If I Were a Rich Mag: is print media broke? American Jewish Life closed its doors for the last time this past week. Asked for a reason, editor (and, ultimately, the sole full-time employee) Benyamin Cohen told the Forward that "[u]nfortunately, this is just not the right economy for a print publication," and that, effectively, print media is dead.

I seem to remember Sir Salman Rushdie saying the same thing about the novel in the New Yorker. Only, when Rushdie said it, he was taking a dig at the folks who’d been saying that same thing ever since the novel was born.

Earlier this year at the Israeli President’s Conference, Jonathan Safran Foer spoke about how there’s already a projected date for the last home newspaper to be delivered. He ridiculed the idea of that -- the idea of getting up-to-the-minute news from print media, he said, has long expired. But, said Foer, there will always be a place for the experience of a Sunday New York Times with coffee and a bagel.

The same, I think, is true of magazines, whether Jewish, hip, or geeky. The big science-fiction magazines are hurting, too, but there’s a whole crop of new magazines that are positively leaping like lemmings to take up the slack, and soaking up the market's readership.

There might be several reasons why "Jewish Rolling Stone," as the Forward called it, ultimately failed. Lilit Marcus, who wrote the Forward article, notes that "two freelancers confided off the record that they were 'strongly urged' to resell pieces they had written for the July/August issue of AJL."

As a former AJL staffwriter herself, it's not hard to guess who one of the freelancers Marcus alluded to might have been. I know it sucks for writers to find out their papers are closing -- I was certainly bummed to hear about AJL's demise, partly because they still haven't paid me for an article they ran months ago. I just got the obligatory End of Service letter, and guess what? They've offered to kindly pay a fraction of what they owe. It sucks, but I know it could be worse. At least they're offering.

With all due respect to the recently departed, it seems like there's still a space in this world for some Jewish magazines -- the O-inspired Jewish Woman magazine is doing a fair job on that corner of the market, and Heeb and Guilt and Pleasure aren't showing any signs of going anywhere. Meanwhile, former editor Benyamin Cohen isn't moping around at the gravesite; he's already at work hyping his next project, the memoir My Jesus Year, will be released in October.

To: Shmuel Rosner
From: David Samuels

Dear Shmuel,

You are right to say that we do different kinds of work. You are a reporter with a gift for simplifying Israeli politics and Jewish institutional wrangling in a way that makes outsiders like me feel like we are informed about an exotic world that we actually know very little about. My purpose is to captivate readers into leaving the orderly and reasonable-seeming place that you inhabit when you sit down at your keyboard for the wilder pastures of reality. I take the same facts you have available to you, filter them through my subjective consciousness, and create a universe whose particular combination of familiarity and strangeness causes readers to get The New York Times and Shmuel Rosner out of their heads and see the world with fresh eyes.

American Jews: Freaks even by their own standards So yes, when you seem unsettled by the idea that life is full of paradox and contradiction, I feel like I am doing my job --- though I also wonder why you have chosen to devote your particular gifts to thinking about literature. The demand that people "mean what they say and say what they mean" is futile in everyday life, and simply nonsensical when applied to literary work. If you think my mildly personal and contradictory brand of journalism is troubling and frustrating, just wait till you clap eyes on Kafka and Babel, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, or any of the other major or minor literary masters whose habit of forceful contradiction defines 20th century Jewish writing everywhere except perhaps in the Hebrew language --- and even there.

Now that I've complemented your very real talents while mocking your naïve and uneducated approach to literature, let's get down to the thread of my response that worries you the most, namely the idea that American Jews may not be exactly like other Americans.

I am sure that you have met plenty of patriotic, God-fearing Jews in Potomac, Maryland who say hamotzi every Shabbat under a Norman Rockwell portrait of George Washington crossing the Delaware River. But please believe me when I tell you that these people are freaks even by their own standards. If these people are really so uber-American, why do they pray every Sabbath for the welfare of a foreign government and its leaders, and the soldiers who defend its borders? Why do they celebrate the Independence Day of a small country in the Middle East? Why do they celebrate the new year in September instead of in January? Why do they insist on converting their goyish wives or children's children to their religion instead of simply letting them chose to be whoever they want to be? I'm telling you, Shmuel: by American standards, American Jews are pretty weird people.

