to do with the Holocaust. It made me wonder about how we can create or cherish a different kind of shared Jewish memory. What if we actually see all the different places from which Jews have come, and the identities which people carry alongside their Judaism, which are cut off by centering of the Holocaust in American Jewish institutions? This project helped me see that Jewish memory doesn’t have to be so fully informed by this recent grief, that there are other contemporaneous Jewish stories. And that the Jew who remembers doesn’t have to only remember horrific things. There’s Jewish memory that’s just everyday memory. Like: This was our office space, and we had a Hanukkah party with deli meats, and this guy had bad breath. Those can be Jewish memories too.
Miriam: Yeah. Wow. That’s beautiful.
Chaya: I also found that learning about this incredibly acrimonious relationship between Jewish socialists and communists really resonated with me. In the first part of the 20th century, on the American Ashkenazi Jewish left, there were two of every community resource: the socialist summer camp, and the communist one; the socialist paper and the communist one. They had separate mutual aid organizations, different shuls. They really hated each other— some of the socialists even turned in communists during the Red Scare. These were people who lived in the same neighborhoods, went to the same schools, they all really valued Yiddish and Yiddishkeit. But they felt so betrayed by one another that it took them decades and decades to reconcile.
There is some of this posturing and in-fighting on the Jewish left now. What does it mean for us to be alienated for one another like this? I’m thinking specifically about anti-Zionist Jews being alienated from their communities, and then how these anti-Zionist Jews have struggled to keep their own organizations together because of some of that lingering hurt and distrust of one another. It is so particularly painful to be alienated from people who have so much in common with you, or, even worse, to be so alienated you can’t see what you have in common anymore. The socialists and the communists were so deeply hurt because their politics were so similar, because their lives were so similar. So hurt that they couldn’t bridge that gap for decades. That’s such a deep personal betrayal, communal betrayal. It is, in some ways, comforting to see that even that acute communal pain has a history, that to be alienated from one another is not new. This project has been an opportunity for learning about how we might relate to each other now.
Miriam: Talking to Sam and Lisa (longtime JC community members who are married to each other) was so joyful. Growing up, Sam went to Camp Kinderland and Lisa went to Camp Kinder Ring. The camps were on opposite sides of a literal lake, but also opposite sides within this very small world that spent so much energy fighting.
Then, in the early 2000s, the socialist Worker’s Circle and formerly-communist Jewish Currents had a literal wedding where they merged their publications, symbolically marking what a big deal that merger was, given their histories. Listening to Sam and Lisa talking happily about the cultural organizing they do together now was really powerful–they’re really an embodiment of a larger reconciliation process.
Miriam: Can you talk about how our interviewees remembered things? And how that’s different or similar to how we might create that memory?
Chaya: A lot of the remembering, I found, was very influenced by the fact that many interviewees no longer control Jewish Currents. I found that in many of our interviews, people seemed to be somewhat aware of what they were saying that might not be so credible anymore, or even aware of what they might be accused of misremembering. We interviewed a woman who worked there in the 1970s, and asked her, “What was it like to work at this place that was very patriarchal?” She was defensive about it. It was clear that she thought we were going to over-write her story somehow. But what does it mean that she was the only woman there? Yet I understand this defensiveness of their own memories from our sort of prying, younger interpretation of events.
Miriam: We had to really push for those tangible details of things that were obvious to people; what did the magazine look like? What did the office space feel like? Those details were the most exciting to me.
What was really interesting for me was trying to understand how people treated each other behind the scenes. What were people like? If I were to go back and do this again, I’d want to look more into the authors and what their personal lives were like, and how that reflected what they talked about. Who was included and who wasn’t? Were there people doing this kind of leftist work who just weren’t publishing? Who was getting the attention? And who got a spot in the magazine? How does that influence how we remember who we are?
Chaya: This could be a good moment to talk about how a mostly white, Ashkenazi version of the Jewish left has overshadowed other Jewish spaces, at least historically. The white Ashkenazi Jewish left’s history is often remembered as the history of the Jewish left, and that’s a big oversimplification. But Currents is also a magazine that has never had many subscribers or institutional power, existing mostly at the political fringe. I really struggled to make sense of that contradiction while working on this project.
