“We believe that in a world in which Jewish periodicals outdo themselves in attempting to highlight just how endangered Jews are,” writes editor and publisher Joshua Neuman, “there should be one Jewish media outlet that actually makes its readers smile. So whether online, or in print, we like to think that we can all still have a little fun—and don’t worry, Ahmadinejad will still be waiting when we’re done.”

So, Heeb, welcome to the world of online-only Jewish journalism. We think you’ll enjoy it.

So Much for Controlling the Media [Heeb]
Earlier: Is ‘Heeb’ On Its Way Out?

Although we’ve never met, I’d like to take this opportunity to congratulate you for your pending purchase of Newsweek magazine.

I’m not assuming you’re hearing much by way of congratulations these days. After all, everywhere you turn, you come across another report of the magazine industry’s nearing demise: Circulations are down, advertising is down, U.S. News & World Report has abandoned its print edition, 279 magazines folded in 2009 alone, and TV Guide—a magazine that once boasted the highest circulation in the country—was sold for $1, the same price you paid for Newsweek. And yet, you chose to enter the industry at this tough time, and I won’t be surprised if some in your circle tried to talk you out of the move.

As one who has devoted his life to writing for, editing, and publishing magazines—including 30 years as editor and then publisher of The Nation, and now as chairman of Columbia Journalism Review—let me try to put your mind at ease. Magazine journalism, Mr. Harman, isn’t busy dying, it’s struggling to be reborn. And now, as it was in the golden age of magazines, it would likely be us Jews who’ll revolutionize this essential industry.

Jews, after all, have always had a special place in their hearts for magazines. Even at this difficult moment, there is Nadine Epstein’s Moment (“the independent national Jewish magazine”), there is Commentary, there is Tikkun (the anti-Commentary), there is The Jewish Review of Books, there is Lilith (“the American-Jewish feminist magazine”), there is Jewish Frontier (for organized labor), and for young, Holocaust-mocking hipsters there is even Heeb, along with many, many others. If you’re reading this letter, you’re surely also aware of Tablet Magazine, which represents, along with jewcy.com and several other Web sites, innovative attempts to carry on the magazine tradition on a new technological platform.

As you walk into Newsweek’s offices, and as you wonder in which direction to lead a great American magazine, let me share with you a bit of good advice I once received from an unlikely source. Although I disagreed with the late Irving Kristol, the so-called godfather of neoconservatism, on many things, I think he was onto something almost existential when it comes to magazine publishing. “A lot of New York intellectuals”—which is to say, Jews—“have roots in Eastern Europe, where, unlike in England or France, there was no tradition of civility,” he told me once when I was interviewing him about intellectuals and magazines. “In England or France, you operate within a framework of existing institutions. In Eastern Europe, we wanted to change existing institutions, to improve them. The Cossack was the existing institution, so ideas were more important than institutions. That is why if you disagree with someone, you stop talking to him and start your own magazine.”

I would add that, whatever one thinks of the neoconservative movement, one must concede that, for better or worse, it would not have come into being had it not been for magazines like The Public Interest (co-edited by Kristol), which in effect launched it, and Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary (now edited by his son, John), which nourished it. Most likely, you have no designs to turn Newsweek into an ideological organ; but you would do well to heed Kristol’s advice, and perceive of your magazine not just as a source for news but also as an institution for the manufacturing and dissemination of ideas.

Having sat on the publisher’s chair for enough time myself, however, I can guarantee that if you go on talking about ideas, someone is going to try to tell you that magazines have no place in the Internet’s age of immediacy. Simply remind these gloomy folks that the year’s biggest political story—the fall of the general who wouldn’t shut up, Stanley McChrystal—was caused by a magazine, Rolling Stone, one of the few media organs that still permit reporters to hang out with sources for long periods of time, and that still allocate 7,500 words or more for a worthwhile story. I’d like to see a Web site, or even a newspaper, have this kind of patience.

I am tempted to end my letter by citing any number of examples from the past glories of American magazine journalism. I’m tempted to remind you of Ida Tarbell’s exposé of Standard Oil Co. in McClure’s at the turn of the last century, of John Hershey’s “Hiroshima,” Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” and Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem” in The New Yorker. But instead, allow me to end with an anecdote that neatly captures what magazines, at their best, can do, and why we need them now more than ever.

