THE 75th issue of Jewish Socialist has arrived from the printers. All the usual cliches apply.

The smell of the ink, the feel of the paper, the frisson at opening the first copies after weeks of work are just as powerful as they were when we started producing it 36 years ago, but this one feels like a landmark because of the pandemic and the bitterly polarised political landscape into which it has been born. 

In every single issue we have published writing by authors, Jewish and non-Jewish, who are new to Jewish Socialist.

And, as a rewarding by-product of a year and a half of Zoom, we have built links with and amplified the voices of political, cultural and human rights activists across the world, as well as focusing in on complex questions facing progressive Jews and other minorities here in Britain. 

In this 75th edition, Israeli activists from two organisations campaigning for justice for the Palestinians, B’Tselem and Zochrot, discuss the implications of describing Israel as an apartheid regime.

On other pages there is a profile of a US researcher exploring the experiences of Jewish International Brigaders through the Yiddish documents they left about the Spanish civil war.

This dovetails with an account of a vibrant Bundist community in Melbourne, Australia, where young people are engaged in new ways of expressing the Yiddish language, culture and progressive politics that they have inherited from their immigrant and refugee grandparents.

We also hear from young Jewish Americans working in their unions, challenging the continuing aftermath of Trumpism, challenging the far right on the streets, and pushing their own community institutions into action for racial justice including support for Black Lives Matter.

Jewish Socialist magazine was conceived in 1984, on a sunny day in Victoria Gardens, Westminster, where a group of us from the Jewish Socialists’ Group (JSG) met up after a demonstration.

I remember the astonishment on everyone’s face when I suggested that we produce a publication; then I had to convince them that we could — and needed to — develop the editorial skills to share our ideas on our own terms. 

The first issue, produced with cow gum, Letraset, galley proofs and scalpels, with lines of type getting lost on the floor, came out in spring 1985, and it was groundbreaking.

At that time, although most Jews still voted Labour, the activist Jewish left was tiny and fragmented.

The JSG was the only radical Jewish group in Britain with an overarching politics, and our activism overlapped with small campaigns focused on specific issues, such as the Jewish Feminist Group, the Jewish Gay and Lesbian Group and some small religiously oriented progressive initiatives. 

Before Jewish Socialist, writing about our deep-rooted and militant progressive Jewish tradition rarely broke out of newsletters or academic journals to reach a wider audience of both Jews and non-Jews.

Some debates occasionally made it into the Jewish Chronicle which, though politically well to the right of us, still had reasonable journalistic standards and the function of a community newspaper at that time.

During the 1980s we were virtually alone in promoting, reflecting and celebrating the history, culture, languages and struggles of Jews in communities across the world.

We had an enthusiastic reception which has never waned, because we have always articulated the real, diverse experience of people who were pushed to the margins or even out of the Jewish community because they didn’t conform to how Jews were — and continue to be — portrayed by our our own “representative organisations” and media, and, as a result, by the surrounding society.

It was this assertion of diaspora, even more than taking dissident positions on Palestine, that generated most anger and aggression from the self-proclaimed representatives of Britain’s diverse Jewish community — the religious and zionist leaders (often one and the same).

So from that time, we have had to withstand the experience of being attacked and targeted that has exploded into more public view over the last six years. 

The upside is that, in our 36th year, we can also see a wonderful blossoming of confident Jewish radicalism and a flourishing Jewish counterculture, particularly among younger generations.

From groups like Jewdas and Na’amod, campaigning in this country for social justice across the board and to shift public opinion within and beyond Jewish life, to the Shministim, school leavers refusing military service in Israel/Palestine, Jewish Socialist now finds itself among a constellation of progressive initiatives that are reflected in our pages. 

Julia Bard is a writer and editor, and a founding member of the Jewish Socialist editorial committee.

You can subscribe to Jewish Socialist and read a sample of articles in the current issue on the Jewish Socialists’ Group website. 

We are also creating a digital archive of every issue, which will become accessible soon.