Miriam: After we wrote our first draft of the magazine’s history, I remember looking at the draft and worrying it was replicating the exact story that we didn’t want to replicate. There are very strong reasons (including white supremacy) why an originally Ashkenazi magazine, that partially came out of white Jews assimilating, is what defines the Jewish left to a lot of young Jewish leftists today. Even though my family’s not from New York, I come from this history. I didn’t want to idealize that. Sometimes I went so far in the other direction, assuming the worst when framing research questions, when the actual articles or evidence turned out to be more complicated.
Chaya: I feel like we were dancing with living memory. Because so many of the interviewees had lived through this history, and worked with or loved the people we were asking them about, I was very conscious of how personal and intimately painful would it be for us to contradict their memories and interpretations of the past, how much it might hurt them if you and I were to take this information and turn it into something else. These previous writers were giving us their time, their thoughtfulness, their cherished memories. We were being asked to make something of it. Sometimes what we made contradicted how they felt about it, or what they’d said. We were entitled by our distance from the past.
Miriam: When we interviewed people, they talked about Jewish Currents as the center of their world, because it really was a community space that brought people together, and they formed their identity around it. But they weren’t always talking about journalism, activism, Jewishness outside that space. So if we had just relied on the stories that were told to us by people involved with the magazine, we wouldn’t understand what it meant in the larger world.
Chaya: We also talked to historians who were not explicitly affiliated with Currents, who helped give the retellings context.
Miriam: For example, we interviewed Marc Dollinger, a historian who wrote a book about the concept of the Black-Jewish alliance during Black Power and the Civil Rights Movement. As he told us, this representation of an alliance, often referenced in majority-white, Jewish communities, does not historically match up with what happened. It’s based on the pervasive idea that there weren’t any Black Jews then or now and that the white Jewish community was consistently supportive of Black liberation work.
Through previous interviews with community members, we had gotten this very rosy vision of the solidarity between the magazine and Black liberation struggles — how supportive the magazine had been, and how progressive. We had a sense, based on our own experience and hints from current people at the magazine that it probably wasn’t that simple.
That conversation, with Marc Dollinger, helped us place those rosy memories in a larger context. It helped us understand why people might hold onto this memory of solidarity so closely. It’s not that there wasn’t any activism or solidarity—but the memory sits on a pedestal that doesn’t always acknowledge the anti-Black racism and the way white Jews centered themselves, then and now.
Chaya: We were also conducting that part of this project in June-ish of this year during this very public re-reckoning with white supremacy and racism in progressive spaces. We wanted to make sure that the story we were writing actually reflected a heightened and more self-critical understanding of the history than what we were getting from some of the people who we were talking to.
Miriam: How did these interviews, or even the larger New Voices fellowship, influence you?
Chaya: Something I’ve personally struggled with for a long time is that I’ve never been sure what my role in my Jewish communities should be. I grew up mostly secular, and it’s been hard for me to figure out how to be a leader or even a thinker in a Jewish context because I often feel like I have so many gaps in my “Jewish education,” whatever that really means. But during this project, I’ve come to imagine some role for myself as a historian of the recent Jewish past, someone who can help my comrades make sense of what we’ve inherited from our political ancestors on the Jewish left. I feel really grateful for the way that this project has expanded my sense of what I’m good at and how I can bring that knowledge to my community.
What about you?
Miriam: Getting to talk to very generous people about complicated questions of communal memory helped me realize I want to do more memory-related work with archives or museums in the future. I really liked the parts of this fellowship year where I learned really specific stories, either through an archive or a person.
Speaking of specifics, as an ending, since this is what we tried to do with our interviews, could you share a story?
Chaya: One of my interviewees paused at one point and said, “Are you ready, Chaya?” I’m like, okay, sure. “I’m going to tell you something that no one is ever going to tell you ever again in your whole life.” And then he proceeded to tell me a very obscure fact about the Israeli Communist Party. This process has been a lot of collecting really specific details that maybe we’ll never share again. Or maybe we will. Our final project has been so difficult to pull together because we’ve been so overloaded with information. Whatever our project looks like in the end, I think it can’t reflect the intensity of the personal experience and the shared experience that you and I have had together. All the parts, all the details that don’t make it into the piece, like a good punch line, or like a good story that we’ll get to tell people. There’s been this intergenerational opportunity that won’t be totally reflected in the final piece — but we experienced nonetheless.
