Time For the Jewish Week’s Annual Article Slighting Heeb Magazine!

It wouldn’t be the UJA newspaper if they did get it, now would it?

No, it wouldn’t, because the New York UJA wouldn’t feel safe purchasing 80% of their circulation. That’s right, they purchase 80% of the Jewish Week’s circulation and give it to people who have attended a UJA event or gave them a check, and they give to them whether they want it or not, so they will hopefully read about what wonderful things the UJA has done this week –like not give money to Heeb, since its content and events, according to Gabrielle Birkner, “set the bar too low.”

Unlike the mainstream secular Jewish events, where you are guaranteed a very meaningful exchange at, say, a “Young Professional” dinner, and have the opportunity, for the umpteenth time, to go around the circle, and say who you are, and of course, what you do. Uh oh! Some new people just walked in late. Let’s go around the table again.

“My name is David Kelsey, and I’m still the only guy here who is not a lawyer, and I am quite sure that this is really, really, the last time I will attend an event that has the words ‘Young Professional’ attached to it, and I definitely mean it this time.�

Or how about roof top Bar-B-Q? Now isn’t that more substantial? The next Haskallah movement, really. Nothing like a “serious” cultural event based on corn on the cob. Well, at least it’s not “hipster,â€? so it’s okay.

But perhaps I am being defensive. After all, who says that this Jewish Week article is picking on Heeb? It’s not like they explicitly named Heeb SIX TIMES or anything like that, or used a picture of a chick wearing a Heeb T-shirt with the story.

But who am I to say it’s recycled? So Birkner, for her Heeb quote, used one from Jenn Bleyer from a 2001 article in the Observer. Well, I can’t expect Birkner to go and get all new quotes, can I? That would, like, take an email or something crazy like that.

Talk ab out “substanceless.”

But Birkner sees light at the end of this tunnel. A couple of people in school, not her friends or anything like that, I’m sure, are going to make a more “serious� magazine devoted to “Israeli hip hop,� among other things. What a novel idea. Jews and hip hop. Too bad no one ever thought of that before.

Anyway, I don’t really think it’s fair to compare Heeb to religious Jewish culture. I think it is only fair to compare it to other secular Jewish cultures. And Birkner did not do that adequately, because the Jewish Week never does that adequately. When it comes to a challenge to secular Jewish culture, the Jewish Week suddenly wraps itself in a tallis of piety, but does no such thing with more accepted secular Jewish cultures which may also be contradictory, or at least problematic, when contrasted to traditional Judaism.

There is no new Jew. There is only new secular Jewish culture, because secular Jewish culture changes much quicker than the religion does, since it’s defined much more by provincial and present norms. If you want to defend the old, defend the old – but defend the secular suburban Jewish culture, not Judaism. Neither the old nor the new is directly dictated by Judaism, and neither has seriously claimed that it is there to replace it.

Below is a couple of pictures of people I know from Heeb. It’s really not as awful as the Jewish Week always makes it out to be.

At least, it isn’t for me.