As Passover approaches, let us take a moment to remember those Jews we’ve lost—you know, the ones who consumed “matzoh with a dark history” and were transformed into the living dead only to be hunted down by the goyim they preyed upon. Wait. What?

Add Hasidic Jews to any situation and it instantly becomes funnier—that’s the theory behind Sam Falconi and Oliver Noble’s Night of the Living Jews, a Heeb Magazine–produced film about Jewish zombies who use their lethal peyos to attack gentiles. The film premiered in October, though if you happen to live in Australia or Canada you can catch it this spring. It features Melissa Leo, Homicide vet and star of the Sundance darling Frozen River, as Jewish Mother Zombie. (It could have been worse—she could have been cast as Bagel Zombie.)

Will the zombies be taken down by the power of a bacon double cheeseburger? You’re going to have to watch to find out.

Don't be fooled by his innocuous nickname: Schwarztie This week in J-media:

• Did you know that the gays cause earthquakes? The ultra-Orthodox Israeli political party Shas just suggested that instead of reinforcing buildings, the government should spend more money discouraging homosexuality. Insert obligatory San Francisco joke here, and then bang your head against the wall while wondering how you’ve managed to get stuck in the same religio-ethic group as these people. [Jewschool via Haaretz and the Jerusalem Post.]
• At JSpot, Hannah Farber asks the world’s rabbis to please stop insisting that she (and every other Jewish professional woman) pop out some babies right this very minute. Jewschool responds. [JSpot, Jewschool]
  
• This writer is really, really angry at Jerry Seinfeld, and not because of Bee Movie. [San Diego Jewish Journal]
• From the department of How Not to Grow the Jewish People: Rabbi Shlomo Schwartz, who runs the Chai Center in California, just can’t stop sending angry text-message-speak e-mails to women who appeal to him for Jewish knowledge. A steller example: “Shame on U 4 yr disgusting unpaid whoring ways 2 try & take Jewish men away from Jewish women. Hitler murdered Jews & U R also trying 2 exterminate Jews." [LA Jewish Journal]
• An Orange County task force says antisemitism is so rampant at UC Irvine that Jewish students should stay away. [JTA]
  
• Heeb gets at the biggest issue facing young Jews today: Beefy men playing strip dreidel. [Heeb Magazine]

With the release of the first issue of Jewish Living magazine came a phone call to me from a reporter at the Palm Beach Post. Jewish Living is a new Martha-esque lifestyle ‘zine for the Jewish homemaker, and the reporter thought that as editor of the website Modern Jewish Mom I could give him the dish on this new "trend" of marketing to hip, Jewish moms.

I told him it's not so new, the idea of making it hip to be Jewish. From Heeb and Jewcy to Rabbis Daughters and ChosenCouture, (I even threw some credit to Madonna and Demi), hip and Jewish is here to stay. As the young women who onceThe Lifecycle of Hip: From Challah Back t-shirts to Jewish Living magazine wore "Challah Back" boy beaters now become mothers, websites and magazines will follow.

But that wasn't what he wanted to hear.

"Wouldn't it be smart for Bloomingdale's to advertise in JewishLiving? After all, aren't Jewish women their primary customers?"

"Non-Jewish women shop at Bloomingdales, too. And Bloomie's and their ilk can reach a Jewish AND non-Jewish audience by advertising in mainstream magazines. JewishLiving readers probably won't be interested in ads for Maneschewitz, though."

He kept pushing. I knew what he wanted. For me to say we're a bunch of materialistic JAPs who love nothing more than to shop. That we're more likely to be found in Saks than in shul. That reaching a niche market of wealthy, young Jewish women is an advertisers dream. So why would advertisers need to bother with shiksas when they have JewishLiving?

The more he pushed for me to tell him the differences between Jewish and non-Jewish women, the more I realized how slight those differences are. Today, being Jewish is part of our identity, but not our entire identity. We want tradition to be relevant and valuable while fitting with our modern lifestyles. Gone are the days when we will stay home all Friday to make Shabbes.