Some years ago, when I was helping to put together a group of small shareholders to invest in The Nation, I was making a pitch before a group of well-wishers assembled by my friend Stanley Sheinbaum in his Brentwood, Calif., living room, when a middle-aged woman raised her hand and said, “Count me in. I can’t not invest.” When asked to say more, she told her story. Her father, she said, used to go to shul every Saturday with his father. And his father would sit there with a copy of The Nation on his lap, reading while the rabbi spoke. Why, her then-9-year-old father asked her grandfather, are you reading while the rabbi is talking? “Because,” said her grandfather, “what he is saying up there, I already know, but what this magazine is telling me down here, I don’t know.”

This, Mr. Harman, is our past. It is up to you to make it our future, as well.

… But it’s really difficult to see the point of the magazine’s “take” on T. Alan Hurwitz, who is the first Jewish president of Gallaudet University. Gallaudet is a school for deaf and hard-of-hearing students in Washington, D.C., and Hurwitz himself is profoundly deaf. There’s probably something interesting worth saying about that; maybe there is even a provocative, counter-intuitive position on it. I would love to read a creative argument against the 1988 Deaf President Now movement (which the post cites), in which the students demanded a deaf president, perhaps analogizing it to Jewish tokenism.

But this? It feels mean, offensive, gratuitous, and—maybe worst of all—not funny.

Gallaudet University Gets a Deaf Jewish President [Heeb]
Earlier: ‘Heeb’ Explains Hitler Image
Is ‘Heeb’ On Its Way Out?

(The show itself, which is about Ben and his friend Cam’s dreams of success in the fashion world, is alright. The story of aspirational young people trying to make it in the Big City never gets old. At the same time, lines referencing Blue Ribbon and a Condé Nast expense account make the whole thing a bit annoyingly name-drop-y.)

The most Jewish characters on the show, whom Heeb doesn’t mention, don’t appear until the fourth episode. (The second episode airs on HBO this Sunday night; I’ve seen the first four episodes, because I’m special that way.) Ben reluctantly heeds Cam’s request and goes to ask his parents for some money. Sure enough, his mother, a teacher, is hosting a few other members of the union in their homey Upper West Side apartment, and insists that her son stay a bit, you know, just to have a little nosh.

Ben then goes to Bookculture, the Morningside Heights bookstore which will forever be known as Labyrinth to past denizens of that neighborhood, to see his father. He is played by Richard Portnow, whom HBO fans may remember as Uncle Junior’s attorney. The scene between father and son—filmed on Labyrinth’s second floor—is pretty much as Jewy as it gets. If that’s your sort of thing.

Chosen TV: How To Make It In America [Heeb]

We conducted our own inquiry, with similar results. Former Heeb staffers told us they’d heard rumors of its demise but couldn’t confirm them. We asked the magazine’s music editor, Arye Dworken, what was going on, he maintained in an email that the gossip was just lashon hara that likely came from angry freelancers or ex-interns. “We as a magazine can’t be best friends with everyone and those non-best friends love coming out of the woodwork with ‘scandalous’ details (i.e., yawn, who cares, so what, etc.) when the rumor mill goes back into production,” he wrote. But when asked about the specific allegation that the print magazine, rather than the Heeb brand as a whole, was on its last, he dodged the question and referred it to editor in chief Josh Neuman. Neuman (who earlier told a Jewish Telegraphic Agency blog that Heeb was alive and well) responded in a short email, “Long story short: denying that we’ve decided to cease print.”

The Heeb Magazine Deathwatch Starts Now [Gawker]
Heeb Not Closing, According to Publisher [JTA]

Heeb 100

Best part of the 25-hour prayer-and-food-deprivation marathon we refer to as Yom Kippur? The end, when the shofar announces it’s time to stop mumbling apologies to God and shift our attention to fressing whitefish salad and bialys. Imagine, though, what a perpetual Yom Kippur would feel like, denying your appetites and begging God for mercy every day. Abby Sher, a comedian and young adult novelist, lived like that. She recounts her battles with obsessive-compulsive religious devotion, with eating disorders, and with the compulsion to cut herself in Amen, Amen, Amen: Memoir of a Girl Who Couldn’t Stop Praying (Among Other Things) (Scribner, October). Sher is not the first Jewish memoirist of scrupulosity disorder—Jennifer Traig’s Devil in the Details (2004) covered similar ground—which raises the question of whether collective fasting and breast-beating might not be the healthiest forms of communal ritual.

