They're functioning in a highly politicized environment, where everyone is pushed to take sides. But the editors of three new student journals at prestigious North American campuses say they're just trying to foster intelligent discussion.

During her sophomore year at Columbia University, in 2004-2005, Bari Weiss became something of a celebrity, after she and several classmates challenged the university's administration to act against the anti-Israel intellectual intimidation that they said existed in its Mideast studies department. As Jews and Zionists, the group's members charged that several faculty members in the department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Civilizations (MEALAC) stifled open discussion about the region. After a Jewish advocacy group released video interviews it had made of students testifying about the problem, the affair became a national cause celebre, and Columbia took steps to revise its process for reviewing complaints against faculty (although a committee concluded that there was no ongoing problem in the department).

For a while last winter, the video, "Columbia Unbecoming," was something of a political litmus test, as pro-Zionists and anti-Zionists, in all their permutations, lined up to take a position on the question of whether Columbia specifically, and American intellectual life in general, had come in the thrall of a politically correct, post-nationalist, anti-imperialist ideology. And Bari Weiss and her classmates inevitably became symbols of a right-wing package of positions that didn't necessarily describe their own individual political outlooks.

"What was made obvious by the MEALAC controversy," says the Pittsburgh-born Weiss, 21, "was that there's a lot of political posturing and loud heated debate, but it's hard to find a space for reasonable discussion." Believing that that's what she had come to college for, Weiss decided to create the "space" herself, and in December, the first issue of "The Current: A Journal of Contemporary Politics, Culture and Jewish Affairs," of which she is editor-in-chief, was published.

The Current, which is the size of a Playbill, its cover illustrated with a detail from a canvas by early 20th-century painter Oscar Bluemner, is one of three new Jewish journals to come out of North American college campuses in recent months. The other two are the University of Toronto's "Notebook: A Discussion of Contemporary Jewish Issues" and "Chalav U'dvash (Milk and Honey): Brandeis's Journal of Zionist Thought," whose cover depicts a Jerusalem-centric parody of Saul Steinberg's New Yorker's view of the world. All three were founded with the support of Azure, the quarterly journal of the Shalem Center, in Jerusalem.

Shalem is a privately funded academic research institute, and its journal, published in English and Hebrew editions, runs scholarly essays that deal with "ideas for the Jewish nation." Azure's editor, David Hazony, explains that the origin of the campus-journal project was in a conversation he had with Roger Hertog, the New York money manager (he's vice chairman of Alliance Capital Management) and philanthropist. "We recognized that on campuses in North America today," says Hazony, "there's a battle of ideas being waged about the importance of Judaism and the justice of Zionism, and everything they invoke; that on some campuses, such as Columbia, students were being called upon to defend what they hold dear. They're up against something coherent, profound and fashionable." Hazony adds that he and Hertog spoke about creating an "intellectual home" for Jewish students, somewhere they could feel safe to "develop ideas, substantiate them, and feel secure in following their own instincts."

The first time Hazony told me about the publishing program, he said, jokingly, that his real motive was to identify talented young writers for his magazine before anyone else gets to them. He laughed when he said it, but it probably contained some truth. Azure has been running a summer internship program for the past few years for college students, a hands-on opportunity to learn about all the responsibilities entailed in publishing a magazine. Beginning last summer, several of the interns were offered workshops that would enable them to begin organizing their own journals. In addition to the three that have already brought out their first issues, by mid-February, another three were expected to be in readers' hands, from the Universities of Pennsylvania and Michigan, and New York University, and there are hopes of setting up another half dozen.

Shalem is putting about $ 100,000 into the project this year, most of it from Hertog and his wife, Susan, which covers about half of the journals' budgets. The students have to fend for themselves in finding additional sources for the remainder. All of the journals' content is uploaded to the Internet (at chalav.org, notebook.sa.utoronto.ca and columbiacurrent.com), and their editors, who stay in touch with each other via an e-mail listserv Shalem set up for them, are committed to ensuring that 85 percent of it is original and by undergraduates.

To help with the project, Hazony hired a 2004 Columbia graduate, Aharon Horwitz, who also had been involved in the MEALAC affair, and who made aliyah to Jerusalem this past summer. Horwitz, originally of Cleveland, says he tried to start a Jewish journal when he was in college, and together with a classmate and friend, Ariel Beery, himself an editorial fellow last summer (Beery is now founding a new Jewish magazine, called Present Tense), did create a website called "Blogs of Zion." Jewish life in the U.S. is rich, says Horwitz: "You have klezmer music, Heeb magazine, Jewish storytelling. They're nice, but a lot of us felt that they lacked content. They were about form, not depth. We wanted to approach the questions and address them."