But a more germane question may be why even such a mild assertion of the fact that American Jews are not exactly like all other Americans makes you so nutty. You say that my rather benign allusion to the double-ness of American Jewish identity is "a serious charge, with potentially grave consequences." I assure you that the Cheka or the FBI will not come knocking on my door --- even in this age of AIPAC prosecutions, and with Jonathan Pollard still behind bars.

I believe that American Jews are different, in the same way that blacks are different. Jews and blacks are both guilty of embracing an alternative historical narrative that at times trumps the mainstream narratives commonly accepted by our fellow citizens. I am not "ruining" anything for my fellow Jews in America by speaking the truth about the fact that we live as Americans even as we also live sometimes contradictory lives as Jews. Telling the truth is part of how I see my job as a writer, even if I choose to speak in opposites and misdirection some of the time.

One reason you may be such a timid mouse when it comes to discussing these subjects is that the word "double" suggests "double agents." To clarify this point, I want to state clearly that I do see American Jews as double agents in American society. I think both Judaism and America have been greatly enriched by the creative tension produced by trying to live two very different narratives at the same time.

Look at the history of progressive political movements in America in the 20th century, and lo and behold, you find Jews. Look at the history of anti-Communism in America, and lo and behold, you find Jews. You find Jews on the front lines of aesthetics and commerce, and for the same reasons, namely, that we don't see things exactly the same way that lots of our fellow citizens do. The struggle of American Jews to be both American and Jewish, and to bring two sometimes conflicting kinds of narrative consciousness to bear on the society in which they live, has had such an outsized effect on American life over the past century in part because many of the best minds of the Jewish people emigrated here. There is also the fact that the country was founded by a group of uniquely philo-semitic Protestant dissenters for whom "Jewish" ways of thinking and acting were more congenial than they were to the Catholic regents of France or Spain.

The other reason this conversation scares you is that you are an Israeli, meaning that you are a product of a 19th century ideology that believes that blood, soil and language must be united in order to form a healthy, unified self. It is no secret that Theodore Herzl and his fellow Zionist ideologues were heirs to many of the antisemitic stereotypes of the 19th century European nationalists they sought to imitate.

Israelis can't help but believe that the doubleness of the Jew in exile is a diseased condition that needs to be healed, and that the mark of being a healthy Jew is to be a member of a free nation living in its own land. That's why Israelis have such trouble understanding what it has historically meant to be a Jew in all other times and places --- and what it means to be Jew today for those of us who are not Israelis. The irony of course is that the Jews of Israel are in many ways the ones who are stuck in the past: You live in the largest Jewish ghetto in history, under threat of nuclear catastrophe, and under the thumb of a corrupt ultra-orthodox religious establishment whose definition of Judaism is quite literally medieval.

While I am a strong political supporter of the State of Israel, I don't see Israel as the necessary solution to the historical condition of the Jewish people, just as I do not necessarily believe that American Jews will always be at home in America. Perhaps you will not be surprised to learn that I believe that the Jewish condition is, in its essence, contradictory. I am Jewish, not because I think things are rosy, but because I chose to be Jewish, because I feel lucky to carry the historical weight of 3500 years of contradiction and argument and exile, and because there is something irreducibly slippery and human and contemporary about having to be two or more things at the same time.

To: David Samuels
From: Shmuel Rosner

Dear David,

Thank you for your explanation. My impression is that this could become a long and detailed dialogue about the nature of journalism, literature and all things in between, but I'm really not sure Jewcy's the right venue for such discussion.

However, after reading your comments, I think we stand to benefit from summarizing the differences between our respective approaches to our journalistic work. While I think my job is to make the world more orderly and understandable for readers, to try and overcome the chaos, your work does the exact opposite: You meddle with your readers' minds and make them more confused.

The American Melting Pot: Where do Jews fit? Having said that, I'm a little confused now myself: Is what you say in your letter is what you really think or just one of your mind-games? You write a lot of things (that's one lengthy letter, why do they tell me to write up to 800 words, and let you go crazy with a 1300 words - I wonder), but do you really mean them? I'll take a chance here, and assume that you do. So let's make this our topic of discussion for today:

If Americans are self-made people who embrace an imagined future in order to escape the burdens of the past, American Jews seek to have their cake and eat it too by embracing the future-oriented American idea without relinquishing their historically bound identity as Jews.