Simchat Torah, taking place a week from Sunday, celebrates the giving of the Torah, the ancient text that, among other things, includes many tales of bizarre and self-destructive rituals no less shocking than Sher’s memoir. The first book of the Torah alone contains instances of fratricide, attempted human sacrifice, incest, rape, and a whole lot of animal husbandry—all of which the alternative comix master R. Crumb renders in gorgeous detail in The Book of Genesis Illustrated (Norton, October). Though raised Catholic, Crumb has always had a bit of a thing for Jews—his wife, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, is one—and he bases his version of Bereishit on Robert Alter’s widely lauded English translation. Crumb’s draws and letters marvelously, as always, though his interpretative decisions brim with contradiction. If he quails at the Torah as “a piece of patriarchal propaganda,” as he told the New Yorker, why draw Yahweh so conventionally, as an old man with a flowing beard, a slightly more august version of Mr. Natural?

England’s Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, approaches Genesis more reverently than Crumb in Covenant and Conversation: A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible (Koren, September), a collection of responses to parashat hashavua. Meanwhile, NYU professor Mark Smith offers a scholarly take on the Torah’s creation myth in The Priestly Vision of Genesis 1 (Fortress, November), scrupulously attending to the ancient pagan traditions and priestly theology that influenced the Torah’s authors. Readers curious to discover how ancient Jews themselves represented narratives from the Tanakh can do so in a new, affordable paperback edition of Steven Fine’s 2005 study, Art and Judaism in the Greco-Roman World: Toward a New Jewish Archaeology (Cambridge, October). Among many other ancient artworks, Fine discusses the frescoes of scenes from the Tanakh narratives—none from Genesis, but plenty from Exodus and Esther—which have been preserved at the third-century synagogue of Dura Europos, in present-day Syria.

If the Torah seems like unusual fodder for adult-only alternative comix, how much stranger is it to discover that the scripture that condemns homosexuality as “abomination” has become a sourcebook for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender activism and thought? Torah Queeries: Weekly Commentaries on the Hebrew Bible (NYU, October), edited by Joshua Lesser, David Shneer, and Gregg Drinkwater—rabbi, scholar, and activist respectively—seizes on the Torah as just that. Scouring parashat hashavua for pearls of insight into the perplexities of queer Jewish identity, a wide range of writers suggest just how broadly relevant and provocative the ancient texts can be.

Perhaps neither Torah Queeries nor Crumb’s project should be surprising: as Judy Klitsner, a teacher at the Pardes Institute in Jerusalem, suggests in Subversive Sequels in the Bible: How Biblical Stories Mine and Undermine Each Other (JPS, October), the Torah often rewrites its own tales, modeling a sort of interpretive chutzpah. So potentially subversive is Genesis, in fact, that Crumb and his publishers felt it necessary to include on the cover of his edition a warning label: “adult supervision recommended for minors.” Such gestures, intended to guard youth from deleterious influences and impulses, have a long history in Jewish education. Take Tiferet Bahurim, a 17th-century tract advising Jewish grooms on sexual behavior. In Juvenile Sexuality, Kabbalah, and Catholic Reformation in Italy (Brill, October), Israeli historian Roni Weinstein introduces and contextualizes this fascinating early modern text.

Speaking of juvenile sexuality: Dustin Diamond’s tell-all memoir, Behind the Bell (Transit, September) promises to reveal the bacchanalian excesses of the teenagers on the cast of the long-running sit-com Saved by the Bell; Diamond played Samuel “Screech” Powers, an unforgettably goofy geek. Diamond’s not exactly a reliable source, though: in desperate attempts to attract media attention, he has appeared not only on awful reality shows, but also in a disturbing sex tape, and his former Saved by the Bell colleagues banned him from a reunion. Not much dignified conduct should be expected from the child star who will, nebekh, forever be known for epitomizing the intensely Jewfro’d dweeb whom every teenager wants desperately not to resemble. In a stand-up routine, the comedian Michael Showalter, a founding member of MTV’s The State, has described how he was once mistaken for Diamond on the street in Brooklyn. A stranger erroneously “thought I was one of the most iconic losers ever, of all time,” Showalter remarked. “Do you know how badly that hurts?” Surely not quite as much as being Screech.

This summer, reporting on Diamond’s sex life enlivened the blog of Heeb, the Jewish hipster magazine infamous for blending punk aesthetics with Jewish nonprofit foundation funding. (The magazine and the actor have share a willingness to do almost anything to generate buzz. The latest Heeb project, Sex, Drugs, and Gefilte Fish (Grand Central, October), features dozens of essays adapted from the magazine’s live Storytelling events, selected and edited by Shana Liebman. In it, those readers who haven’t heard enough anecdotes lately about nude Hebrew school teachers will discover much to savor.