Brauna Doidge, 20, a second-year student at the University of Toronto, is the founding editor of Notebook, whose cleanly designed cover features a quote from Albert Einstein about being Jewish on the back and a pixellated photo of the university's Convocation Hall on the front. She says she wouldn't have thought of starting a journal if she hadn't been in the internship program, but once the idea clicked, "I started e-mailing people from Israel about becoming editors and about article ideas." She tracked down Alex Green, a university senior, at the Jewish camp where he was working as a counselor, and asked him to become Notebook's executive editor. The Toronto-raised Doidge, who's majoring in Jewish studies, doesn't see her journal as having a political agenda: "I don't feel embattled, and I think the journal reflects this. We're not trying to be a voice for Israel, but rather for the students at Toronto." Notebook's 63-page first issue has an article by third-year student Shaun Hoffman, "It's Been Willed, but Is This the Israel of Our Dreams?" based on interviews he did with both Israeli and Diaspora students at the Hebrew University, with the general conclusion that the Israelis lack a well-developed Jewish identity; a conversation with Canadian Jewish documentary filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici; and parallel accounts by a "Toronto Jewess" and a "Sicilian Signorina" studying at the university about the experience of becoming friends and learning about each other's cultures and faiths.

Jason Lustig and Daniel Temkin, at Brandeis, already knew a year ago, when they were freshmen at the Waltham, Massachusetts, private school, that they wanted to start a magazine about Israel and Zionism; the Shalem program was merely a source of funding and editorial counsel. Brandeis, which was founded with much Jewish support though it is officially non-sectarian, is very welcoming to Israel supporters, but Temkin, from Madison, Wisconsin, says he was "troubled that, despite the fact that there is such a great department of Jewish and Israel studies, most of the intellectual programs (about Israel) on campus are geared to small audiences. There's a religious group, a right-wing one, left-wing, a couple others." He says he and Lustig wanted to create something non-partisan that went beyond "just 'We stand with Israel,' but that really explored issues and ideas, and that would be well-researched."

Lustig, who like his colleague grew up in a Conservative Jewish family, in his case in Buffalo, confirms that "we want readers to read about things they haven't thought about, but in a manner that's not rhetorical." Although the first issue of Chalav U'dvash does have pieces supporting last summer's Gaza disengagement and the security barrier (as well as articles on the changing kibbutz and the state of medicine in Israel), Lustig says they want them mixed with "topics that will be relevant in 10 years or 100 years. If you read Ahad Ha'am and Jabotinsky and Nordau and Pinsker," all early Zionist thinkers, "what they have to say still resonates today."

Toward the end of a phone conversation, Bari Weiss expresses surprise that I haven't asked her if she's had political interference from the Shalem Center, whose founder, Yoram Hazony (David's older brother), was once an aide to Benjamin Netanyahu, and many of whose fellows are right-leaning politically as well as religiously Orthodox. "Everyone wants to know: Aren't you just the handmaiden of the Shalem Center?" Not at all, says Weiss, who adds that she and her colleagues at the Current have "total control" of their editorial content. The charter issue of the Columbia journal is the most eclectic and sophisticated of the three, with a number of articles that aren't explicitly Jewish in content, such as "It's Not Diversity, Stupid: The Case for Affirmative Action," by executive editor Dena Roth, and "Paris Hilton, Ariel Levy, and Me: Flirting with Female Chauvinism," by Blythe Sheldon, about the difference between "raunchy" and "liberated" women. But there is also an essay defending Israel's security barrier, and a joint review of "Paradise Now" and "Protocols of Zion," a documentary about the revival in anti-Semitism.

Doidge, from Toronto, echoes Weiss about the editorial independence she feels, and both Lustig and Temkin, at Brandeis, stress that "the only pressure we've had is to print high-quality material," as Lustig puts it.

Hazony says that he and Horwitz will offer basic editorial advice to their younger colleagues, but stresses that any more involvement "would be counterproductive. We already put out two journals here; we don't want to be the editors of another six."

Hertog, who is also part-owner of the New Republic and the conservative daily The New York Sun, says that for him the bottom line of the publishing program is that "ideas matter." Speaking with The Report by phone from New York, he explained that his goal is to make it possible to "stimulate dialogue about important and penetrating questions that affect Jews in the United States as well as in Israel," adding that "these kind of magazines bring together constituencies that have the potential to be larger than themselves - not just for the writers, but for other Jews on campus too, and it creates a larger platform for debate and discussions."

As the daughter of a Maoist-turned-conservative father and a liberal mother, Bari Weiss says her aspiration is to publish a magazine that "fosters debate," in an era, she argues, in which entrenched ideologies sometimes make her fellow Jews "blind to reality."

Right after the Hamas victory in the Palestinian elections, Weiss explains, "I was flooded by e-mails from all of the lefty listservs - Michael Lerner, Gush Shalom, etc. They all made statements along the lines of 'Now we have to make peace with our Hamas brethren and embrace them.' This sentiment is deluded; it's just completely detached from reality. Hamas our brethren?

"On the right, though, it's also scary. I hear all kinds of things to the tune of 'Aha, you see, now the whole world sees we were right all along: They all just want us dead.'"