Former Communist magazine gets airing in Jewish Pittsburgh
Author, editor and self-proclaimed Jewish atheist Lawrence Bush spoke in Pittsburgh March 16 at an event sponsored by the Pittsburgh Area Jewish Committee (PAJC). Travelling from New York, Bush brought with him a series of posters which had originally been published in Jewish Currents magazine, a print and online publication of “activist politics and art” for which he serves as editor. The poster exhibition consisted primarily of copies of photos originally taken by Mark Levy, a Jewish college professor who volunteered for the Freedom Summer campaign of registering African Americans to vote in 1964.
At Rodef Shalom Congregation, he read from an article he wrote on the history of Jews in America and the contributions they made, focusing on class struggle and the concept of being a good person without being a religious person.
For 13 years, Bush was the editor of Reconstructionism Today, the magazine of the Reconstructionist movement. But in Pittsburgh, he gave a history of Jewish Currents, to which he urged people in the audience to subscribe. Bush explained that the magazine was originally founded in 1946 by the Communist Party and was its English-language voice to the Jewish community until 1956; it no longer has any ties to the party, he emphasized. From 2003 to 2006, it was distributed free to members of the Workman’s Circle. Its current readership demographic runs from ages 40 to 85, and Bush admittedly struggles to make it more appealing to “[his] generation, the baby boomers.”
Although the event was publicized as being a discussion on “how Jews and Jewish values influenced the civil rights movement,” out of a talk lasting an hour there were only two sentences on the topic. People who were expecting to hear about Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marching with Dr. Martin Luther King or what drove the two Jewish college students who were murdered in 1964 when they tried to register black Mississippians were disappointed.
Even so, Libby Zal, one of the attendees, felt that Bush “was a very articulate and eclectic speaker. He covered a great amount of material on the variety of contributions the Jews made in all facets to the United States.”
“The evening turned out better than I expected,” said Zal, who was one of several attendees who were given a free subscription to Jewish Currents. And, she pointed out, the food was good.
Simone Shapiro can be reached at simoneshapiro@hotmail.com
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