by sue fishkoff
special to j.
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Ariel Beery is leaning over his espresso in a noisy coffee bar on E. 44th St. in New York City, talking so fast about the new Jewish magazine he recently launched that you’d think he’d already downed a double shot or two.
“PresenTense is a transdenominational marketplace of ideas,” he says of the 48-page glossy that debuted last October.
Beery, 26, doesn’t write a thing himself. Not that he can’t. He’d just rather give others the chance to express themselves. Indeed, the articles, essays, poetry and artwork in PresentTense are all created by young writers from around the world.
That’s risky for a new magazine, particularly one dependent on advertising, subscriptions and street sales rather than foundation grants. Not to mention one headed by such a young guy, who, like everyone else in the operation, earns the enviable salary of $0 per annum.
But that’s the aesthetic of a crop of new publications created by and aimed at Jewish twenty- and thirtysomethings. Dozens of print magazines and online ventures, all less than five years old, tout a new way to engage young Jews and –– to borrow Hillel’s phrase –– to get them to “do Jewish.”
“Every generation of American Jews creates publications that reflect the reality of its life,” says Columbia University journalism professor Sam Freedman, who likens the current Jewish media explosion to the emergence of the Jewish Daily Forward a century ago, and to alternative publications of the 1960s. “There’s something happening at the grassroots.”
Like those earlier publications, the new Jewish magazines and Web sites have created a cozy community of writers and activists who know each other, read each other and often write for each other.
“The fact that it’s so incestuous speaks well of the holistic aspect. It’s part of the overall exploration of Jewish identity,” says Esther Kustanowitz, senior editor at PresenTense, blogger and freelancer for a host of Jewish print publications.
To critics who complain that young Jews aren’t affiliating, the new magazines counter, “We study, we read, we pray, we blog, we create Jewish music, we fight for social justice, we’re very affiliated — just not with your organizations.”
One likely contributor to PresentTense is poet/novelist Alan Kaufman, a San Franciscan who has the distinction of creating the last Jewish magazine from the Bay Area, Davka, which flashed like a shooting star in the publication firmament in 1996.
“At the time, except for Tikkun, there was a complete dearth of any kind of new-vision Jewish magazine out there,” says Kaufman. “The concept was to take the most obscure, archaic, arcane periodical format in the United States –– the Jewish magazine –– and turn it into this insanely transgressive center of the storm. It would land like a space alien in the middle of American Jewish culture.”
In only a few print issues (and a handful of subsequent online editions), Davka made an impact. Among its more memorable stories: Jewish porn priestess Annie Sprinkle’s photo spread as a Chanukah Queen (complete with Magen David pasties), a piece about queer Yiddish activists, and interviews with artists such as Tony Kushner, David Mamet and filmmaker Greg Bordowitz. Davka even had a special theme issue: “Challah-palooza.”
San Francisco is the birthplace of Rolling Stone, Mother Jones and other upstart icons of the magazine world. It’s not surprising the Bay Area proved fertile ground for Kaufman.
“We have a less rigidly defined, more fluidly experimental Jewish culture here,” Kaufman says. “We exist in this nice dialectic with the revolutionary tradition of San Francisco, so it was inevitable that Jewish culture here would interface with that.”
Though Davka drew attention across the country, the magazine flamed out after two years. “We met with editors and asked what we had to do to make it,” recalls Kaufman. “They told us, ‘Modify the content, and have a consistent format.’
“We said no. We wanted to make each issue more transgressive than the last. There was this James Dean-die-young quality to it. That’s what made it so fun.”
With all its requisite kinkiness, Israel wasn’t too common a topic in Davka. But for the newest publications, the Jewish state is front and center, if not always in the usual packaging.
The most recent issue of Zeek, a high-brow journal of essays, art and literature, features the musings of a newly religious gay man in Jerusalem.
Sometimes the Israel focus is straightforward. PresenTense scrapped its entire first issue, which was going to be about holiday cuisine, to focus on the summer war with Hezbollah, which it covered via first-person essays from Israeli soldiers, students and visitors.
“When Israel’s at war and our people are dying, it didn’t seem appropriate” to do otherwise, Beery says.
What does Davka’s Kaufman think the new magazines should do? “The most important new imperative would be to make Zionism avant-garde and hip, and to reclaim Israel as the exciting, vibrant and fascinating Jewish enterprise it is,” he says. “Not to propagandize it, but to show young people that Judaism and Zionism are the ultimate outsider things to do.”
