It’s no secret that Jews were disproportionately involved in the campus activism of the 60s and 70s. What many don’t know is that those Jews were doing a fair amount of writing, and even founded a wire service to link all the new Jewish campus publications together.
By the mid-70s the Jewish Student Press Service had hundreds of member publications, many of which championed issues the mainstream press—Jewish and otherwise—wasn’t talking about: LGBTQ Jews, Vietnam, left-wing Israel politics, and the plight of Soviet Jewry, among others.
But by the end of the 1980s, as the activist climate cooled, most member publications had shuttered. So in 1991, JSPS reinvented itself as New Voices Magazine, a national magazine written by Jewish college students, and which, in the tradition of JSPS, covered issues that mattered to them on their own terms.
New Voices, now an online-only publication, is still kicking. So next time you bemoan the apathy of today’s young Jews, remember that a little slice of the Jewish student movement of the 60s and 70s lives on—and on and on.
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