The Barr photo, the publisher said, was meant to question “whether something new was happening in the culture—whether the taboo against joking about the Holocaust and the Nazis exerted as much power as it used to.” While that’s a legitimate mission, it was probably clear that the Holocaust taboo had weakened over 40 years ago, when Mel Brooks’s The Producers was released. Which brings us to our only question about the Barr image: what, actually, is the joke? Unlike The Producers, in which the humor is as obvious as the offensiveness, the Barr image is arresting and provocative but little more. We agree that people would be wrong to accuse Heeb of ill intentions. But Heeb should be less worried about such overt critics and more concerned about those who take a look, register the image, and then move on to something else that doesn’t commit the lesser sin of protesting too much.

Heeb Publisher Comes Clean on Barr Brouhaha [Heeb]

On a side note, if dear R.R. is a poor Eastern European immigrant, why does she have an uppercrust Germanic-sounding surname? Well, because American girls can’t pronounce Moskowitz, a company spokeswoman suggested.

The Other Rebecca Rubin [Heeb]
American Girl Doll Shares Name With a Suspect [NYT]
American Girl’s Journey to the Lower East Side [NYT]

I held onto that business card for two years. My first semester at Columbia was mostly spent drinking 40s at punk shows on the Lower East Side and making ‘zines, but eventually I decided to seek out this mysterious rabbi. The synagogue was plain: pink walls, rows of metal folding chairs, a simple ark for the Torah, a disorganized bookcase, and a lace-curtained divider separating men and women. At the back near the door, a cherubic older man rocked and prayed. Turning, he asked my Hebrew name. Reb Shlomo smiled, kissed my forehead and said, “Chaya Sarah! I am so happy to see you.”

I had grown up in congregations where the aisles were used as catwalks during the High Holidays. Here, worshippers were freaks, geniuses, outcasts, and eccentrics—more like members of the tribe to which I imagined myself belonging. One was a former yeshiva student who now favored various Hindu gurus, but still kept Shabbat. One was a Kahanist alcoholic from Transylvania. One got arrested for aiding a runaway teenager and other congregants rallied to help bail him out of jail. Reb Shlomo referred to all of them as “holy schleppers.”

Years passed, and I continued to fiddle around in the liminal spaces between Jewishness and everything else. I met others who seemed to do so as well, consciously or not, and became sort of fascinated by how many other Jews there were like me. “Like me” meant someone who had hitchhiked across the country a half dozen times, traveling up the Pacific Coast highway with surfers, along Route 66 with Cherokee women, and across Interstate 80 with a shoe salesman. It meant someone who had been in and out of relationships with a punk boy from Memphis, an Ecstasy dealer from Toronto, a chain-smoking sculptor, an activist saxophone player, and a self-fashioned motorcycle adventurer. It meant someone who had glimpsed the divine at Sufi zikrs, Hindu kirtans, Buddhist meditations, pagan equinoxes, and Native American peyote ceremonies.

Like me also meant someone who had been reared on Solomon Schechter Day Schools, Shabbat dinners and bat mitzvah lessons. Someone who was second-generation American, named after a great-grandmother killed in Auschwitz, and who had grown up in an atmosphere thick with accents, foods, and melancholy. It meant someone who had studied in an Orthodox women’s yeshiva, and who felt maybe there is a Divine Source who expects something more from us than intellectual appeasement and Western liberalism.

For some, I began to think, being Jewish was the main-course brisket on their identity dinner tables. Everything they do, everyone they know is Jewish. Maybe they have a couple of side-dish identities—being a woman, a litigation attorney, from St. Louis—but by and large, they are Jews. But then, there were people for whom identity itself is more of a dim sum, and their Jewish part like one small, tasty dumpling amid a variety of other yummy treats. I was a dim sum Jew, and so were most of my friends. I had the idea one autumn day to make a magazine for us. This magazine, I decided, would be called Heeb.

It took about a year and a half for me to get my magazine going—to procure funding, cobble together a volunteer staff, set up a little office in my apartment, solicit and edit content, and find a designer who would work for nothing. I got a rudimentary website up, figured out how to accept online subscriptions, made a subscriber database, printed T-shirts in my living room, and organized a launch party. I had been working 80 hours a week and was just short of losing my mind.

Finally, the first issue came out. It had some funny pictures of Jewfros, hip-hop reviews by the grandmother of one of our editors, and a Neil Diamond centerfold. It had a dryly hysterical analysis of the connection between Nazis and Pizza Hut, a memoir of one young writer’s teenage affair with Allen Ginsberg, and staged photos of a sexed-up wedding. Nothing too declarative or definable. It was an attempt to capture what was Jewish by sideglance rather than head-on.

