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Jewcy Book Club
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Benyamin Cohen
& Matthew Rothschild
who are posting all week.
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- 12/08: Seth Greenland
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Hip-Hop Heeb Jumps the Shark |
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 by Dan Friedman, August 25, 2008 |
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Never has so much been invested in being a hip Heeb, both financially and culturally. For those outside the New York metropolitan area, though, the specific patterns and emphases of that hipness may not have been made clear over the past six years since Jenn Bleyer founded the flagship of kyke kool, Heeb magazine. Lisa Alcalay’s Cool Jew: The Ultimate Guide for Every Member of the Tribe is an indulgent guide to every nuance of that burgeoned cool along exactly the same lines as Heeb, but without the glossy production values or the topical articles.
Genius might be 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration but “cool” is 10% inspiration and 90% presentation. Cool Jew is enjoyable, engaging, informative and a grab bag of both fun (“When do you swing a chicken over your head?”) and funny (Jewish Gangsta Tags) stuff. However, it is worth noting that although there is a plenty of new material here – especially valuing women, Sephardi culture, and traditional Jewish texts – all of it is in the easily recognizable pre-existing styles of the people Klug rightly credits as the originators of the trend for which she is providing the guide.
Klug seems to have three agendas: to highlight many of the important elements of the New Jew Cool; to make elements of Jewish religious and cultural observance seem hip (“Real life Talmudic Riddles”); and to add some more Heeb-like hip Jewish-pride things – (“Sheebster, meet Heebster”) turning the Jew=Cool vibe into the form of a parodic life-guide. She achieves these things admirably, but there are scant new concepts for those people who are Jewish enough to grab a copy and few apparent reasons for anyone else to buy it. Especially with its carefully happy explanatory notes designed to make it accessible to everyone, Cool Jew is in grave danger of being distinctly uncool. Indeed, it’s in danger of being a book that sits on the Judaica shelf at Barnes and Noble for bubbes to buy their pierced and tattooed grandchildren as a follow-up to that great “so, you want Hitler to win?” line.
The kabbalistic Shiur Komah outlines, among other things, the exact dimensions of God. The apparently earnest attempt to carry out this impossible, and absurd, task is a virtuosic attempt to underscore the absurdity of such projects of measurement. Cool Jew, by attempting to be an encyclopedic guide to everyone and everything that is, was, wants to be, or might have been fashionably Jewish, faces a similar, although perhaps less deliberate, self-defeating struggle for the credibility of its own project. By deliberately absurd and parodic appropriation of everyone and everything possible, the book generates plenty of amusement, while simultaneously undermining the concept – and possibly even the desirability – of Jews qua Jews as emissaries of the zeitgeist.
It is unclear whether, through her frequently implicitly ridiculous judgment on Jewish/not Jewish, hip/not hip (“parsnip ; Jewish ; just has that ring to it: snip, snip”) Klug is deliberately undermining the connection between hip-ness and Jewishness. Are we laughing at “Top Seven Reasons Jews and Japanese are Related; 1. They got Buddha, we got Judah” because it’s meant to be such a patently absurd comparison or because it just IS an absurd comparison? Klug’s inclusivity is clearly over-the-top – a page listing where Jews live in 23 North American cities sits opposite a page explaining how to recognize if you are a long-lost Latino Jew. On one level this counter-productive inclusivity (Elvis?!) might suggest to Zeek-readers that Judaism and Jewishness, with their deep religious, human, and cultural responses to the challenges of life should have, at best, contingent intersections with the superficial and ephemeral judgements of what is hip and what is popular. It seems rather, that Klug takes an irreverent approach to the syncretic and appropriative impulses of contemporary trendsetting and includes material for logical, historical, comedic, aesthetic or polemic reasons, however tenuous.
As well as potentially removing its own raison d’etre, there’s the danger that this relatively traditional Hanukah-type of gift book might remove the raisons d’etre of the artists it quotes or emulates. Like a Thai beach getting included in a Lonely Planet guide, a book like this might spell the end to the cutting-edge trendiness of anything included. For, despite its bubbly and eager tone, Cool Jew is as earnest a collection of Hebrew Hammer, JDub-y, Heeb-y, Jewcy-y, things as any establishment Co-ordinator of Jewish Life could want. In intention it is less Heeb and more like a cross between the Worst Case Scenario series, Lonely Planet guidebooks, and the Shulchan Aruch: it is not cool itself, it is merely a key to a cool foreign cultures real and imagined about which the readers need guidance.
But, since it’s not for the cool, who is the target audience? Klug invites anyone who is “a strongly-identified Jew, more Jew-ISH, an Honorary Heeb, an ally, or a [jewishly] deprived Midwesterner” to dip in but why should they? Cool Jew has the high energy Jewish pride that marks Heeb at its best, but it sometimes falls into the trap that Heeb occasionally and its imitators to a greater extent do, namely the stereotypically kitsch. Big noses, circumcision, manischewitz, “oy vey” (or other frequent yiddishisms), herring, kibbitzing, rapping Rabbis, Jewfros – even retro forms of them – are just not funny on their own any more.
The hip forum for guides like this is the Internet where reference, cross-reference, and intertextuality are only a hyperlink or a twitter away. The New Jewish Cool and, for better or for worse, pretty much anything hip in 2008, is either an event or online or both. The Borscht Belt’s dead and has been successfully exhumed already once this young century. Heeb’s been there, done that, Jonathan Kesselman made the movie, JDub recorded the soundtrack, featuring Matisyahu and Good for the Jews, Jewcy’s got the t-shirt and panties. And, if you want it, it’s all online. Who, under the age of 30, still needs the book?
