// from the editors //
Fall 2018
From the Editors
A Journal of Contemporary Politics, Culture, and Jewish Affairs is a string of words begging constant reinterpretation. The disparate yet intersecting elements of our tagline pose new questions each semester to whomever may take up the gauntlet of an answer. Turning to the Columbia community for inspiration is always accompanied by some degree of uncertainty, a call into the wild; it is a hopeful prayer that our peers are willing to be the inventors, curators, reporters, and academics they have been in issues past. Will they—will we—rise to the occasion?
We’ve noticed a pattern within this issue: students are returning to the past, a past not only to reclaim as their own, but to study, research, and ruminate upon in order to best understand the present. Channeling the work of historians, theologians, movie critics, and visual artists is a habit our writers share. With an intense discomfort with old habits, the writers of this issue push our understanding of art, the self, and the beauty of what is both personal and foreign.
The first piece in our Features section marks the fortieth year since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism, a work which continues to inform the conversation around many issues that followers of The Current hold dear. As Danielle Harris speculates on the intentions and success of Said’s description of the West’s “other,” she is matched by Miriam Lichtenberg’s chilling account of how Jewish students were defined in Barnard’s early years. Maya Bickel shows that community can be made up by those on the outskirts of our network, and viewers of the Yiddish performance of Fiddler on the Roof teach us that even if community seems absent, we can find ourselves in stories that unlock emotions and relationships we may not have thought possible.
In defining what it may mean to write for The Current, we are letting our writers roam free. There is no prescribed agenda of topics that we intended our issue to follow, nor is there a universal meaning our readers should find. And yet, looking at this semester’s body of work, the constitution of our writers as Jewish students at Columbia University in New York cause conversations to exist between sections and across pieces. Readers are welcome to map new connections, question how Said’s “other” extends beyond geography, culture, or even race, and create an understanding of The Current that is all their own.
We’ve noticed a pattern within this issue: students are returning to the past, a past not only to reclaim as their own, but to study, research, and ruminate upon in order to best understand the present. Channeling the work of historians, theologians, movie critics, and visual artists is a habit our writers share. With an intense discomfort with old habits, the writers of this issue push our understanding of art, the self, and the beauty of what is both personal and foreign.
The first piece in our Features section marks the fortieth year since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism, a work which continues to inform the conversation around many issues that followers of The Current hold dear. As Danielle Harris speculates on the intentions and success of Said’s description of the West’s “other,” she is matched by Miriam Lichtenberg’s chilling account of how Jewish students were defined in Barnard’s early years. Maya Bickel shows that community can be made up by those on the outskirts of our network, and viewers of the Yiddish performance of Fiddler on the Roof teach us that even if community seems absent, we can find ourselves in stories that unlock emotions and relationships we may not have thought possible.
In defining what it may mean to write for The Current, we are letting our writers roam free. There is no prescribed agenda of topics that we intended our issue to follow, nor is there a universal meaning our readers should find. And yet, looking at this semester’s body of work, the constitution of our writers as Jewish students at Columbia University in New York cause conversations to exist between sections and across pieces. Readers are welcome to map new connections, question how Said’s “other” extends beyond geography, culture, or even race, and create an understanding of The Current that is all their own.
Editor-in-Chief, Charlotte Rauner
Managing Editor, Solomon Wiener
cover photo by Alfred Joseph Frueh
Managing Editor, Solomon Wiener
cover photo by Alfred Joseph Frueh