Reaching Out, With Cheek, to Young Jewish Readers
NEW YORK --”This is the result,” says Jennifer Bleyer, waving at proofs of the soon-to-be released first issue of Heeb magazine, “of a bunch of kids meeting for a year in an East Village basement and cracking jokes about rabbis and Hebrew school.”
The glossy, 64-page publication she’s holding includes a story about Jewish stereotypes in the television show “The Simpsons,” a profile of Neil Diamond (complete with pullout poster), and a look at Jews’ relationship to pizza (ambivalent, according to the article).
The “New Jew Review,” as it bills itself, also has more serious stories on political activism in Puerto Rico, Israel and the U.S. But the main tone of the magazine is slick, edgy and knowing and, oh yeah, Jewish.
According to its promo postcard, the magazine is “an ambitious antitrust investigation into the monopoly on God. It is a sweaty prizefight between hip-hop and sushi in this corner and klezmer and kugel in the other. It is the ... love child of Emma Goldman and Lenny Bruce.”
It is also an effort to connect with young Jews who feel disenfranchised from their religion. “I meet Jews all the time who have such ambivalence about being Jews,” says Heeb’s ad manager, David Kelsey, 31, whose day job is in the wholesale knish field. “For most people, their education ends at a bar or bat mitzvah, so they associate Judaism with that awkward adolescent age. Heeb is not just about being hip. We hope it gets people to reexamine their own Judaism.”
Bleyer, the magazine’s 26-year-old editor, describes herself as having a typical “suburban American Jewish schlock” upbringing in the Midwest. Her first foray into journalism was in her teens with the one-time publication of an underground punk magazine.
At the time, she says, Judaism “seemed the absolute anathema of everything I was interested in--punk rock, anarchy, literature. Judaism seemed nerdy and boring. But I never felt embarrassed about it. If anything, I wanted to connect.”
She first made that connection as an undergraduate at Columbia University, when she combined her interests in punk rock and Judaism with the publication of another one-issue low-tech magazine, Mazeltov Cocktail.
Bleyer went on to dream up Heeb while an intern at Harper’s magazine in spring 2000, and discovered she could get a $60,000 grant from Joshua Venture, a San Francisco-based foundation aimed at promoting young Jewish entrepreneurs. The foundation is backed by a number of organizations, including Steven Spielberg’s Righteous Persons Foundation and the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies.
Heeb, which plans to be a nonprofit quarterly, is due on newsstands around the country Feb. 5. The initial circulation run will be 16,000, and the first issue will cost $4.50. Distribution will be in major bookstores such as Barnes & Noble and Borders.
Although the magazine has yet to be published, the name Heeb--which is a deliberate misspelling of the ethnic slur “Hebe”--has raised some eyebrows in the Jewish community for some time.
“I understand the magazine’s intent is to try and attract disaffected Jews, which sounds like a fine purpose,” says Ken Jacobson, associate national director of the Anti-Defamation League. “But why have a name that really distracts from its purpose? Words like that still have power, and this tends to diminish the sensitivity to them.”
Bleyer, who exudes a low-key confidence and a self-deprecating sense of humor, obviously doesn’t mind if her magazine provokes the mainstream Jewish community. But she seems pleasantly surprised that--so far--the response has been as positive as it has.
Bleyer says that she received “hundreds and hundreds” of e-mails last year following publicity about Heeb in the Jewish press and in the weekly New York Observer, and very few were negative.
“Given the name and the tone of the magazine, which is not nearly as sanctimonious as the Jewish community likes to be, I’m surprised how supportive [the Jewish community has] been. For every 50 e-mails of support we get, there’s one that accuses us of being self-hating Jews.”
J.J. Goldberg, editor of the Forward, one of the oldest Jewish newspapers in the country, says, “I don’t have a problem with a magazine with that name. I think it’s bold, and I think it’s on to something. We have to think outside the box to reach the next generation.” The Forward, which is published in Manhattan, placed an ad in Heeb’s first issue.
