Joshua Leifer, a graduate student at Yale, is a soft-spoken leftist whose thoughts unspool in long, eloquent paragraphs. In this respect, he is like his peers in the small bowl of soup that is the world of leftist magazines, a group of writers and editors who know one another, sit together on editorial boards, and attend the same issue-launch parties. But it is their differences that have been most pronounced ever since Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, their gentle voices belying the vehemence of their disagreements. “A segment of the left’s moral compass seems to have broken,” Leifer told me over the phone from New Haven.

The argument playing out in a handful of New York–based journals — most notably n 1, Dissent, and Jewish Currents — may seem like the intramural squabbling of underpaid scribblers on the margins. As Mark Krotov, the co-editor and publisher of n 1, told me as we entered the magazine’s airy office loft in Greenpoint, “We like to joke that we are never more relevant than when the world is being convulsed by historic events.” But in truth, this debate has shaped the rhetoric and agenda of the broader left, which in the past ten years has become an influential bulwark composed of an array of groups and figures including self-described communists, the Democratic Socialists of America, and popular Democratic Party officials like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This debate has also revealed fissures that remain raw and open and, some fear, may be long-lasting. “I believe the Jewish left will never be the same,” said Celeste Marcus, managing editor of the journal Liberties.

The initial point of contention was how to respond to the events of October 7, which the New York Times, among others, described as the single worst attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust. In a widely read essay in Dissent, Leifer denounced members of the left who celebrated the attack or refused to sanction it, including an n 1 contributor who had scorned the “smarmy moralizing about civilian deaths.” This prompted an impassioned rebuttal, also in Dissent, by Gabriel Winant, a professor at the University of Chicago, who said the focus on Jewish victimhood fed into “a machine for the conversion of grief into power” and further oppression of the Palestinians. The argument has since grown to encompass a constellation of questions surrounding the leftist project: whether it is too extreme to appeal to people to its right, whether it has exposed latent Stalinist tendencies, and whether it can even keep its own movement together.

The crisis has perhaps been most acutely felt at Jewish Currents, a magazine that brings together in its pages the aspirations of the Jewish left and the Palestinian liberation movement. Editor-in-chief Arielle Angel, who wrote a plaintive........

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