Summer 2024: Florida Issue

Description

The cover photo is a tribute to Miamis otherworldliness by Robby Campbell.

Inside the issue: In a staff Responsa, the editors take Florida Governor Ron DeSantiss attacks on queer and anti-racist education as a starting point to consider how mainstream Jewish groups attempts to suppress the truth about Palestine have made them accomplices to conservatives autocratic ambitions. Alex Kanes profile of the bombastic Florida state representative Randy Fine shows how the Jewish, pro-Israel power broker is navigating antisemitism and rising neo-isolationism within the America First right. In photographs from 19771986 and a new accompanying essay, Gary Monroe contemplates the end of old Jewish Miami Beach and the rise of Little Haiti. Eight organizersworking on issues from immigration to climate to reproductive justiceprovide dispatches from the frontlines of American autocracy, introduced by Zaina Alsous. A pair of pieces examine two left experiments in South Florida: The co-owners of Paradis Books & Bread remember the life and death of the radical bookstore, while Marina Magloire looks back on the Third World Feminist School. Gavriel Cutipa-Zorn traces violent parallel histories of orange cultivation in Florida and Israel, which have set the stage for a present-day agricultural partnership. Sasha Wortzel speaks with Shoog McDaniel about photographing queer life in rural Florida amid widespread repression. In an illustrated guide to the vegetation of subtropical South Florida, Monica Uszerowicz explores how plant wisdom connects the regions Indigenous and diaspora communities. Max Freedmans portrait of a Miami Jewish community suffused with hardline Zionism asks: Is this the future of American Jewish life? Arlo Haskell details the little-known history of the Jewish cell of the Cuban Revolutionary Party. Fargo Nissim Tbakhi reflects on a session with a Florida medium in a time of genocide. Samantha Schuyler reviews DeSantiss presidential campaign memoir, which details his expansion of executive powerand foreshadows the possible shape of a second Trump term. Plus, fiction by Ryan Alan Boyle, poetry by Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, art by Beatriz Chachamovits, and more.

Vol. 78 no. 1