Ninety-three years after its first issue, The Jerusalem Post is still, at heart, a letter from home for Jews and friends of Israel across the world.
What began in 1932 as The Palestine Post, a modest English-language paper printed in a small Jerusalem office, has grown into something far larger than its founders could have imagined: a global conversation, a daily heartbeat of the Jewish world.
In its early years, the paper served a small community of diplomats, journalists, and new immigrants who needed reliable news in English from Mandatory Palestine.
It reported on the struggles of a people seeking self-determination and on the painful battles that marked Israel’s birth. For those who arrived from London, New York, Johannesburg, or Melbourne, unfolding the paper was a way of understanding their new home.
After 1948, The Palestine Post became The Jerusalem Post, reflecting the transformation of the Yishuv into the sovereign State of Israel. That change of name signaled that the paper saw itself as an institution bound up with the story of the Jewish state.
Today, most of our readers are not in Israel at all. They are Jews and friends of Israel in Los Angeles and London, Paris and Panama, Johannesburg, Sydney, Buenos Aires, and small communities where there is no longer a robust local Jewish press.
For them, The Jerusalem Post has become not only an Israeli newspaper in English but a kind of global town square, a place where the arguments, anxieties, hopes, and achievements of the Jewish people are reported, debated, and preserved.
That role has grown as the landscape of Jewish journalism has shrunk. Many local Jewish weeklies have merged, gone digital in name only, or disappeared altogether. Newsrooms have been hollowed out, investigative reporting has become rare, and too many communities rely on social media feeds or partisan newsletters instead of independent journalism.
In that void, there is a real danger that Jewish life will be documented only in fragments, press releases, viral posts, and angry threads, rather than with context, memory, and a sense of responsibility to the historical record.
Therefore, we cover Knesset debates and coalition crises, but we also cover antisemitism in Europe and North America, campus battles, the rebirth of communities in the Gulf, and debates inside Jewish organizations
When a synagogue in the United States is attacked, when a Jewish school in Europe is threatened, or when Jews in Latin America wrestle with political turmoil, our readers rightly expect to find those stories on our pages.
Today's world bears little resemblance to that of the 'Post's founding
The world in which we publish bears little resemblance to the one our founder, Gershon Agron, knew. The smell of fresh ink on morning papers has been supplemented, and in many places replaced, by the glow of screens.
JPost.com now reaches readers in every time zone. Many of them never touch the printed paper, yet they feel the same emotional connection that earlier generations felt when the paper landed on their doorstep.
That continuity is not an accident. The Jerusalem Post is still written and produced by editors, reporters, photographers, and designers who love Israel and tie their fate to that of the country and the Jewish people.
In a media ecosystem saturated with noise and instant reactions, a 93-year-old newspaper could easily have become a relic. Instead, the Post has reinvented itself again and again.
We are a website, a newspaper, a podcast platform, a conference host, and a digital library. We cover politics and diplomacy, but also technology, culture, Jewish thought, health, and the everyday lives of Israelis and Jews abroad.
Anniversaries are not only a reason for pride; they are also a moment for self-reflection. Have we always gotten it right? Of course not. We have made mistakes, learned from them, and moved on. Readers expect us to be fair, to be tough on those in power regardless of party, and to make room for a range of voices in our opinion pages.
At 93, we are grateful for the trust our readers place in us, and we know that trust must be earned anew every day. For us, and we hope for you, it will remain what it has always tried to be – a letter from home and the beating heart of a global Jewish conversation.