Izzy Grinspan, previously in charge of Jewcy's editorial operations, has surfaced in another Yiddishly-inflected publication, recently.

Jewcy spies (in the form of Jewcy's original art director, Dave Choe) sent word -- and a scanned image -- that Izzy and new husband Andy took the joyous occasion of their wedding day and besmirched it by posing with a copy of MAD Magazine. I say "new husband" because Izzy goes through husbands faster than my mom goes through excuses for why she ate sixty-three bags of potato chips. Chips which she also went through quickly.

There's a number of weird things going on here. For one, this story involves two ex-Jewcy employees (of which there are only a few), and for another, it involves one of those employees reading MAD Magazine.

Here's the pic. Note the firmness of Izzy's arms. She had been working out for months prior at her mom's suggestion:

Izzy Gets Married: Kaputnik missed the wedding due to doctor's appointment.

I had to send the picture to Izzy, as apparently the Jews over at MAD don't send out comps to people they make fun of in Letters section. I asked her if she had anything to say.

(05:33:38 PM) Izzy Grinspan: i would just say that yes, andy was indeed wearing cut-offs
(05:33:42 PM) Izzy Grinspan: as was the rabbi, standing behind us
(05:33:51 PM) Izzy Grinspan: it was actually a jorts-themed wedding
(05:33:55 PM) Craig Leinoff: haha, that's your rabbi? Not your brother?
(05:34:02 PM) Craig Leinoff: hahaha
(05:34:05 PM) Izzy Grinspan: it's andy's brother
(05:34:08 PM) Izzy Grinspan: who is also a rabbi
(05:34:08 PM) Craig Leinoff: I see
(05:34:12 PM) Craig Leinoff: He looks like your brother
(05:34:19 PM) Izzy Grinspan: that's because all jews are related

I enjoyed talking to Izzy so much that I contacted Amy Odell, Jewcy's old office manager, but she refused to make any statements on the record in accordance with the terms of her restraining order.

Michael Morlitz was unable to be reached for comment.

While Jewcy visitors may not have noticed anything out of the ordinary on the Jewcy site today, April Foolery was, indeed, afoot.

After spending hours in debate yesterday about what would be an acceptable prank for Jewcy to pull on its woefully staid readership, the staff came to a consensus on the one joke that truly befit our boring selves: nothing. Even the brilliant "Joey gets arrested for public indecency" idea eventually came to naught.

But as everyone wrapped up work for the day, a deliciously evil thought crossed my mind. Because "Malice" is my middle name (...actually, it's "Alice," which makes me full of malice...), I wrote a quick email to Tilted Planet, Jewcy's server hosts, and set to coding.

Success came at approximately 10:00 a.m. as I was on my way to work, with a phone call from Maya, distraught at logging into the site to see this:

Of course, I was "unavailable."

What caused a bigger problem, however, was finding that bosses Tahl and Joey were in a meeting, and wholly unaware of the issue, upon my arrival.

This necessitated my feigning ignorance (as well as faking angry phone calls to Tilted) for the benefit of the understandably flustered Maya. I also was forced to share outrage with Izzy and Tara at our predicament, something which I am not usually very good at. (Talking to Izzy and Tara, that is.)

Tahl finally became aware of the incident around 1:05 p.m., and I quickly found that I had precious little time to fess up before he obliterated the Tilted Planet phone system with his ultra-sonic Israeli complaining. (I should note that Maya had already reached out to Tilted earlier, and they'd been quite good about playing dumb, but Tahl would be on a completely different level of fury.)

I sent out the "Gotchya" email I'd been composing, prematurely, and ran to Tahl's desk, where he was already dialing his phone.

"Hold on!" I yelled, "I just got an explanation email from Tilted! I forwarded it to you! Check it!"

The email was a link to this page.

We all had a good laugh when Tahl finished beating me. Except Maya, who took the brunt of my abuse, and deserves a big cake for being such a good sport. Please don't hate me, Maya.

Another successful April Fool's Day. JOB WELL DONE. As the final coup de grace, I had Izzy's cat sent to the pound. Haha. Golden.

Leave a comment telling us about bugs, problems, or what you WE TYPING WI TH OUR TOES TOO!: Jewcy web development and design team in action!think should be different, better, or just less miserably sucky about the Jewcy site design.

If it's a bug you're reporting, please tell us what operating system and browser you are using.

Typing with my toes,

Joey

Izzy, with Menorah: The childlike tape job was done by Craig.'Twas the first night of Hanukkah
And on each Jewcy table
Not a Menorah was present
Or so goes this Fable

All the workers worked quietly
Til one passer-by called us out
"You call yourselves Jewish?"
He said with a shout

We fretted and frowned
At the words of this man
But then Izzy stood up
And said "I've got a plan!"

She remembered an email
That Tara had sent
A small paper menorah!
The day was not spent!

