Secular Culture & Ideas is a web magazine that explores secular Jewish history, cultures, and thought. Since debuting in 2007, Secular Culture & Ideas has regularly published articles, interviews, and essays that consider the many ways secular Jews and cultural Jews connect to their heritage — through Jewish art, history, languages, literature, philosophy, cuisine, folklore, and politics.

The importance of such a resource was made especially clear after the 2008 American Religious Identification Survey and the 2001 American Jewish Identity Survey showed the steadily growing number of non-religious individuals in the United States. Additionally, the studies revealed that nearly half of Jewish Americans see themselves as secular or somewhat secular. Of this group, a large number remain interested in connecting with their Jewish heritage. For this growing readership, Secular Culture & Ideas offers a means of engaging with secular Judaism and cultural Judaism.

To that end, Secular Culture & Ideas adheres to a broad definition of Jewish culture, with content driven by an enthusiasm for secular Jewish life. It takes a view of Judaism put forward in the recent publication by Bernardo Sorj, Judaism for Everyone...without Dogma where he writes,

Contemporary Judaism is a vast cultural field with porous borders, and that is a good thing. Judaism is a successful synthesis of local and global, particular and universal...[and] is a mixture of destiny and choice...about how to be Jewish. ...Most Jews feel that their Jewish identity should express [these] modern values.^[1]

And touching on secular Judaism as a unique culture, in his book Not in the Heavens, David Biale notes,

Jewish secularism is a tradition that has its own unique characteristics grounded in part in [Judaism's] premodern sources...Jewish secularism is an alternative to Judaism as a religion that has its own intellectual lineage.^[2]

These ideas and others are broached in theme issues published by Secular Culture & Ideas, including "Jewish Languages", "Renaissance of Yiddish", "Sephardic and Mizrahi Secularisms", and "Making Judaism Modern." Secular Culture & Ideas also regularly updates its blog, News & Notes, with information about lectures, art exhibitions, new books, and new media at the vanguard of secular Jewish studies and secular Jewish culture.

Secular Culture & Ideas is supported by the Posen Foundation.