MOMENT MAGAZINE : The latest issue feature ‘THE NEW ERA OF JACKED JEWS’…

What Kind of Journalism Do We Need for a Healthy Democracy?

Media experts Vivian Schiller, Mark Oppenheimer, Marty Baron, Margaret Sullivan and Tom Rosenstiel weigh in.

Journalism must earn trust.
Moment’s cover story, “What Kind of Journalism Do We Need for a Healthy Democracy?”, puts the question to Marty Baron, Margaret Sullivan, Vivian Schiller, Mark Oppenheimer and Tom Rosenstiel. With advertising no longer paying for news, they look to memberships, donations and community ties. They also weigh AI, the decline of local reporting and government pressure on the press. Rosenstiel urges reporters to win over sceptical audiences rather than write them off.

China is rising in the Middle East.
In “China Is Changing the Middle East,” Ilan Berman notes that Beijing now has closer ties than Washington with 12 of the region’s 23 states, and its trade there reached $510bn in 2025. He warns that its surveillance exports could make the region less free. For now, regional states are hedging between the two powers rather than abandoning America.

Jewish citizenship was never settled.
In “Who Are We?,” historian Lila Corwin Berman tells Amy E. Schwartz how debates over whether Jews are a race, a religion or a nationality shaped American law, from Emma Goldman’s loss of citizenship to the Afroyim dual-citizenship case. Citizenship, she says, is “not an answer but a question.”

A play falls victim to fear.
In “Why My Play Didn’t Open in Chicago,” the Israeli novelist Naomi Ragen writes about the Chicago company Arts Judaica, which shelved its revival of her play Women’s Minyan in October. According to the company’s artistic director, actors and designers feared that working with a “pro Zionist” writer could hurt their careers. Ragen has called the cancellation a “return to McCarthyism.”

Moment defends nuance.
In “Journalism, Ahead of the Curve,” editor Nadine Epstein argues that journalism should help people think rather than polarise them. She calls Moment “an island of sanity” in American Jewish life and urges Jews not to give up on democracy.

The issue also includes Sam Franzini on “the new era of jacked Jews,” a debate on whether Jewish identity is an ethnicity, and Robert Siegel’s review of a book on the gangster Meyer Lansky.