About

Vashti is an independent online magazine offering Jewish perspectives on debates confronting the contemporary British left. We prioritise in-depth, critical insight on a wide range of topics relevant to politics, community and historical inheritances, moving beyond the homogenising visions of Jewish life reinforced by Zionism and the British Jewish mainstream. 

Founded in 2019, Vashti is now organised as a workers' co-operative and our members maintain a variety of relationships with Jewish life in Britain. While representing a new generation of Jewish identity and expression steeped in reckonings with empire, capitalism, climate change, austerity, xenophobia and ethno-nationalism, we approach such issues through a multigenerational lens that draws from, and engages with, the trailblazers who went before us.

Vashti publishes a weekly newsletter, The Pickle, which is written by our editorial collective and looks at recent domestic and international news stories from a Jewish leftist perspective. We also publish a broader selection of original reporting, analysis, and opinion from a range of external contributors, Jewish and non-Jewish, on our website.

Through retrieving buried stories from the Jewish past, documenting critical developments shaping the Jewish present, and expanding the political horizons of Jewish life, Vashti sees itself as a voice for a rejuvenated British Jewish Left committed to a just future, and a means to widen the debate over what it means to live an ethical, politically informed, and socially reparative life.

You can contact Vashti on editors@vashtimedia.com.

In the early months of 2024 we commissioned designers, organisers and comrades Leigh Brown and Zissel Aranow to create a new logo for Vashti Media. You can read the piece exploring the logo's design and our responsibility to mark ourselves visible, as the diasporic Jewish left here.

Zissel Aronow (they/them) is a queer community organiser from Philadelphia, currently based in London. Their most recent work focuses on movement in movements — embodiment in community organising spaces. They’ve been experimenting using slow, tactile, and repetitive processes such as archival research, field recordings and interviews, poetry and letterpress printing, sound and reel-to-reel audio tape. Much of their work seeks to collectively reimagine a radical Judaism beyond Zionism. This included compiling and printing the Jewish Bloc for Palestine Anti-Zionist Shabbos Siddur. Zissel also just started a new series called Movement: An Experiment in (Radical) Improvisation, exploring the relationship between the body and collective political consciousness through improvised music. Previously in Philly, among many things, they ran Baby Tooth – a shop by and for local artists, which hosted community workshops and events as well as closely collaborated with Homies Helping Homies to raise money for their mutual aid work. A strong desire for a better world, and a deep love for their grandparents, thread through all that they do.

H. Leigh Brown (they/them) is a designer-researcher, writer, and facilitator of experiences, projects, and programmes. They have spent their career coordinating between local government, non-profits, grassroots groups and residents on community wealth building, participatory governance, and regenerative practice in local places. This work has included providing backbone support for a collective impact initiative, directing the production of public artworks, and convening creatives to build community archives. They like to ponder power shifts and reparative relations through the lenses of the solidarity economy and municipalism. Leigh enjoys growing and eating food, composting, cycling, singing, writing poetry, and talking about transformation.