Dogs: Here's a picture of some dogs to even out the empty space in this article. Izzy and Craig
With scissors in hand
Set to work cutting
No regard to the plan

When it all was done
And the candles affixed
It looked only half-great
...The feelings were mixed

And so to her iMac
Izzy did run
And took a picture for you
And for holiday fun

We wish you the best
On this Festival of Lights
We wish you a menorah
Cause ours kind of bites

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Yesterday, some Jewcy readers observed that Brendan O'Neill, editor of the online magazine Spiked and recent contributor here, began his journalistic career at a magazine named Living Marxism. Living Marxism was the organ of Britain's Revolutionary Communist Party, which held positions with which most Jewcers would not agree. Our would-be comrade commissars proclaim that O'Neill must be exiled from Jewcy.

Michael Kinsley says that the digital age is a propitious time to be a cranky libertarian, but it's also springtime for leftist factionalism. On the web, every clique can sanctify its own luminoso blogrollo, forever excommunicating deviationists for doctrinal unorthodoxies, past affiliations, refusals to pronounce some shibboleth of our corner of the internet.

Not here. Take the stultifying provincialism of left politics, amplify it with the Circle Jerk culture of the blogosphere, and you have something of a Jewcy nightmare: a hothouse of unchallenged ideology and lazy self-congratulation that looks like everything Jewcy was born to combat. Neither the Jewish community nor the left need help making themselves sclerotic, conformist, or irrelevant. The promise of the internet, for us, is its capacity to smash those tendencies, rather than reinforce them.

This isn't just about this specific issue: about Brendan O'Neill, the RCP, Living Marxist, or the Oxford Union debate. It's about what breadth of views can be accommodated in Jewcy, and who gets to contribute. We agree that there are borders to the pale, and some people are beyond those borders. But we're also aware of all the barriers that stand in the way of productive communication between people with well-entrenched and opposing positions: a reluctance or flat-out unwillingness to process evidence contradictory to one’s own point of view, an application of nearly impossible standards of evidence for opposing points but a knee-jerk acceptance of supporting points, a presumption of one's own intellectual bravery and integrity and an assumption that the opposition is weak or foolish or venal or lazy, et cetera. These, too, are things we want to overcome, rather than reinforce.

So defining Jewcy's boundaries will be an ongoing process. We'll discuss them. But we won't define them by pronouncing takfir on anyone who joined an organization with which Jewcy itself would not wish to partner.

Meanwhile, Kvetcher, nee David Kelsey, has taken Jewcy to task for our handling of the Oxford Union kerfuffle.

Jewcy chose a symbol of November 9th Society to represent the debate, even though the November 9th Society is a hardline neo-Nazi party that is quite critical of the British National Party for being mere "conservatives on steroids." That Jewcy chose their logo (replete with swastika, of course) to represent Nick Griffin is as risible as it is shrill.

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Being an online media professional is very much like being a sociologist or a psychiatrist. None of us really have any clue how anything in our field works or how it ought to work, so we spend much of our time making shit up and hoping that it sounds awesome. This is what we call "theory." And for every Lacanian psychoanalyst or critical theorist, there is some digital swami blathering about "increased layers of meaning" or "intertwingled longtails" or some such ginned-up piffle.

The paradigm-smashing theoretical framework of the moment is "Web 3.0." Theorists of Web 3.0 manage to use the language and tone of Viktor Frankl while describing what is, so far as I can tell, a plan to steal shit from other websites while keeping your ass covered legally.

My question: instead of "scraping" from other websites—"scraping" being trade talk for taking their stuff while ensuring they get nothing out of it—why can't we just revert to the old method of "transcluding" their content. Transcluding means that everyone on Jewcy gets to read their stuff, but they still get their pageviews and advertising revenue.

Transcluding seems to have gone of out fashion sometime in internet pre-history (the 90s? Is that possible?), but it seems like a more effective, less labor-intensive, and vastly fairer way to poach proprietary content.

You can't transclude a New York Times page, because they have some sort of fancy technical barrier set up. So in the spirit of ethnic fraternity I'll just sample the content of someone closer to home.

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A message from Craig Leinoff, Jewcy's Tech Guy...

Dear Jewcy Readers,

At approximately 6:30 p.m. on November 15, 2006, Jewcy magazine staffers gathered together to watch ceremoniously as the "Send" button was pushed, triggering a thousands-strong email notification announcing Jewcy Magazine was online and public.

A lot has happened since then. Mike Weiss bought a dog. Izzy adopted a cat. I got a haircut. Joey had bowel obstruction.

But the memories aren't all good. A 3-month standoff with Comcast ended badly in early Spring when Mike Morlitz screamed, "Give peace a chance," and an ATF sniper got hot under the collar and accidentally plugged him between the eyes. Tahl bought us a new graphic designer the next week, but while we like Tara, she just didn't have Morlitz's afro.

When we had to say goodbye to Amy a month or so back (her name didn't have the requisite four-letters that everyone else's did) and Maya came on board, we realized things were gonna be different. We were gonna have to get our Weekly To-Do's in on time. These are the sacrifices we make, however.

