Ami Magazine

Ami Magazine (עמי, "My people") is an international news magazine that caters to the Orthodox Jewish community. It is published weekly in New York and Israel. The magazine was launched in November 2010 by Rabbi Yitzchok Frankfurter (previously Torah Editor for Mishpacha) and his wife Rechy Frankfurter (previously Mishpacha's American Desk Editor).

Coverage


Ami has featured interviews with politicians including President Donald Trump, Senator Ted Cruz, Senator Marco Rubio, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, George Pataki, Ben Carson, former White House Press secretaries Sean Spicer and Ari Fleischer and former White House counsel John Dean. Ami has also interviewed rabbis including Rav Yissachar Dov Rokeach (fifth Belzer rebbe), Rabbi Yisrael Horowitz of Kaliv, Rabbi Dovid Soloveitchik, Rabbi Baruch Mordechai Ezrachi, Rabbi Nissan Kaplan, Rabbi Manis Friedman, Rabbi Reuven Feinstein, and Rabbi Nosson Scherman.

Ami's political correspondent Jake Turx became the magazine's first member of the White House press corps with the start of the Donald Trump administration. During a February 16, 2017 press briefing, Turx began asking a question about the government's response to antisemitic threats across the United States, but was stopped in mid-question by Trump, who felt he was being personally attacked and denied being antisemitic or racist. Merriam-Webster reported that searches for "anti-semitism" spiked in the week following the Trump-Turx exchange.

Ami also produces a women's magazine called Ami Living and a tween magazine called Aim!. They publish a standalone food magazine Whisk that is packaged with the rest of the Ami Magazine sections, as well as Ami Business, a section in the main magazine featuring LunchBreak-interviews by Nesanel Gantz with businessmen and entrepreneurs, JTank-"the Jewish version of sharktank", and more. The issue released in the week before a Jewish festival often include two different main magazines.

Ami journalists and writers have traveled to several continents and numerous countries, spanning North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Malta, Cuba, Iraq, the Nevada desert surrounding Area 51, Chernobyl, Afghanistan, a possible location of Mount Sinai, the burial place of Aharon HaKohen in Jordan, Murphy Ranch in California, and more.

On December 11, 2019, shortly before the Impeachment trial of Donald Trump, Ami published a poll it had taken among 723 Orthodox Jews, asking five questions, four of them pertaining to the presidency of Donald Trump, with an overwhelming majority expressing support for President Trump. The poll gained much fame after Trump tweeted it.

Staff

 * John Loftus, columnist
 * Rafael Medoff, columnist
 * Rabbi Mordechai Kamenetzky (rosh yeshiva of Yeshiva of South Shore)
 * Rabbi Moshe Taub, rabbinic editor and weekly contributor
 * Jake Turx, White House correspondent
 * Nesanel Gantz, columnist
 * Shloime Zionce
 * Isaac Horowitz

Controversy
Some rabbis in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn asked that Ami (along with the Jewish publications of Mishpacha and Hamodia) not be read after the magazine published a piece about Jewish religious terrorism perpetrated by Sikrikim and sympathizers of the Jerusalem-based Edah HaChareidis organization. The Satmar Rebbe of Kiryas Joel, Rav Aaron Teitelbaum, along with various other Jewish leaders, have since that time condemned some of the communities which make up the Edah HaChareidis for alleged extremism.

In 2014, Ami Magazine featured a positive profile of the abusive Jewish cult Lev Tahor. The article was written by Ami Magazine's Editor-in-Chief Rabbi Yitzchok Frankfurter.