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stacey.
I was reading this book last night before going to bed. I woke up this morning, opened firefox and there was this article. Funny. I'm reading the book not because I was particularly intrigued and picked it off the bookshelf myself, but because my mom wants me to promote it on campus for our town's Jewish Book Festival. I'm supposed to be the voice of the young, hip Jew or as Klug would say, the "heebster". I did want to like it. I was hoping this book would somehow make me even prouder to be a Jew and make me smile at all the cultural references that might only be familiar to young Jews like me, growing up today with our homepages set to Jewcy and our iTunes to Balkan Beat Box. Granted I've only read up to chapter "dalet," I feel it's just a big scrapbook full of "hip" Jewish Cultural icons such as Meshugga Nuts and JDub album covers, with little substance or new revelations. I really haven't learned anything new, except for that Diego Rivera had Jewish blood. My mom and her friends who have read it, however, loved it. They like it because they appreciate that now it's "cool" be a Jew, something which maybe their generation didn't get a sense of too much. I don't know if I'd agree with Friedman that this book spells the end to any "cutting-edge trendiness," but I probably wouldn't urge any of my friends to run and pick up a copy. However, it might be cute to read 20 years from now to remember the what it meant to be a "cool Jew" in 2008.
On another note, last Hanukkah I received Bryan Fogel and Sam Wolfson's "Jewtopia" from a family member and actually enjoyed reading it. It was funny, edgy, full of Jewish self-mockery, and I never felt they were trying too hard.
ignoblus
..and Jewcy provides it. Just like the religious Jews are evangelical toward secular Jews, I've noticed that secular Jews are 'evangelical' toward assimilated Jews. (While secular Jews seem rarely to appreciate the advances of those who care about eating kosher, assimilated Jews often feel like outsiders among outsiders and do appreciate explicitly secular Jewish spaces that try to be welcoming.) Jewcy is a primary site of this, much more so than The Forward (or Zeek, for that matter), where I've seen numerous articles on Jewish cultures aimed at Jews who are unfamiliar with them. http://www.jewcy.com/post/five_jewish_wedding_mistakes_and_how_avoid_the... Jewish Wedding Mistakes - who's that aimed at?
That said, and said with an appreciation for Jewcy, this book doesn't look interesting to me. I might pick it up as a cultural artifact to write about later.
jewlicious
Guess what? Being Jewish is NOT cool. Defining yourself as cool is not cool. Remember "Happy Days?" Henry Winkler played a character called The Fonz. At the time he was considered the epitome of cool. How many kids came to school the day after the show aired and would regale their friends with the Fonz's two thumbs up signature "Eeeeeh!" How many of those same kids would now be horrified if a video clip suddenly appeared on YouTube, digitized from some old film footage, showing them in all their awkward 15 year old geekery emulating the Fonz? Yet at the time, they thought it was cool... in fact the term "jumping the shark" in the title of this post refers to an episode of Happy Days wherein the Fonz was going to jump his motorcycle over a real live man eating shark. With memories of Jaws still fresh in people's minds, this episode was meant to resuscitate a slowly dieing series. Instead it was a sign of desperation that clearly demonstrated that the show had reached the end of its rope.
Now let's look at Clint Eastwood's character in "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly." That guy was fucking cool. His cool was timeless and lasting. That film came out in 1966 and Clint is still the embodiment of authentic cool. In fact, he is so damned cool in that movie that he transcends cool.
So now we have the Cool Jew movement which captured the zeitgeist of a generation of kids whose parents were embarrassed, dismissive or just plain ignorant about their real Jewish identities. Judaism was thus reinvented - sometimes successfully and sometimes less successfully. Some of these manifestations of Cool Jewy-ness will age badly like the Fonz and some will be timeless, like Clint. But which will cause embarrassment? And which will be the equivalent of Clint?
Let's return to my first sentence - Judaism is NOT cool. Judaism transcends cool. To compare it to trendy manifestations of cool like hip-hop or a sentimental attachment to early immigrant life on the Lower East Side or the music of the Shtetls diminishes it. There is no comparison. One is based on timely values that change over time and the other is a timeless way of life that has sustained a people for thousands of years.
That having been said, I love, LOVE Klug's book. It's kitschy and shmaltzy and shows a respectful reverence to the corny aspects of Ashkenazic American Judaism, while subtly and not so subtly sliding in references to substantive Judaism - something I found lacking Jewtopia. The Cool Jew Book is meant to be funny. The title is a joke - and the joke is on us.
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I blog at Jewlicious.com
Jack
I look forward to seeing unopened copies of this book on the shelves of local thrift stores in 7-10 years with some inscription inside the cover that reads: "I know you will like this!"
Anonymous
Very nice Jack. What an incredible dick you are.
aaron
this book could've used a better title.
It's not jumping at me. The content though, could be interesting, depending on the tone.
Jack
Really Mr. Anonymous? Let's face facts: Most books like these are released not to be purchased by their target audience but to be purchased by parents and others to give to kids who are supposedly the target audience but will most likely grimace and say humbly "Thank you!" while trying to dodge the topic of if they liked it or not for weeks.
It's a cash-in on a non-existent trend. And the review here basically does a more eloquent take on this view than I could in this short space. Jumping the shark indeed.
MaxKohanzad
==
JewcyCraig
You used to be so creepily positive. ..You've started to become just creepily creepy.
Anonymous
....Um...Lou Reed?