Anyway, because the rest of the staff doesn't speak to me except to offer abuse and insults, I don't really know all the accolades and exploits of Jewcy's past year. I don't know anything about The Surge; I don't know anything about the egg on Abe Foxman's face; and I sure don't know anything about Jewcy becoming the world's biggest Jewish media website (after JPost and Haaretz in Israel).

What I do know is because I'm the only one with the tech savvy to change things on the site, I basically have an open forum to the masses. And I choose to use that forum to wreak havoc and destruction on all my enemies.

But it's late, and I want to go home soon, so I've decided, instead, to post a picture of a turtle with a balloon that I doodled in my notebook during a particularly boring, Michael Weiss-dominated office meeting.

I don't know what prompted this masterful creation, or why it says "45 MAIN, DUMBO - ALL YOU, BUDDY" (our office address, plus, apparently, a self-congratulatory annotation), and I don't get the mis-perspective'd catapult launching a baseball into what appears to be a soggy paper bag. Hell, I don't even understand the bulleted notes I made. But I do recognize genius when I see it.

Check out our original launch video here. And if you're lucky, I might just put up another video showcasing the exciting life and times of the Jewcy staff.

Until next year...
Craig

The Jewcy Offices: Editor Raz delivers a keynote address to the adoring throngs.It's that magical time of the year again, getting near the end of Summer but still nowhere near Fall (I call it: "Sumall". Something I came up with one day during Calculus.) when I realize that one man cannot handle the entire development and technological needs of a company on his own. And if one man cannot do it, then I most certainly cannot either.

Which is why I've reached into the deep recesses of my heart, through its tar-like membranes, past the hardened cholesterol, and beyond all the repressed memories that have caused me to awaken to the sound of my own screams so, so many nights, and come up with this little nugget of charity for the aspiring geeks on our site.

The Jewcy syndicate is expanding.

If you think you would like to work as an almost-unpaid web and technology intern in the futuristic fantasy-world that is Jewcy, we would love to have you.

I submit to you now the official Craigslist advertisement I wrote for this position, in its full, unedited glory. I say unedited because, in light of recent legislation regarding Family Values and Decency statutes, Amy has wisely advised me to reconsider certain aspects of the application. But you guys? I know you guys hate decency as much as I do.

Also, if you're looking for a job, but don't want to work in computers, Amy actually has a job opening in the "Office Manager/Executive Assistant" category that you might enjoy if you're fresh out of college, interested in a career in journalism, and don't mind babysitting adults.

Anyway, the full ad is after the jump.

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Yesterday, Michael kindly leapt to my defense against those who assert that I'm unentitled to speak on Jewish issues, what with my being not only a "neo-Nazi shemale prick," but, less forgivably, a non-Jewish neo-Nazi shemale prick.

Michael volunteered that I'm "100% halachically Hebrew," and he’s probably right about that. Still, my great-grandmother—the halakhically relevant one—was named Mary and was illiterate in Yiddish. I assume Mary was Jewish, but there seems cause to wonder, and I really can’t be bothered to find out. For anyone who places importance on such things as matrilineal succession, I encourage you to operate from the assumption that my mother is Margaret Thatcher.

And isn't that the point? We am ha-ares are so incurious about this stuff, so cavalier about life's BIG questions such as the Jewishness of one’s mother’s mother’s mother’s mother. It's really not much of a surprise if, as one commenter said, some ultra-Orthodox will no longer drink wine prepared by secular Jews. How can they be sure?

Michael also says "For the record, Joey's reference to "mongrel" or "FrankenJews" in his dialogue with Jack Wertheimer applied to only a few of us at Jewcy who were born of virgin Gentile mothers (myself included)." Actually, I did not intend terms such as Frankenjew to apply only to those whose mothers are not Jewish, or to children of intermarriage generally. I regret that I seem to have left myself open to that interpretation.

As I said to Jack Wertheimer in my second e-mail, “I don’t believe intermarriage is the cause of all this turmoil, but rather a consequence…your enemy is not intermarriage, but the pluralistic, endlessly permeable culture of the modern American city.” As an example of my own Frankenjew “patrimony,” I mentioned my high school experiences at a Korean Baptist Bible study, rather than anything about the diversity of my family. That’s because my point was that it’s our “polyglot, postmodern American creole culture,” rather than our ancestry, that makes for “Jewish-American mongrels” or “Frankenjews.” It’s a culture we share with people from an endless array of backgrounds, and in which our worldview is shaped by all sorts of non-Jewish influences, even as we also retain Jewish influences and connections.

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Today, Jewcy decided to launch this Development Blog to chronicle all the inside events that happen behind the scenes in the office.

We hope to make interested users aware of both the future development initiatives Jewcy intends to implement and the steps that we take along the way to their creation.

Right now, Designer Michael Morlitz and I are going through a serious redesign of the site, actually. The intention is to revamp all the fonts, some of the homepage elements, change how featured artists are promoted (e.g., not at the bottom of the site where no one looks), and much more.

Should be exciting if you get off on Jewcy updates. Which I do.