People of the Magazine

Jewish Currents wants to criticize Israel while holding on to Jewishness.

- GIDEON LEWIS-KRAUS

In June, the small left-wing magazine -Jewish Currents summoned its donors and close confederates to a private event in a penthouse apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Kathleen Peratis, a stylish human-rights advocate who co-chairs the publication's board, pressed refreshments on the guests with the warm, fluttering anxiety of a doting Jewish grandmother. This particular crowd, especially since October 7th, isn't often the beneficiary of such Jewish hospitality, and a few attendees sparred amiably about who among them was the most despised within the broader community.

The magazine's most prominent contributor is Peter Beinart, an observant Jew whose public opposition to a Jewish state has rendered him a moral hero to some and a turncoat to others. A few years ago, Beinart recalled, he turned on his computer after Yom Kippur, a day on which observant Jews abstain from electronics, to find an e-mail calling him a self-hating Jew. He said, with boyish good cheer, "Imagine considering me such a bad Jew that you feel compelled to tell me in a way that desecrates the holiest day of the Jewish calendar." The featured guest was the Haaretz columnist and reporter Amira Hass, the rare Jewish Israeli journalist to live in the Palestinian territories-previously in Gaza and now in the West Bank. Hass spoke for almost two hours, and no one so much as glanced at a phone. Her mother, Hass recalled, had been shocked to read in one of Simone de Beauvoir's memoirs a passage about a pleasant bike ride in the mountains during the Second World War when Hass's mother was in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.