This 2022 article by Mari Cohen says The Association for Jewish Studies paused its advertising relationship with Tablet after members complained. The AJS statement noted that some members felt direct harm from views Tablet had promulgated. The specific grievances included contributors who attacked the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago raid and celebrated Trump’s ultranationalist speeches, content focused on decrying liberal wokeness, and a piece by Jennifer Bilek framing philanthropic support for gender-affirming care in conspiratorial terms, published amid legislative attacks on the rights of trans children.
The piece cuts both ways. Jewish Currents is itself a coalition publication, and the AJS controversy is as much a story about the AJS’s own generational shift as it is about Tablet’s rightward drift. One scholar quoted in the piece read the AJS decision as a signal that the organization was experiencing a generational transition and a desire to take a more activist stand. That is an honest admission that what is being described is a coalition realignment, not a neutral scholarly judgment about quality.
The four questions framework applies to Jewish Currents as cleanly as it applies to Tablet. Jewish Currents traces its origins to the Morning Freiheit Association and the Communist Party USA, broke with the Party in 1956, and relaunched in 2018 under an entirely millennial editorial team whose politics sit firmly on the Jewish left. The coalition that sustains it needs Tablet to be the enemy for the same reason Tablet’s coalition needs the liberal establishment to be the enemy. Each publication’s identity depends on the other’s existence and malevolence.
Tablet has become a coalition publication whose heterodoxy operates within understood limits, and those limits have drifted rightward enough that a formerly sympathetic adjacent institution found continued association costly. Scholar Shaul Magid, who left Tablet’s masthead after voicing criticisms directly to Newhouse, said he felt the magazine was moving in a direction he could not comfortably associate with. That is the most damaging testimony in the piece, not because Magid is necessarily right about everything, but because his departure represents the kind of internal dissent that a heterodox publication would retain rather than lose.
The piece’s blind spot is that it treats the drift as Newhouse’s failure of nerve or ideological capture rather than as the predictable outcome of the institutional pressures the four questions expose. Tablet drifted because its donor base, its coalition, and its market all pulled in the same direction, and Newhouse made the rational coalition manager’s decision to follow rather than resist. Jewish Currents did the same.
Tablet Magazine
On what coalition Tablet depends on for status and income: Its primary donor base runs through the Tikvah Fund network and aligned conservative Jewish philanthropy, which has shaped the publication’s ideological center of gravity since its founding. Its readership coalition spans culturally serious American Jews who find mainstream Jewish institutional culture too timid, dissident intellectuals from across the nominal political spectrum who have concluded that liberal institutions have failed, and a growing audience of non-Jewish readers attracted to the contrarian-right cultural commentary that Tablet’s contributors increasingly produce.
On who Tablet risks angering if it speaks plainly: The American Jewish institutional left, which it has already substantially alienated and from which it now draws more energy through antagonism than through accommodation. The Orthodox communities it cultivates as readers would be alienated by sustained critical analysis of Orthodox institutional failures, communal insularity, or the internal political economy of haredi influence on Israeli policy. Its Tikvah-adjacent donor base would be alienated by serious engagement with Palestinian narratives, criticism of Israeli military conduct, or any analysis that treated the occupation as a moral problem requiring more than strategic management. Its dissident intellectual coalition would fracture if Tablet applied to its own contributors the same skeptical analysis it applies to mainstream liberal institutions. The magazine has never seriously examined whether its own framing of brokenism, elite capture, and institutional failure serves its coalition’s interests as reliably as the liberal framings it critiques serve theirs.
On who benefits if Tablet’s framing wins: The Tikvah Fund’s broader project of building a conservative Jewish intellectual infrastructure benefits from Tablet functioning as its most culturally credible outlet. Israeli government positions on security, settlements, and Palestinian statehood benefit from a publication that treats skepticism of those positions as naive or antisemitic rather than analytically serious. The dissident right intellectual ecosystem benefits from having a Jewish publication that legitimizes its broader critique of liberal institutions while providing cover against charges of antisemitism. Tablet’s writers benefit from a venue that rewards contrarianism without requiring the epistemic rigor that contrarianism at its best demands.
On what truths would cost Tablet its position: The mildest costly truth is that the magazine’s rightward drift reflects donor pressure and coalition capture as much as honest intellectual development. Tablet presents its evolution as a courageous response to liberal institutional failure. A more accurate account would note that the evolution tracks the preferences of its funding base with a consistency that suggests responsiveness to coalition incentives rather than editorial independence.
