This is not a fun column to write. It probably will not be fun to read. But if you care about Jewish life in America, you need to sit with it for a few minutes.
American Jewish media is dying. Not dramatically, with a front-page obituary and a big communal debate, but slowly, quietly, in budget meetings, staff cuts, and shrinking page counts. What once felt essential, something that could change policy, topple a federation CEO, or rally a community, has turned into something that is “nice to have” if the money is there at the end of the year.
Isn’t it absurd that we at The Jerusalem Post often have more readers in the United States than many local Jewish outlets that are physically based there?
Think about that for a moment. An Israeli paper, edited in Jerusalem, is sometimes more central to the Jewish information diet in Los Angeles, Chicago, or Miami than the local Jewish newspaper that used to land on doorsteps every Friday. It is flattering in a narrow, ego-driven way. It is terrifying in every other way.
For decades, American Jewish media was the nervous system of the community. It connected synagogues, schools, federations, and activists. It told you which rabbi was moving, which shul was splitting, which kids were raising money for a trip to Israel. It covered the Soviet Jewry movement, the Ethiopian aliyah, the debates over intermarriage, and Jewish education.
You could disagree with the editorials, roll your eyes at the communal politics, complain about the photos, but you read it, and it read you back. It noticed. It had the time and the mandate to notice.
Today, that ecosystem is hollowing out. Titles are closing, going digital only, or operating on skeleton staffs that can barely rewrite press releases. Many function more as donor-relations newsletters than independent newsrooms. The business model, built on a mix of classifieds, synagogue ads, and federation support, has not survived the rise of social media, Google, and the decline of print.
Inside the Jewish world, we sometimes comfort ourselves by saying that “Jewish media has depth.” It reaches a smaller, very committed audience. It is where rabbis, donors, and communal professionals still read long analyses and inside baseball. Meanwhile, Black and Hispanic media have mastered width, reaching tens of millions, shaping culture, meme by meme, playlist by playlist.
There is truth in that. But depth without oxygen eventually becomes a well that nobody bothers to visit.
There is also the uncomfortable question of power. On paper, the Jewish nonprofit model should give media independence from advertisers. In reality, it often swaps advertiser pressure for donor pressure. One strongly worded email from a major foundation about Israel and Palestine, or one annoyed federation chair who did not like a headline, can threaten a budget line that keeps half the newsroom employed.
Other minority media outlets are not exactly living in paradise. Many depend on algorithms, the tyranny of “engagement,” and advertising categories that quietly devalue serious content. If you cover policy instead of celebrity gossip, or antisemitism instead of a viral dance trend, platforms are less eager to show your work. Black and Asian American outlets talk openly about structural racism in ad-tech, where they are pushed into “DEI budgets” that are the first to be cut in a downturn.
Jewish media, by contrast, has benefited from being seen, in many cases, as part of the “general market” and not only as a minority niche. That has allowed some outlets to sell ads to banks, law firms, and defense contractors at mainstream prices. It sounds like an advantage, but it also encourages a certain comfort, a sense that the money will somehow keep coming, and that the community will always step up one more time.
That complacency is colliding with a brutal reality.
Here is what this looks like from Jerusalem.
At The Jerusalem Post, we have had to make some hard editorial choices in the past year. We have decided that we cannot write about every swastika that appears on a school wall in New York, a playground in New Jersey, or a dorm room in California. Not because these incidents do not matter, but because they have become tragically normal – an everyday event. If we covered every single one, there would be little room left for anything else.
That sentence should make your stomach hurt.
We now have two full-time reporters whose beat is the Jewish world and the Diaspora. Once, this paper only had one.
The volume of antisemitic incidents, campus crises, political battles, and cultural fights is enormous. On any given day, we are choosing between writing about a violent assault, a university investigation, a local school board controversy, or a new piece of legislation.
And then came the October 7 massacre.
After October 7, we realized that no one was actually telling our story – our story as Israelis and as Jews under attack.
Most American Jewish outlets did not have a reporter in Israel. So, who is supposed to tell that story? The New York Times? CNN? The Wall Street Journal? Or actual people who are connected to this story, who can tell it from within.