There was an odd publicity blitz. In a flash I was interviewed by the New York Times, the L.A. Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Hartford Courant, CNN, ABC, New York Magazine, the Village Voice. It was disembodying, and the press generally either adoring, mocking, or fascinated. But through it all, the magazine clearly became a symbol that young Jews had arrived—and weren’t afraid to make fun of our ourselves. I found myself to be the movement’s unwitting spokesperson, and thought I was done with it until a call came one afternoon from Howard Stern’s show.

An NPR kind of gal, I had never heard Howard Stern before and didn’t know what to expect. It was like being stuck in a room with a bunch of fourth-graders for 40 minutes, more bizarre than insulting. Howard railed against my magazine, commenting on the unforgivable offensiveness of its name (what it must take to offend Howard Stern) and making tangential remarks about gas chambers. He also got me (under truly irrefutable pressure) to show him my ass. The show finally went to a commercial break. Howard leaned over, shook my hand, and said, “Sounds like a great magazine. Good luck.”

In many ways, Heeb was exactly as I’d intended it: secular, irreverent, political, and funny. It was my own subconscious writ large and distributed at Barnes & Noble. Therapy probably could have afforded me a less revealing sphere in which to work out my questions about what the hell this Jewish thing meant, but the train had already left the station.

As it turned out, it was a train that other people wanted to get on. Emails and letters came in from everywhere—Montana to Missouri, Long Island to Las Vegas—saying variations on the same thing: “Finally.” They wrote in about dating angst, neurotic families, and seders. They wrote lurid tales of what happened to them at bar mitzvah parties, summer camp, and Hebrew school. Some wrote about having been the rabbi’s daughter, or having shtupped the rabbi’s daughter (on the bima, no less). The cumulative effect spoke to some deep longing that people seemed to have—to be cool in their otherness, to belong to a subculture that was theirs alone.

But as more people got into Heeb, the more disconnected I felt. After a while, it was like I was putting out a magazine for people with brown hair. Sure, I have brown hair. I like having brown hair. But I can talk about it only so much until it feels irrelevant, not to mention self-indulgent. Being the poster girl for hipster secular Judaism wasn’t really me. And although I was glad for Heeb‘s success and worked very hard for it, the popular message was, roughly speaking, that being Jewish is cool.

Being Jewish, cool? Um, dork factor: ten.

It’s not cool now, it never has been, and it never will be. But, this was the message taken by many people, and I was its mortified messenger.

I preferred the definition of Jews as ultimate outsiders. That I bore this ridiculous message of coolness made me want to crawl under a rock. I finally felt true Jewish guilt, having created and unleashed a monster against my core beliefs. I didn’t want to be a “cool Jew.” If anything, I wanted to be a holy schlepper.

So after four issues and almost three years, with an easy exhale, I left.

Not long after I was having coffee with my friend Moishe, who grew up Hasidic in Brooklyn, had been a talmud chohem, sent to the most prestigious yeshivas. From a young age, the rabbis predicted he would be among the greatest minds of his generation. He loved learning Torah and was very good at it. Except he couldn’t find proof that God existed. He attacked the idea from every possible angle, but nothing could help him overcome his persistent doubt. So at 27, Moishe shaved his beard and went to live in the secular world, which he found terrifically cold and alienating compared to his Hasidic community, but at least there, he felt he was no longer living a lie.

Moishe and I were talking at a diner. At some point, he told me this story:

Once, there was a young rabbi. People came from near and far to hear this young rabbi speak, because the way he spoke about Torah made them feel like they were flying through the air. And when the rabbi spoke, he himself felt like he was flying, such was the enjoyment he received from teaching Torah. Once he met with his own rabbi in the privacy of his study. There, he confessed that he didn’t believe a word that he said. He didn’t believe that the Torah was true.

“Oy,” said the young rabbi, “how can I go on like this? They hang on my words, and I enjoy teaching them, but this is hypocrisy!” The great rabbi looked at him and replied, “So you enjoy it, and they enjoy it. You get joy from it, and they get joy from it. The only one it’s bad for is hypocrisy!”

I thought of how far I had drifted from the 18-year-old who hung out at Carlebach’s synagogue between acid trips and punk shows. Back then, I had my own weird little search going on for a place within Judaism. It was something I tinkered with in a quiet, personal way. When the tinkering turned public, it ceased to be mine anymore.

Moishe and I looked at each other, he who had left his prodigious study, and I who had left Heeb‘s hipster posturing. They were things we were good at, that gave others joy. But they were lies of a sort, and the guilt of hypocrisy was too great to brush aside. It felt more truthful—more Jewish, even—to be outsiders.