A more costly truth is that Tablet applies its analytical frameworks selectively in ways that protect its own coalition while exposing others. The brokenism thesis, the critique of elite capture, the analysis of how institutions serve coalition interests rather than stated purposes, all of these are deployed against liberal institutions with vigor and against conservative Jewish institutions almost never. A publication genuinely committed to the analytical frameworks it claims would apply them symmetrically. Tablet does not, and the asymmetry is the clearest evidence that the frameworks are coalition technologies rather than analytical commitments.
The truth that would cost Tablet most is that its literary editor’s epistemic habits, and the broader culture of atmospheric assertion over rigorous verification that those habits exemplify, have shaped the publication’s intellectual standards in ways that make it less trustworthy than its cultural ambitions require. Tablet aspires to be taken seriously as an intellectual publication. Its actual epistemic culture rewards writers who generate the feeling of insight over writers who produce its substance. That gap between aspiration and practice is the most damaging thing that could be said about it, and it is the thing Newhouse is least equipped to say because acknowledging it would require accounting for her husband’s centrality to the publication’s identity.
Jewish Currents
On what coalition Jewish Currents depends on for status and income: A donor base drawn from progressive Jewish philanthropy, left-leaning foundations, and individual subscribers who identify with the Jewish left. Its editorial coalition runs through the broader American progressive infrastructure, including academic Jewish studies departments whose younger cohort shares its political commitments, the anti-Zionist and non-Zionist Jewish activist world, and the progressive media ecosystem centered on outlets like The Nation, Jacobin, and The Intercept. The magazine’s budget of roughly 1.6 million dollars drawn from individual donors and foundations makes it structurally dependent on maintaining the confidence of a relatively small number of high-capacity progressive donors.
On who Jewish Currents risks angering if it speaks plainly: Its anti-Zionist donor and reader base would be alienated by any serious engagement with the case for Jewish statehood, any acknowledgment that Palestinian political culture has its own internal failures and coalition distortions, or any analysis of Hamas and Hezbollah that applied the same critical frameworks the magazine applies to Israel. The progressive coalition it depends on would be alienated by criticism of progressive antisemitism, by any suggestion that left-wing movements have historically instrumentalized Jewish suffering, or by analysis that treated certain strands of anti-Zionism as continuous with older forms of Jewish exclusion rather than as a clean break from them. Its academic Jewish studies network would be alienated by honest engagement with the degree to which the field’s leftward turn reflects generational coalition capture rather than dispassionate scholarly development. Jewish Currents has never seriously examined whether its critique of Zionism serves the coalition interests of the American progressive left as reliably as Zionism serves the coalition interests of the American Jewish right.
On who benefits if Jewish Currents’ framing wins: The Palestinian solidarity movement benefits from having a Jewish publication that provides ideological cover for positions that would otherwise be more vulnerable to charges of antisemitism. The progressive left benefits from a publication that frames Jewish identity as compatible with, and even requiring, opposition to the Jewish state, which dissolves a significant source of internal coalition tension. Academic Jewish studies benefits from a publication that treats its most politically aligned scholarship as the field’s cutting edge. Young progressive Jews who experience their Jewish identity and their political commitments as in tension benefit from a publication that tells them the tension is resolvable on the left’s terms.
On what truths would cost Jewish Currents its position: The mildest costly truth is that the magazine’s 2021 apology for running an advertisement for the Dorot Fellowship, a program for American Jews to spend a year in Israel, revealed how thoroughly its coalition has captured its editorial judgment. That its readership found the advertisement compromising, and that the editorial team apologized for running it, shows the coalition’s boundaries more clearly than any editorial statement could.
A more costly truth is that Jewish Currents applies the critique of institutional power and coalition interest to Jewish communal organizations, Israeli state actors, and American liberal Jewish institutions with precision and energy, while never applying the same critique to the progressive movement whose coalition it serves. The progressive left has its own institutional failures, its own coalition enforcement, its own convenient beliefs about Jews and Israel that serve movement interests rather than Jewish ones. Jewish Currents has the analytical tools to examine this. It does not use them, because using them would threaten the coalition on which the publication depends.
