Sh'ma was supposed to promote multiple viewpoints, but none were heard
h’ma has breathed its last. Not, chalilah, Krias Shema and the acceptance of ol malchus Shamayim. I refer instead to an American Jewish periodical of that name, which after 50 years and 751 issues, has announced that it is ceasing publication. Leading Reform theologian Eugene Borowitz launched it in 1970 with the goal of creating “a dialogue in difference,” and he assembled an advisory board stocked with big names on the American Jewish scene like Eli Weisel, Yitz Greenberg, and Harold Schulweis. It was a boutique journal for communal insiders and “thought leaders,” rather than a mass-market publication, never topping more than a few thousand subscriptions.
Over the years it covered the lot of Jewish theological and social topics (although I checked and there was never anything in all the years on the sugya of palginan dibura). Joshua Rolnick, who headed the board of directors of the Sh’ma Institute, the journal’s sponsor, told a writer for Jewish Insider that “Sh’ma’s commitment to pluralism was something special. The way it approached a particular theme, turning it again and again.”
Sh’ma’s editor for the past 21 years, Susan Berrin, told the writer that since the announcement of its termination, she had “heard from readers, writers, and donors that it spoke to so many different types of people, that it created a conversation where people who were scholars, academics, laypeople, all different kinds of Jews could talk to each other in very thoughtful ways….We modeled a place where people who had very different attitudes could actually find a place to have a conversation.”
There were indeed, at least in its early years, a few learned Torah Jews who wrote in its pages, sharing an authentically Jewish perspective. Whether it was a forum for “different kinds of Jews [to] talk to each other in very thoughtful ways” is, at least from my cursory review, more debatable.
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