Jews may be overrepresented in industries such as entertainment or law, but when it comes to campus publications, their standing is intriguingly proportional – out of the estimated 1,600 college publications in the US about 0.2% are Jewish.
In addition to their longstanding role of creating space for young Jewish thought to be expressed, some of these Jewish publications have adapted to fit the needs of Jewish students in a post-October 7 campus climate.
One such publication is Ha’Am (The Nation) – the student-run Jewish newsmagazine at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“It’s really been a hub of Jewish life, of Jewish thought, for a long time,” said Bella Brannon, the former editor-in-chief of Ha’Am and a religion and public affairs graduate. “And I think that since October 7, we have kind of become a news source for people on campus, not only students who are trying to figure out where to walk, what professors might not be the best class to enroll with, but we’ve also driven some national news coverage.”
The student staff at Ha’Am consists of photography, news, and opinion-oriented teams, and students join from various majors.
“I think, first and foremost, it is a Jewish magazine, so we’re going to be coming from a Jewish perspective, integrating the parasha [weekly Torah portion] and whatnot whenever we can,” Brannon said. “We also have fun stuff – I had a lot of fun writing satire, tongue-in-cheek type of things, [and] we had a Valentine’s Day edition where we made silly little Valentines.”
“But recently, we have taken a larger role in reporting and breaking stories involving UCLA,” she said, citing coverage such as alleged discrimination against Jewish students applying to the Cultural Affairs Commissioner staff and the Weinberg vs. SJP case, a lawsuit between Jewish members of the UCLA community and multiple defendants over alleged antisemitic actions on campus in spring 2024.
Roma Yukilevich, a history major at UCLA who plans to attend law school, joined Ha’Am about a year ago and was the one to write about the case, for which she read more than 100 pages of the initial complaint and related paperwork.
“I made it digestible for people, so I just kind of summed it up and wrote who are the plaintiffs, who are the defendants, what are the laws at stake, what are the asks of the court, what’s the conclusion, and what does it mean for us,” she said.
“That was a direct thing that our students from our campus, our rabbi, who everyone is familiar with, were taking action in this lawsuit,” Yukilevich said. “I also think no one really knew about it. And people were like, ‘Why is no one taking action?’ People were taking action, and I think covering that was important.”
Being on campus allows Yukilevich to learn what topics people are talking about, what debates are ongoing and what current attitudes are.
“I’m like, ‘Okay, this is what people are talking about, this is what people are protesting about this week, let’s look into it, let’s research it,’” she said, noting that her experiences on campus go into her work at Ha’Am. “And then I write something about it.”
At the newsmagazine, Yukilevich has written about Shabbat, elections, campus news, and Jews in the USSR, and for the upcoming quarters, plans to cover politics and opinions that impact Jews on campus.
A major success, Brannon explained, is that Ha’Am is not only a voice of Jewish students, but a platform that publishes multiple viewpoints on contentious topics such as immigration and international affairs.
“What I am the most proud of with Ha’Am is that… beyond publishing heterodox views on Israel, we also have some of the most committed Palestinian peace activists on our staff, and we’re also the only publication that’s published pro-Trump views – and, of course, anti-Trump views,” Brannon said. “There’s some of these rigid orthodoxies in the school of student journalism where people think everything is a litmus test, and if you blur the line on something like Trump, on something like immigration, no other student magazine would cover it.
“I’m really proud that we were vigorous about covering different viewpoints, about being unabashed,” she said, “because I believe that’s the spirit of true journalism: not conforming to societal tests.”
Ha’Am is far from being the only student publication on the UCLA campus, and there are six adjacent identity-based news magazines.
“Ha’Am is very close with Al-Talib; they are absolutely wonderful,” Brannon said about UCLA’s Muslim-student run news magazine, the first in the country. “Whenever there has been antisemitism on campus, [the editor at] Al-Talib is always the first to check in on me, make sure we’re all okay.”
After October 7, many news magazines decided to not cooperate on a previously planned joint issue, Brannon explained.
“One of our amazing writers wanted to write something with a Palestinian American about how they had loved ones die and how voices were centering on an American hegemonic perspective, instead of looking at people who were actually on the ground,” she said, noting that with the exception of Al-Talib, other newsmagazines declared they would not have empathy for Zionists.
A cog in a larger wheel
It wasn’t always the case that Jewish student publications made up 0.2% of all student publications. In a 1971 New York Times article detailing the growth of Jewish student press in North America, it was noted that 36 student-edited Jewish newspapers existed at the time.
Those newspapers were but one part of a larger development of Jewish student and youth literature, according to a study of Jewish student and youth movements published by Matthew Maibaum in 1980. Flyers, newsletters, journals of opinion, social-scientific journals, and students-designed prayer books, haggadot, and festival prayer literature also represented this expansion of Jewish youth literature.
“The Jewish student press was just one part, one cog, in a larger wheel of the emergence of a new, more self-confident generation,” American Jewish historian Jonathan Sarna said. “Many of these folks were not nearly as worried about antisemitism as their parents had been. Between 1950 and 2000, antisemitism declined decade by decade, and so that’s why younger people were so shocked when it emerged in the twenty-first century.”