Goldberg says, however, that “no one has shown how you build a constituency if you burn your bridges, if you cut the ties to the traditionalists and reach out to the next generation.”
The Heeb staff, pulled from Bleyer’s pals from Columbia University and other like-minded folk, is tiny. The advertising, which includes the San Francisco beer company He’Brew, the Knitting Factory nightclub and independent production company Freed Pictures, is minimal and largely on an issue-by-issue basis. But interest among prospective contributors is intense, judging from a recent meeting.
In a dank basement of an East Village synagogue, about 40 people gathered. They had been chosen by Bleyer and her colleagues from about 100 people who had e-mailed to express an interest in working--for free--for Heeb. These included writers, editors, designers and business people. The intent of the meeting, Bleyer says, was to pick out a few of the most qualified to help put out the second issue of Heeb.
Munching on bialys, they explained their background and interests. There was purple hair and yarmulkes, serious writers and confused seekers. Some were converted, others the product of mixed marriages, a few the children of rabbis. But what tied them all together was their age--virtually all were in their 20s and 30s. And they shared an almost--dare one say?--religious-like fervor in explaining their interest in Heeb.
Amy Wachtel spoke about how she wanted to be involved because, as a former deejay known as the “Night Nurse,” she has seen many similarities between Rasta and Jewish cultures. Elisheva Lambert called herself a “totally neurotic Jew from Toronto who is doing everything my parents didn’t want me to. When I first heard of Heeb I thought it was a really awful idea,” she said. “Then I thought it was the best idea I’d heard of.”
Michael Hirschhorn, who is helping the staff develop a nonprofit marketing plan, says, “There is a whole core of untapped young Jews who feel very little connection to the organized Jewish world. The offbeat irreverence of Heeb gives them a place to be unabashedly Jewish.”
Heeb is far from the first publication to attempt to target young, non-Orthodox Jews, but Bleyer and her cohorts argue that there has been nothing like their magazine.
Rob Eshman, 41, editor of the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, an independent community newspaper, wishes Heeb luck but is skeptical the new magazine can make it. “L.A. is littered with hip Jewish publications that come and go,” he says. “It’s a tough, tough market. You have to have deep pockets and a real passion. People always make the argument--and these are the publications that make it to the light of day--that what is needed is some magazine that will break through the apathy and ignite Jewish fervor,” he adds. “Everyone’s looking for that key.”
Eshman also argues that many newspapers like his have an increasingly younger readership and staff--his editors and writers are primarily in their 20s and early 30s--and therefore cover stories similar to those in the magazines and newspapers that target young, hip Jews.
Not so, Bleyer contends. “I’m sure the Jewish newspaper editors don’t think there’s a need for Heeb magazine, but we’ve had thousands of people sign up for our mailing list, and hundreds upon hundreds writing to us months before an issue even hits the newsstand wanting to know when and where it’s coming out, so there’s obviously a desire for it,” she says. Jewish newspapers exclude “a huge swath of us ... who identify with our Jewishness in unconventional ways.”
Heeb’s Web site sums up the difference neatly, stating that the magazine is interested “in the inadvertently Jewish ... the Jewish by side-glance rather than head-on.”
“It’s very easy to point out what is Jewish about pastrami, klezmer, dating frustrations and neurotic families,” notes the Web’s letter to prospective contributors. “It is far more difficult to point out what is Jewish about spirulina, Dolly Parton, the civil war in Angola and serial killers in the Midwest. The latter is what we’re looking for.”
Some wonder if there’s enough cool, young Jewish stuff to write about, but Bleyer says that because Heeb is a quarterly, she’s not worried. “If we came out once a week, it would get played out pretty fast. We’re coming out three or four times a year.”
The staff has enough money to publish two or three more issues, Bleyer says, but then they will need an infusion of capital.
Whatever happens, though, Bleyer says she’s not nervous about the reaction to her magazine.
“Some people will like it, some will hate it,” she says. “And some won’t get it.”