This, you imply, is the reason that "the themes of double-ness, lying and imposture have a special significance" for you "as an American Jewish writer." And these qualities are self-evidently vicious: Lying isn't be good, trying to have a cake and eat it too is what our mothers warned us not to do. But therein lies your irony. You go on to say that such characteristics "can be the source of a tremendous amount of creative tension." Which is a good thing, isn't it?

Basically, what you're up to is blaming American Jews for misleading their fellow-citizens, their communities, their friends: pretending to be aligned with American society while they really aren't. This is a serious charge, with potentially grave consequences --- a charge that shouldn't be made lightly just for the sake of toying with outrageous ideas. And I must say I am not yet convinced about your motives (if you haven't noticed, I'm the self-appointed responsible adult in this crowded neighborhood of rogue writers).

So the question arises: Is this accusatory description of American Jewry even accurate? Many American Jews whom I know --- who take the trouble to constantly marvel at the extent to which they are an integral part of the great American melting pot --- might dispute your narrative. And they might be even right. They see a tolerant society that can put up with the cultural and religious differences inherent in so many groups playing a part in it. They see an influential group overcoming the difficulties of being a true American minority while preserving its distinctiveness and uniqueness. This, they will say, is not "lying" or "posturing," but rather living a complicated and rich life in this shining city on the hill.

You want to ruin this for them, and one has to ask oneself why. What's bothering you?

"Life Is Full Of Important Choices" is the name of an article you published in the second book you've just released, Only Love Can Break Your Heart, a collection of articles you wrote for all sorts of magazines. Supposedly, the piece is about 9/11; it takes time for the reader to realize that as most of it is dedicated to, well, David Samuel's life. And too some degree, this old article of yours pulls the rug out from under the argument you made in your letter to me:

No one could dispute how beautiful Brooklyn was less than one year later, the summer after the towers fell. It was as if the ashes from the tower had fertilized our neighborhood. The local population of stoop-sitters, myself included, were the recipients of an unexpected bounty.

Can't this description of your Brooklyn count as proof that this joint venture of Americanness is no mirage, but rather the daily reality of "worshippers at the Mosque," and of your wife's mother who "called to tell us that Jesus Christ offered the only pathway to salvation," and of "Virginia and I" who "lit the Sabbath candles together, and said our blessings over the wine"?

"What is happening?", Virginia repeated as we stared at the picture on the television screen of the towers falling, one after the other. We went to the hardware store and bought white paper masks so we could safely breath, and then we went down to the Promenade, where my father used to take me to look at the cargo ships. We stood in the crowd of onlookers and watched the black cloud cross over the river.

Thus you, with your candles, and your decision to "not eat pork," were an integral part of an American tragedy. Not as a pretender, but as a participant. I'm no American, but it seems to me that your behavior that day, and the days following, is anything but part of an "ungracious refusal of large numbers of American Jews to buy into the full weirdness and wonder and scariness of the American idea."

It is your American-Jewish weirdness, your American-Jewish scariness --- that is the American idea.

Best,
Rosner

Frank: Attractive? No. Interesting? Yeah!This story at American Jewish Life about Jacob Frank, the "greatest Jewish heretic of all time" (part of a regular feature on Jewish heretics!)is really worth a read.  I don't know anything about Frank myself, but he sounds fascinating:

He rejected the Torah (once threatening to defecate on it if angry rabbis didn’t leave him alone). He converted to both Islam and Catholicism. He slept with his followers — and maybe even his daughter. He preached a nihilistic doctrine that saw this world as intrinsically corrupt, and believed that the best way to imitate God was to cross every boundary, transgress every taboo, and mix the sacred with the profane.

Now, I'm not advocating you sleep with your followers (I surely don't), but I'm always curious about true heretics... not to mention boundary-crossers, limit-pushers.  Anyone who pisses a lot of people off.

What the story has me thinking about today is Jewish heresy in general. I want to know what it takes to be a Jewish heretic! 

And it's pretty complicated. Because while Judaism recognizes that heretics have no place in the world to come, and will have to spend eternity in Gehinnom, deciding exactly WHO is a heretic seems to be left up to independent communities.  Which is how Maimonides, something of an expert in what makes a good Jew a  good Jew (and what makes a heretic a heretic) was also condemned as a heretic himself.

Despite that fact, a good rule of thumb is that if you're following the 13 principles (remember, from yesterday) you are probably NOT a heretic, though you might still be naughty.    Because one of the nice things about Judaism is that you don't have to be a GOOD Jew to be a Jew.

Though again, sleeping with your followers is a bad idea.