TORONTO (JTA) — Outlook magazine, which bills itself as Canada’s only progressive Jewish magazine, published its last issue.
A shoestring operation with a circulation that peaked at 3,000 in the 1990s, Outlook was published by the Canadian Jewish Outlook Society from an office in Vancouver’s Peretz Centre for Secular Jewish Culture. The magazine had relied on donations from a dwindling base of readers and supporters.
“We have struggled uphill for quite a while with the difficulties and expenses of sustaining a print publication with a small and specialized — although devoted — readership, and we must finally let go,” Outlook Editor Carl Rosenberg wrote in the Spring 2016 “Farewell Issue.”
First appearing in Toronto in October 1963, Outlook evolved from an English-language insert in the Vochenblatt (Weekly Paper), a left-wing Yiddish periodical that emerged in the 192os. Many of its contributors were linked with the United Jewish People’s Order, a socialist fraternal organization that broke with the Communist Party in the mid-1950s.
Its last edition featured articles on current events, pieces on the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem and the Canadian novelist Adele Wiseman, a selection of Yiddish poetry and several book reviews, including one about the career of U.S. presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.
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