There is a difference between looking at Israel from the outside and reporting as an insider who has skin in the game, family in uniform, and friends in shelters. We cannot simply outsource our narrative to mainstream media.
They have been doing it for years, and to put it gently, the results have not been great. If we have learned anything since October 7, it is that we need to build our own narrative. We need to tell our own story, in our own words, on platforms we control.
In theory, this is work that local Jewish media should be sharing, if not leading. They should be the ones sending regular requests for comment to police departments, school districts, mayors, and university presidents. They should be the ones investigating which security grants are actually reaching synagogues and which are stuck in bureaucracy.
They should be the ones profiling the new rabbis, the new ideas, the new Jewish schools that are trying to respond to a post-October 7 world.
Some still do. Many cannot. There is simply no one left in the newsroom to make those calls.
People sometimes ask me, half joking, whether it really matters that a small Jewish weekly in a Midwestern city is struggling. After all, they say, Jews get news from everywhere now. From X, TikTok, WhatsApp groups, podcasts, The New York Times, this paper, you name it. Is another Jewish outlet really such a big deal?
Yes, it is.
When a local paper dies, you do not just lose articles. You lose memory. You lose an archive of communal fights that you do not want to repeat – of stupid ideas that were already tried, of brave experiments that worked. You lose the ability to track which synagogue keeps failing to pay its cantor, which school board always votes against security funding, which local politicians only discover their concern for antisemitism in election years.
You also lose a place to argue safely inside the family, in print, with context. When those arguments move entirely to social media, they become content for outsiders, weaponized by antisemites and bad-faith actors.
There are some bright spots. In California and New York, governments have started directing advertising and grant money to ethnic and community media. For smaller Black, Hispanic, or Asian American outlets, this can be the difference between survival and liquidation.
Some Jewish outlets may benefit around the edges, especially those that are more commercial in nature. But many of the core Jewish institutions are nonprofits that still depend on the old formula: a heroic editor, a board, a gala, a letter at year’s end.
At the same time, everyone is trying to reinvent themselves. Jewish media are flirting with being more commercial, buying niche newsletters and email lists, launching events and podcasts. Black and Hispanic outlets are experimenting with nonprofit arms that can fund serious reporting when advertisers and algorithms will not. Asian American media is trying to consolidate into something big enough to be noticed by investors.
This is what convergence looks like. Everyone is borrowing from everyone else’s playbook, while hoping not to inherit their vulnerabilities.
Where does that leave American Jewish media, and where does it leave us in Jerusalem?
I do not believe that The Jerusalem Post can or should replace local Jewish papers in America. We cannot cover the zoning fight around your synagogue, the politics of your day-school board, or the drama at your JCC pool. You need people who live there, who see each other at a kiddush, who understand that the person sending the anonymous tip is also sitting three rows behind them on Yom Kippur.
We can, however, help fill a growing void on the national level. We can provide a steady, independent voice on antisemitism, Israel, American politics, and the Jewish world that is not beholden to a specific federation or a particular donor. We can link stories from Pittsburgh to Paris, from Berkeley to Berlin, and show patterns that a small local paper cannot afford to track.
But that does not let the American Jewish community off the hook.
Whether it is philanthropic funds or an idealistic business model, in a democratic world, we need as many media voices as possible – national, local, international. For Jews, that means supporting outlets that are rooted in the community, invested in Israel, and unafraid to ask hard questions of both. It means not relying solely on global brands that drop in when there is a war or a scandal, and then move on.
If you are a philanthropist, maybe the next building does not need your name on the lobby quite as urgently as your local Jewish newsroom needs a multiyear grant and the freedom to annoy you once in a while. If you are a reader, maybe you subscribe to one more outlet instead of relying entirely on screenshots shared in WhatsApp groups. If you are a rabbi or educator, maybe you encourage your community not only to “consume content” but to support the people who create the first draft of their history.
This column is not fun to write. It is not meant to be. But a world in which American Jewish media becomes a nostalgic memory – a set of bound volumes on a back shelf in some archive – would be much less fun to live in.
The choice to prevent that is still, for now, in the hands of American Jews themselves.