Jacob is Leaving Jewish Currents

A Jacob Haiku

Jacob is leaving

Jewish Currents magazine

after his success

Transitions are never easy.  What they mean is change.

Jacob is leaving Jewish Currents, after having made a Big Success of his tenure– hiring many talented young writers, bringing the publication into the Modern Age.  He’s been there a quick five years and the magazine is a different one now. He did what he’d intended: made Jewish Currents new.

Larry and I interviewed Jacob together the first time, in an Italian restaurant in midtown. Larry had decided he wanted to hire someone young to replace him, to bring in a new generation, and I accompanied Larry as a longtime friend, as a coworker, and as someone to talk to about the various candidates. Together we’d initiated a series of evening meetings with young people to talk about how to bring Currents into Now.  We met a few times at the National Writers Union, and the conversations were always lively, but we didn’t know what direction the magazine would take.  And it wasn’t up to us either. Jonah Boyarin brought Jacob to one of those meetings, and that’s how we all met.

Larry himself is an impressive one man band.  He’d done absolutely everything in incredible and unusual ways for years.  He’d worked hard and all the time, and every issue of Currents was alive, original, and full of his insight. An artist, a writer, a musician, and editor, there’s nothing he can’t do. Now he was ready to work fulltime on his art.

He’d worked for Morris Schappes, Currents founder, and I had worked for Moe Foner, another larger than life one man band.  Two Moe’s.  Larry and I used to joke that he was Morris and I was Moe, and although the analogy wasn’t perfect, there was a certain truth to the thought.

Leaving something that was your whole life for a long time (or for just five years) is never easy to do.

I don’t know much about what happened with Morris and Larry — only that Larry worked with and learned from Morris for about four years, then disappeared from JC for twenty before returning to take it over .

I can tell you about Moe and me.  At the end of his life (I’d been running the program for a while) I asked him to call me just three times a day.  Otherwise, I couldn’t do anything else. He had opinions about everything and because he’d started and ran the program for years, he knew his opinions were right. Of course I always loved talking to him, but he wanted to know absolutely every single thing I was doing.  And some things I didn’t want to tell him – especially what I was changing. For most of us, the older we get the harder change becomes.   Moe loved Bread and Roses.  He created programs that no one else could have. He had vision and will and absolute determination.  I learned thousands of things from Moe, especially that No doesn’t matter.  You just have to find a Yes.  In so many ways, my years with him and my years running the program gave meaning and shape to my life. Leaving Bread and Roses was hard for me, but I wanted time to do other things.  Harry Belafonte was my replacement, but that’s another story.

We met Jacob for dinner and he was enthusiastic, creative, and articulate. He seemed to have an enormous amount of both energy, and ideas. With Arielle Angel,he quickly assembled a team and they worked hard these five years to become an Important  Magazine raising money, broadening the audience immeasurably, having a significant presence.

 (Last night at dinner a non-Jewish friend in her thirties quoted from Jewish Currents!)

So that we could continue,  Larry, Jessica and I created ALTE. 

Now Jacob is leaving for the labor movement.

Whatever he does will be interesting, for sure.

And as for those of us who are Alte now, we are grateful for his success.