The content of the Jewish student newspapers included general world and national problems, Jewish national problems, local Jewish and non-Jewish problems, philosophic essays, reprints of interviews and special speeches and interviews by staff members with noted thinkers of interest to the group behind the paper, Maibaum wrote.
The rise of Jewish student media traces back to activist student movements on college campuses. Students who were once rebellious and dissenting carried those ideas into the Jewish field, Sarna explained.
“Many of them [were] much better educated than their parents were, and they wanted more money in Jewish education, less money in Jewish hospitals – but that’s only part of it,” he said. “They revolutionized the synagogue, the chavurah movement, a product of those Jews and all of that Jewish student movement. Remember, it was a very large group of people because the baby boom generation was very large, so they knew they were going to shape the future – which they did,” Sarna said.
“What’s so interesting is to watch people as they move from the periphery to the center, from the Jewish student press to the very center of Jewish life.”
Young Jews who got their start in journalism through the Jewish student movement later went on to transform some Jewish newspapers in the US, newspapers that had investigative journalists and were independent from a Jewish federation but still shared the goal of strengthening Jewish life, Sarna explained.
In the early 1970s, the Jewish Student Press Service was founded. According to records of the JSPS at The Center for Jewish History, it “served as a provider of student-written feature articles and news distributor for the Jewish student and young adult publishers in North America and Israel,” and had offices in New York, California, and Israel. Today, the JSPS is realized through its official magazine – New Voices, a Jewish and justice-focused magazine by and for Jews ages 18-24.
“One of the interesting elements in the Jewish student press was that often it had both Orthodox and non-Orthodox writers,” Sarna said, “and people who had never been able to have a voice in Jewish newspapers were given a voice.”
Another Jewish student publication is Mitzpeh, (watchtower, lookout) the student-run Jewish newspaper at the University of Maryland that was founded in the 1970s and originally named Hakoach. At Mitzpeh, the student staff meet weekly, and host open pitch meetings twice each month.
“In 1983, when Mitzpeh itself was born with that name, it was no longer considered specifically a Zionist newspaper, but it was considered a Jewish newspaper,” explained editor-in-chief Ava Rowse, who is an international relations major. “They weren’t only reporting on things related to Israel, they were reporting on just anything [about] Jewish life. That’s an important distinction in today’s climate as well, because I wanted to make sure that we were a newspaper that is a home to Jewish ideas in general, not just Zionist ideas.”
A challenge for Mitzpeh, Rowse described, is the anti-normalization policy of some toward the Jewish newspaper, specifically at protests.
“People who are anti-Israel and who do anti-Israel activism on campus – when we want to talk to them and ask them questions and include them in an article and genuinely hear their perspective so that we can write a balanced and informative article, they refuse to speak to us because we’re a Jewish publication,” she said.
“It just makes the world a better place when we can understand each other better,” Rowse said. “I wish for our sake that they would let me have a conversation with them and write about them, even anonymously, and write about their movement so that we can understand it better.”
Until the early 2010s, Mitzpeh was printed weekly, though this past year, the staff began printing a semesterly magazine.
“It’s a way for long-form and more interesting, thought-provoking pieces to be put into one tangible item,” Rowse said. “And then a lot of design work, and art, photography, and poetry can also be collected from Jewish students. So it’s a little more creative than just news reporting.”
In the new magazine, an article elaborated on the idea that students at Modern Orthodox schools “tend to relate to Israel in a way that’s not critical, and that’s not nuance, and it’s just sort of blind support,” Rowse said, and it was unknown how it would be received in the Jewish community.
“A lot of people loved it, a lot of people hated it,” she said. “But everybody – and they shared this with me – was grateful that they read it and that it was put in there because it sparked so many conversations, even if it ended up being, ‘I disagree with this.’ They still spent an hour or two deliberating about it. So, it caused conversation and it got people thinking, which is like the only thing we can ask for.”
For Rowse, a future goal is to connect Jewish student journalists across different campuses for collaborations.
“And I want to ideally make a network of mentors of professional Jewish journalists – who have already graduated and are in the professional world – who can work with these small student publications and these journalists to get better and network,” she said. “And they can do seminars with us, build the network, and give Jewish student journalists more of an incentive to do their work, so that they feel like they can really make it a career,” Rowse said.
“I think that will also add more talent to professional Jewish journalism, if we really get students in when they’re just starting off.”
The Jewish student newspaper is not only a space where Jewish students can freely express their ideas, Rowse explained, but it’s where, among the Jewish community, students can participate in debates on difficult topics.
“Reading is the way that people learn about things, and writing is the way people think about things,” she said, “so by giving students a place to both contribute writing and ideas and read others students’ ideas and writings, we are shaping the conversation on Israeli politics, Jewish culture, or the level of how religious students are nowadays compared to 10 years ago, and why that’s changed.”