Are we highly educated? Yes. More so than our mothers, but only because of the sacrifices our mothers made so we could go to college and grad school. Are we wealthy? Yes, Jewish households in America are wealthier on average than non-Jewish households, but overall there's a heck of a lot more disposable income and college degrees among non-Jewish women than Jewish ones. Do we look different? Not so much, anymore. Do we dress differently? I almost started talking about the whole "goyishka" way of dressing when I remembered some Lily Pulitzer pieces in my closet!

For magazines like Jewish Living, and websites like mine, talking to modern Jewish moms means taking into account who we are as a generation. We're more jaded than our mothers. We don't kowtow to the rabbi simply because he is the rabbi. We juggle insane schedules, and tradition better damn well make sense if we're going to give it our time. So speak to us intelligently and thoughtfully and don't patronize us.

So, would mainstream advertisers be smart to advertise in JewishLiving? Absolutely. Because it would show support for the Jewish community. Because it would prove that they understand that when Rachael Ray tells her audience that her Christmas buffet casserole made of leftover ham, turkey, cheese and creamed corn would work just as beautifully for Hanukkah, it's offensive. Because last year's December issue of Family Circle didn't even mention that there were other holidays besides Christmas being prepared for in homes. Because mainstream lifestyle resources are not adequately addressing the needs of the Jewish family and so we've stepped in and met the need ourselves.

But not because you think we're a generation of JAPs who can't stay out of Bloomingdales.

The death of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Norman Mailer has cast attention back on some of his early essays, including “The White Negro,” an influential piece that first appeared in Dissent magazine in 1957. Written during a period he described as "the years of conformity and depression," Mailer's essay focused on the hipster—"the urban adventurer. . .who drifted out at night looking for action with a black man's code to fit their facts"—as a hero capable of providing the antidote to America's stultifying postwar culture.

"The White Negro," and the hipster lifestyle it details, remind us that white Americans have looked to blacks not only as a group upon which they could project the negative aspects of their society, but also as an object of longing: Whites fantasize that the African American embodies the expressiveness and sensuality with which they as whites have lost touch in their self-styled "march toward progress." Bristling under the confines of postwar culture, Mailer admired the hipster as white man who, like his imagined black counterpart, could free himself from "the sophisticated inhibitions of civilization," divorce himself from society, and relinquish "the pleasures of the mind for...the pleasures of the body."

Although Mailer did not explicitly mention his Jewish background in "The White Negro," the essay was undoubtedly shaped by the symbolic importance African Americans and their culture have long held for American Jews. Mailer himself was a product of the urban streets where Jewish youth of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s often listened to "race records," formed their own jazz bands, and occasionally made evening excursions to Harlem and other African American neighborhoods. Not only were many of the leading white interpreters of African American music during the interwar period Jewish, but so was the original hipster, Mezz Mezzrow (né Milton Mesirow), a clarinetist who declared himself a "voluntary Negro" and devoted himself—in his own words—to "hipping the world about the blues the way only Negroes can."

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As a young girl, I had over twenty Barbie dolls, which I once arranged in their Dream House in a brothel scene, with one Ken sodomizing the other over the Utility Kitchen. My mother's reply: "You're too old for Barbies."

Toy marketing execs say that, in the 1960s, girls we would now call "'tweens" or even actual teenagers played with Barbies. In the '80s, my friends and I would've been mortified had anyone known we still played with Barbies after the age of eight or nine, even if we secretly still liked them. Now, the target market for Barbies is ages 3-5. The dolls have largely, of course, been supplanted by Bratz (you may have seen ads for the upcoming feature film).

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Now that The New Republic’s Britt Peterson has come out as a highbrow porn star (well, extra), we thought we’d get in on the cerebral smut racket by offering the following compendium of recycled Jewcy articles all about the oldest profession in San Fernando Valley. We took some heat back in the day for doing what all Jewish magazines must do when they come alive and try to titillate the reader with uncensored displays of chosen carnality. A few dames in cyberville even claimed that the Jewcy was going to be just another playground for the undersexed nebbish pumping up web traffic with his one free hand. We’d like to think we’ve matured and evolved since then —or, at any rate, cured our acne. And as you’ll find, plowing past our famed Joanna Angel-plus-mom interview, our respect for the skin trade has taken on ...

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 JewYou'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.