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| I Heart Heeb | |
 by Joey Kurtzman, January 9, 2007
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Jewcy was recently asked to sponsor a night of avant-garde Jazz interpretations of traditional Jewish music—the kind of ingenious, rooted-in-the-past-but-not-limited-by-it cultural event that we’d love to get involved with. The catch: Heeb was also sponsoring the event. Would we be willing to co-sponsor an event with Heeb? I mean, don’t we want to distinguish ourselves from that awful epitome of vacant New Jew
You're so """edgy""": Quick! Sneer at the hipster! posturing?
God, am I sick, sick, sick of this anti-hipster backlash, if I see the word edgy in scare quotes one more time I'm going to hurl. Heeb is constantly being pissed on as the mother of the Jewish hipster Frankstein, and I can’t count the times people have challenged us to show we're not tawdry and worthless like they are. Well bullshit, Heeb was good and important, limited though it was/is. No one else did what they did, when they started doing it, no one else showed that Jewish media could grab you by the balls and squeeze, instead of serving you the warm milk with piss of stultifying, blandly self-celebratory Jewish media.
Yes, we’re bringing more substance to the table, we think that iconoclasm and irreverence is most potent when wielded in the pursuit of substance, as well as thrills. But if, in their zeal, anti-hipster militants fail to note the distinctions and group us together with Heeb, I can’t for the life of me see why we should care. It doesn’t matter how many searching articles we run on atheism, Zionism, whatever: Some people will still shout out our names during their "hipsterism is sooo lame" jerk-off parties. And what does it matter?
Heeb made a huge contribution to Jewish media, it’d be great to collaborate with them. And that jazz night sounds awesome. Let’s do it.
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Joey Kurtzman was president of Jewcy Partners, LLC, and co-founding editor of Jewcy.com. Prior to joining Jewcy he was an on-air contributor to Ireland's political and cultural radio program, The Wide Angle. He lives in Los Angeles with More... |
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Michael Nehora
Agree with you mostly on Heeb...
...but I can't help noticing you keep referring to it in the past tense. It's still being published, at the usual snail's pace yes, but it hasn't gone away.
The reason I say I "mostly" agree with you is that I think Heeb was much better under its founding editor, Jennifer Bleyer. The first few issues did in fact cover matters of substance, such as the Israel/Palestinian issue, critiques of Joe Lieberman's politics (as a counterpoint to the then near-idolization of him in most Jewish media), social activism, and the like. But it seems to me that under Josh Neuman each issue has become progressively more devoid of real content. Instead, we have pages and pages of shock for shock's sake: the "Bible sex" cartoon pictorial featuring Onan bukkake (I use the term literally this time), an "art" piece featuring the word "kosher" spelled out with cream cheese, in Hebrew letters, on top of ground beef, and a pig on the latest issue's cover. Now I'm not personally "offended" by any of the above--it takes far more than that to offend me--so much as I'm disappointed by the dumbing-down of a once intelligent Jewish progressive/alternative magazine.
But hey, Heeb still has a large following from among the 20 to 40 Jewish demographic, so why not co-sponsor events with them? Nothing wrong with that at all. It doesn't mean you're signing on to everything about them, or vice versa.
alison zack
Heeb vs Jewcy
Why segregate your readers? Don't make us choose!
There is so little out there in the Jewcy/Heeb category that not only SHOULD you be working together, it would be stoopid not too.
I'm won't dispute the merits of Heeb vs Jewcy because its irrelevant. Heeb is a quarterly magazine with a sparse web-presence. Jewcy is online only and updated daily. Its apples and oranges.
See you at Jazz night.
JewcyCraig
Exciting
Did anyone else get a little excited (..and a little aroused) at this conversation?
Anonymous
your focus
I think you are focusing too much on the term Hipster. What IS played out is the endles irony, apathy, sarcasm and narcissism that surrounds the mentality that you are referring to. It is pretty valueless, uncreative and on some level pretty fucked up. Check out an issue of Vice magazine for a reference. Upper middle class suburban white kids that move to Brooklyn or Ssan Fransisco and think that they can mock and ridicule everything around them, particularly when they are taboo (such as dissing minorites endlessly, including Jews) regardless of how much they negatively effect others, is not impressive. It's just an excuse to act like their racist grand parents did, but because they can reference black culture, etc, they think it sets the apart. What a buch of losers. I'd love to smack the shaggy beards right off of their faces.
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