Jewish values, particularly social justice, charity and environmentalism, are popular topics, as is Jewish history and religious life.
Culture, humor and the arts, especially books, film and music, take up a lot of space: Jon Stewart, Sarah Silverman, the Balkan Beat Box, Borat — whoever’s pushing the Jewish envelope.
But they differ from the mainstream Jewish media in their willingness to engage the world beyond the Jewish community, their lack of interest in Jewish establishment organizations, and their focus on people on the communal margins: gays and lesbians, Jews of color, Sephardim, left-wing politicos, non-halachic Jews, the intermarried, even non-Jews, whom these magazines hope are among their readers.
And even when the tone of an article is breezy or sardonic, serious issues are being discussed.
“The Jewish people are smart enough to want content,” Beery says. “Jewish youth are not surface dimwits. Jewish funders think they’re these idiots that have to be shepherded towards the goal with sweets.” And that, Beery says, is insulting as well as wrong.
The biggest difference may be how the new publications position themselves as discussion forums rather than finished products. We’re not talking at you, they say, we’re a conversation you can join.
To prove it, they often write in the first person, they maintain Web sites and blogs where readers are encouraged to debate or berate each other, and they sponsor salons, lectures and other events to create communities of like-minded young Jews who share their concerns.
It’s a new vision of what a magazine can do.
“We want users, not readers,” says Tahl Raz, the 30-year-old editor of jewcy.com, an online Jewish publication that launched last November. The site is experimenting with “wikis” and other interactive media formats that allow readers not only to comment on what they’re reading but to change articles written by others — online, permanently — from the comfort of their home computers.
Raz says his staff will monitor the changes for spam or pornography, but other than that, it’s democracy gone wild.
Laurel Snyder calls the FaithHacker blog she writes for jewcy.com “a conversation, not a column.”
“I expect people to come back and correct me, to have that interaction,” she says. It’s an interaction she believes is sorely lacking in the mainstream Jewish community as well as its publications.
Most of the new Jewish media ventures acknowledge Heeb, the “New Jew Review” founded in 2002, as opening the door to a new kind of Jewish writing — clever, sardonic, knowing, brash and proudly, openly Jewish. The magazine received $60,000 in seed money from Joshua Venture, an S.F.-based venture-capital enterprise geared towards Jewish youth projects.
“[Heeb’s] a model for us all,” Beery says.
“If we inspire them, then that’s cool, I guess,” says Heeb editor Joshua Neuman. “But we don’t think we’re the original Jewish publication. Hell, Moses was an editor-in-chief if you think about it.”
Many are also following Heeb’s lead into the outer world. Heeb holds parties, sponsors film festivals and runs “Heeb Storytelling” evenings in cities across the continent.
“Heeb is creating a new kind of community among Jews 18 to 34,” Neuman says.
Unlike Heeb, however, the newer publications are consciously linking the conversations they hope to generate among young Jews to the articles in their magazines.
Guilt and Pleasure, an arts and culture quarterly launched early last year, started as a salon that editor Mireille Silcoff ran out of her Toronto home. The magazine’s front cover proclaims its mission as “making Jews talk more,” and offers readers tips on running their own salons. It refers to its articles as “salon fodder.”
PresenTense, which held a recent living-room discussion on “Jews and Money” together with students from the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary, is setting up three salons that will run monthly in the New York area, to generate conversations on the topics addressed in its publications.
But while Heeb is seen as a model in some ways, those involved with these second-generation “New Jew” publications want to encourage deeper Jewish engagement than they see Heeb doing, with its emphasis on sex and the shock value of images like the pig on the cover of its recent food issue.
Benyamin Cohen, founder of jewsweek.com and now editor of American Jewish Life, an Atlanta-based for-profit magazine, says reading Heeb “provides a few fun minutes, but at the end of the day it’s very unfulfilling.”
Jewish publications should aim higher, he believes. “OK, so they wear an ironic T-shirt, but what happens next? Do they go to a class in the synagogue? Do their kids go to summer camp?”
Snyder, the FaithHacker blogger and a former campus Hillel director, agrees. “If we don’t show people what’s significant and beautiful about Judaism — religiously, historically, culturally — there’s the danger that” all readers will take away from the publication is: “Jewish tattoos, wow!”
Sue Fishkoff writes for JTA; Dan Pine is a j. staff writer.
Cover photo illustration by Cathleen Maclearie
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California