The truth that would cost it most is that the magazine’s framing of anti-Zionism as a principled Jewish position rather than a coalition credential of the American left has made it easier for progressive movements to absorb Jewish members while maintaining positions on Israel that a serious accounting would recognize as indifferent or hostile to Jewish collective security. Jewish Currents presents this absorption as Jewish flourishing. A more honest account would ask whether the progressive coalition’s embrace of Jewish anti-Zionism serves Jewish interests or uses Jewish voices to insulate progressive anti-Zionism from scrutiny. That question is not askable inside the publication’s current coalition, which is the clearest evidence of how thoroughly the coalition has foreclosed the inquiry.
The Association for Jewish Studies
On what coalition the AJS depends on for status and income: University philosophy and humanities departments that house Jewish studies programs and whose faculty constitute the AJS membership base. Federal and foundation grant funding that flows through the university system and that has its own ideological valence, rewarding work that fits within the diversity, equity, and inclusion frameworks that now govern much academic grant-making. Conference registration fees and institutional memberships that depend on maintaining the goodwill of a membership that has undergone a significant generational shift toward the progressive left.
On who AJS risks angering if it speaks plainly: Its younger progressive membership, which drove the decision to pause the Tablet advertising relationship and which represents the field’s demographic future, would be alienated by any assertion that Jewish studies scholarship should be evaluated on scholarly rather than political grounds when those grounds produce conclusions the coalition finds threatening. Its university institutional hosts would be alienated by resistance to the DEI frameworks that now govern academic hiring, promotion, and grant-making, since resistance to those frameworks carries concrete institutional costs that individual departments and programs cannot easily absorb. Israeli and Zionist donors and institutions whose support has historically underpinned Jewish studies infrastructure would be alienated by the field’s drift toward anti-Zionist normalization, a tension the AJS has not resolved and cannot resolve without losing one side of a coalition it currently needs both halves of.
On who benefits if AJS’s framing wins: The progressive academic coalition benefits from having Jewish studies function as an internally Jewish legitimation of anti-Zionist scholarship, providing the same cover that Jewish Currents provides in journalism. Graduate students whose careers depend on publishing within the field’s now-dominant frameworks benefit from an association that enforces those frameworks through the soft power of conference access, journal publication, and professional networking.
On what truths would cost AJS its position: The mildest costly truth is that the decision to pause advertising with Tablet was a coalition move dressed as a scholarly standards decision. The AJS statement that some members felt direct harm from Tablet’s views conflated the political discomfort of progressive scholars with the kind of harm that academic organizations have legitimate standing to address. A scholarly association whose mandate is the advancement of Jewish studies has no principled basis for evaluating whether a publication’s political positions are acceptable, as distinct from whether its scholarly content meets professional standards.
A more costly truth is that the generational transition the AJS is undergoing, in which a younger and more ideologically homogeneous cohort is replacing an older pluralist one, is producing a field whose scholarly conclusions are increasingly predictable from its members’ political commitments. That predictability is an epistemic problem of the first order for any scholarly association, and the AJS has no framework for naming it because naming it would require applying to its own membership the same critique of motivated reasoning it readily applies to the institutions and actors its scholarship examines.
The truth that would cost AJS most is that Jewish studies as currently constituted increasingly serves the coalition interests of the American progressive left rather than the scholarly interests of understanding Jewish history, culture, religion, and thought in their full complexity. A field that cannot seriously examine the case for Zionism, that cannot engage with the internal political economy of Palestinian movements without coalition anxiety, and that treats certain political positions as professionally disqualifying rather than intellectually contestable has abandoned the scholarly independence that justifies its institutional existence. The AJS does not experience this as abandonment. It experiences it as the field having matured into a proper critical consciousness. That experience is the most precise illustration available of what it means for a coalition not to experience itself as a coalition, but as scholarship.
All three institutions share this condition. Tablet does not experience itself as a coalition publication drifting rightward under donor pressure. It experiences itself as honest journalism that liberal institutions lack the courage to produce. Jewish Currents does not experience itself as a progressive movement organ that uses Jewish voices to insulate anti-Zionism from scrutiny. It experiences itself as the authentic Jewish ethical tradition finally speaking plainly. The AJS does not experience itself as a professional association captured by generational coalition shift. It experiences itself as a scholarly field that has finally developed the critical tools its subject demands. Each institution mistakes its coalition’s moral vocabulary for reality. Each experiences the boundary enforcement that protects its coalition as the natural limit of what serious thought permits.
