The voices of the new Jewish media
 

NEARLY A DECADE AGO, Jennifer Bleyer noticed something missing from the newsstand. A former punk rocker with a taste for zines, the snarky underground journals of the downtown scene, Bleyer concluded that “there were no Jewish magazines for young people like me.” She had graduated from day school, but afterwards left the Jewish mainstream for a variety of more satisfying experiences in the wider world. In her own words, she had become a “dim sum” Jew, her ethnic identity just one morsel alongside others on the plate at a Chinese buffet. Then in her early twenties, Bleyer decided it was time to put together a zine for “dim sum” Jews.

Heeb: The New Jew Review was launched in January 2002, with a mission to explore culture and politics through words and images in a brash, sardonic, Jewishly inflected voice. She later called it “my own subconscious writ large and distributed at Barnes and Noble.”

Bleyer soured on Heeb after four issues, displeased with the fad of “Jewish cool” she felt she had unwittingly abetted. Joshua Neuman, an adjunct professor of philosophy at New York University, who had been the music editor, took the reins and began building Heeb into what he called a “lifestyle brand.” Under his editorship, the magazine has honed its tone of borscht-belt bawdy, marrying it to a left-leaning politics in a combination that Neuman calls “Groucho Marxism.” The pages can be semi-pornographic, celebrity-obsessed, sharply worded, and visually striking, “refining Jewish experience and Jewish iconography” to the extent of running afoul of both the Anti-Defamation League and the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.

Heeb is the enfant terrible, and the poster child, of a new wave of Jewish media, which is itself the mouthpiece of a fresh and powerful manifestation of young Jewish creativity. Over the past decade, along with a proliferation of art, music, drama, and film, there has been a burst of Jewish-themed print journals, web magazines, and blogs, the products of a generation in search of its voice. It is a uniquely American generation, for the most part not shaped by the experience of a cohesive Jewish community, and just as likely to find social, romantic, and professional fulfillment in the broader world where it experiences an unprecedented degree of acceptance.  Population studies have, infamously, revealed high rates of intermarriage and a profound degree of alienation from the State of Israel and Jewish communal institutions, which are considered parochial and stifling.

Simultaneously with Heeb, another new media project was developing to meet a perceived need, not providing irony to the unaffiliated, but aspiring to serve as the “journal of record” for serious young Jews. Jay Michaelson, a prolific writer and poet, a teacher of Jewish spirituality, and the co-founder of Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture, was an avid reader of The New Yorker and Slate. He was distressed to find no comparably sophisticated Jewish periodicals. “To read the Jewish press was to enter a time warp,” he said. “Nothing was meeting us on a cultural or generational level. We were tired of segmenting our identities.”

Zeek appeared online in January 2002, emerging in print a year later. It offered The New Yorker’s array of material – prose and poetry, reviews, politics, photography and art – as well as emphasizing creative spirituality and social justice. The name, said Michaelson, now thirty-seven, was an affectionate homage to the biblical Ezekiel, “our first visionary prophet,” and also rhymed, felicitously, with “geek.” “We never set out to be cool,” he said. “We set out to be smart and authentic, and true to the way we were doing Judaism.” This has entailed a series of themed issues on subjects ranging from “food and nourishment” to the Russian Jewish experience, as well as publishing the work of emerging Jewish writers and poets. Zeek also leads the pack on Israeli fiction in translation. The current editor, Jo Ellen Green Kaiser, formerly the manager of Tikkun, said that Zeek is “about being a catalyst for conversations about the future of Judaism and the Jewish people. We are very much about horizontal, grassroots change.”

The journal actually reaches its widest audience neither through print nor live events, but by virtue of its presence on the World Wide Web, where its monthly readership totals in the tens of thousands. Michaelson recently made a move to increase these numbers, negotiating a partnership with Jewcy.com, a protean, for-profit new Jewish media collaborative. All of Zeek’s online content will now be managed through Jewcy’s already robust digital presence.

Jewcy is a brand in search of an identity. A few years ago, Jenny and Jon Steingart, a young couple trying to revitalize a theater in Hell’s Kitchen through a series of ethnically themed evenings, named their Jewish night with an evocative pun. The logo (with the W printed as the Hebrew letter shin in the faux-Semitic style of the Second Avenue Deli) ended up on trendy tee-shirts throughout the city, and on a website found by journalists looking for a story, post-Heeb, on the “new Jewish cool.” Jewcy was thrust into the vanguard of this supposed movement, which has proved a mixed blessing.  “It’s become a catch-all,” said current president and editor Tahl Raz. “Any kind of alternative manifestation of Jewish culture is put into the word ‘hipster.’” 

Jewcy itself is still looking to clarify its mission, and also for a sustainable business model. The clothing store is joined online by a constantly updated magazine, covering politics, religion, sex, lifestyle, and culture, as well as a “social networking platform” along the lines of Facebook, where monikered users log on to send messages and comment on articles. Raz is pinning his hopes on this kind of “user-generated content,” a model known in the digital world as Web 2.0. He wants to transform Jewcy from an editorially driven magazine to a high-tech media platform, gathering numerous independent content producers, like Zeek, into a marketplace of ideas. The goal, he said, is “a Jewishly flavored digital salon. A portal into a global Jewish dialogue.”

(As this article was going to press, Jewcy’s backers, including philanthropist Michael Steinhardt, pulled their funding. The future of the project is now uncertain, though the core staff intends to work from home, pro bono, for as long as they can, while at the same time seeking new sources of support. According to Jo Ellen Green Keiser, Zeek is unaffected by Jewcy’s difficulties, but will revert to an independent Web presence while it looks for other partnerships.)

New media projects like Jewcy represent the leading edge of the Jewish world’s engagement with the Internet, just as there must have been an avant- garde 500 years ago embracing the printing press. One notable exception is a small-circulation journal called Habitus, started in 2005 by Joshua Ellison, who is now thirty. Habitus is Jewish in concept, if not overtly in content, using “the refined Jewish language of diaspora” as “an empathetic tool for approaching other cultures.” Each issue explores the intertwining narratives of a selected city, so far including Budapest, Sarajevo, Buenos Aires, and New Orleans, elucidating themes of belonging to, or longing for, a place. Ellison decided from the start that Habitus would be primarily a print journal. “There’s a yearning in this fast, easily accessible world,” he said, “to have something that reflects more craft. It’s a way of saying: this is something that we feel has lasting value.”

But Habitus was designed by Dan Sieradski, also known by the screen name “Mobius,” who grew up online. Having received a modem for his bar mitzvah, Sieradski was blogging by the late 1990s, years before the concept of a personal web log had caught on.  Jewschool, which he created in 2001, was one of the earliest Jewish-themed blogs. At its height, it counted 80 contributors from around the world and 50,000 monthly readers, numbers that declined with the proliferation of comparable sites and the consequent onset of “blog fatigue.”

Sieradski found web technology to be the ideal format for guerilla journalism. With cheap and quick means of distribution available from a personal computer, he said, “everyone had their own press,” and could bypass the channels of the mainstream media. For Jewschool, this meant serving as an informational focal point for grassroots Jewish culture, such as the independent minyanim, or spiritual communities, which began appearing around the same time. The site was also active in promoting the stable of innovative recording artists signed to the upstart Jewish label JDub, including Hasidic reggae sensation Matisyahu. But Jewschool also proved a fierce and controversial critic of the establishment, naming rabbis who had been accused of sexual abuse, calling out mainstream leaders for anti-Muslim rhetoric, and criticizing Israeli policy with a vehemence that provoked angry accusations of “anti-Zionism” and “self-hatred.”

Sieradski has now moved closer to the mainstream, serving as the webmaster for the Jewish Telegraphic Association, the ninety-year-old Jewish wire service. Last year, along with several other innovators, he was even invited to address the Federation’s General Assembly, outlining a sweeping plan for the redistribution of communal dollars toward young entrepreneurs.

Another new media project has made an even bolder play for the center. Ariel Beery and Aharon Horwitz, both now in their late twenties, founded the magazine PresenTense in 2005, with the goal of expressing a positive vision for the Jewish future to combat what Beery perceived as a sense of “hopelessness.” “There was a lot of work being done on Jewish identity,” he said, “how it’s hip to be Jewish. But no one was asking why be Jewish in the first place.” Beery and Horwitz proposed reinvigorating Zionism itself, rekindling the flame of “Hebrew culture.” Going back to the nineteenth-century roots of the movement, they saw Zionism, beyond the push for territorial acquisition, as being a prescription for national renaissance that could inspire Jewish youth today. Building on the magazine’s success, Beery and Horwitz established the PresenTense Institute for Creative Zionism, a six-week summer “boot camp” based in Jerusalem, providing technical and philosophical training to young Jewish entrepreneurs. While PresenTense is not the most sophisticated of the new journals, the larger project represents the clearest attempt to reconfigure, rather than subvert, the Jewish establishment. As Beery recently told the Jerusalem Post, “We provide the space to bridge the gap between the wisdom of the old and the implicit knowledge of the new.”

In recent years there has been growing philanthropic recognition that culture may be a significant mode of engagement for otherwise disaffected Jews. Some donors have gone so far as to seed their own cultural projects. Nextbook, a literary endeavor that for the past five years has offered a web magazine and book series, as well as readings and lectures, was founded by the Keren Keshet Foundation. Alana Newhouse, now editor in chief, says that Nextbook is an attempt to form “a single address” for Jewish literature, culture, and ideas. “Culture can be a gateway to a broader Jewish identity,” she said. “It can open you up and make you think, to consider your connection to religious observance, the State of Israel, and the American Jewish experience.”

Reboot, the brainchild of Roger Bennett, a thirty-eight-year-old senior vice-president at the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies, also benefits from donor engagement. Reboot brings together high-powered young Jews in the arts, technology, politics, entertainment, and media at a yearly summit in Utah, “giving them,” said Bennett, “the opportunity to frame their own questions in each other’s company, and see what naturally happens year to year.” The project also encourages salon gatherings in several major cities, sponsors a record label re-releasing artifacts of Jewish musical kitsch, and puts out its own magazine, Guilt and Pleasure. Pointing to the work of historian Jonathan Sarna, Bennett argues that Jewish life in America has always thrived through transformation. The current manifestation of “wonderfully creative, occasionally anarchic” energy is yet another link in the great chain, he believes.

What all these disparate, or anarchic, media projects have in common is their inability to evolve a fully self-sustaining business model, and each therefore relies on grants and donations, usually from mainstream funding sources, to stay afloat. By advertising their success at reaching the young unaffiliated, by providing this sought-after demographic with an arena of Jewish participation, the producers of the new Jewish media are able to make a compelling argument for support to donors preoccupied with “Jewish continuity.” But most producers are adamant that “outreach” is not their objective. They are creating meaningful culture, not fishing souls for the organized Jewish world. On the other side, givers may overlook the bewildering, even objectionable, aspects of these projects, rationalizing them as a means to an end. The result is a fascinating dialectic over the terms of the Jewish future.

Benjamin Weiner is a writer and rabbi living in Boston.