Heeb mag blends Jewish humor and politics

Jamie Rosen Assistant Features Editor

Heeb is the roiling product of so many drunken postmillennial nights on the mean streets of the Lower East Side. It is an ambitious antitrust investigation into the monopoly on God. It is a sweaty prizefight between hip hop and sushi in this corner and klezmer and kugel on the other. It is the bastard love child of Emma Goldman and Lenny Bruce. It is a plague on modern-day pharaohs replete with miraculous jailbreaks and a nice little riot or two. It is a Carnival cruise to the Garden of Eden with all-you-can-eat cheesecake and Parliament as the house band. Hallelujah.
–heebmagazine.com

So goes the mission statement of Heeb magazine, a publication that uses irony to dispel Jewish stereotypes and help disassociated Jews think about what it means to come from a Jewish background.

Heeb Editor-in-Chief Josh Neuman spoke about the magazine and its audience to a group of about 30 engaged students in Josselyn dorm March 29. The event was sponsored by the Vassar Jewish Union (VJU) and the Bayit as part of the “Tuesday Nights at the Bayit” program.

Neuman said he initially became involved with Heeb before the magazine was launched. He received e-mails from several friends telling him that eight students from Columbia had a $40,000 grant to start a magazine and were looking for a music editor. Since Neuman had a background in journalism and was interested in Jewish cultural archetypes and the emerging presence of Jews in pop culture in the mid-90s, he was especially interested in joining the magazine.

It took the group about a year to put together the first issue. Even before its launch in Feb. 2002, Heeb began to receive recognition. “The Howard Stern Show,” New York Magazine, The New York Times, CNN, and others covered the release of the magazine. “We knew we were on to something,” Neuman said. “There were magazines for every demographic, but not for young Jews.”

As a non-religious magazine for Jews in their 20s and 30s, the magazine has fostered a new community for progressive, culturally savvy Jews, Neuman said. “What people sense very frequently when they’re reading the magazine is: ‘That sounds like me.’”

Heeb is still growing and gaining in readership, Neuman said. Almost all the work is done by unpaid volunteers, with the exception of Neuman and one paid office assistant. Still, the magazine has developed a following of 150,000 readers nationwide. A Heeb poll indicated that 58 percent of readers “save the magazine forever.” “Heeb is functioning as a kind of Bible for our audience,” said Neuman.

Neuman explained that the mainstream Jewish community has been less successful in attempts to draw in disengaged Jews because of its emphasis on why people ought to be Jewish, rather than on why people would want to be Jewish. He attributes Heeb’s success to the magazine’s recognition and embracement of disengaged Jews. “They feel Judaism in terms of culture and family rather than religion and spirituality,” he said.

Heeb blends humor and politics to get important, or just funny, messages across. But the magazine is more than just a breeding ground for debate, Neuman said. “I definitely see us in that old yiddish tradition of muckraking, but I don’t think the politics are more important than the humor or that the humor is more important than the politics,” he said.

For instance, one article in the Fall/Winter 2004 issue features a photo spread called “Once You Go JAP [Jewish American Princess],” which pictures non-Jewish punk girls (and boys) from different ethnicities wearing trendy clothes and Tiffany’s bracelets, carrying Louis Vuitton bags, and straightening their hair, shopping, eating salads and Starbucks, holding ostentatious cakes, and waiting in line to enter a VIP club. The point is that the J in JAP may be misleading. “We thought it was boring to condemn the JAP archetype,” he said. “We wanted to play with it. If we can pull this off in Heeb, then maybe there’s nothing Jewish about the archetype.”

While some students have taken to Heeb, Rebecca Green ’08, who attended Neuman’s talk, said she was not impressed with the magazine as a whole. “Some of the [articles] were funny, but most of it was borderline offensive,” she said. Green said that an upcoming photo essay making fun of Holocaust memorials, which will feature things like people making out against one Holocaust memorial and a Sbarro next to another, “pushes the envelope a little too much.”

But Adjunct Instructor in Religion Elliot Ratzman, who initially contacted the VJU to bring Neuman to campus, said the magazine is not inappropriate. “It does offend, but offensiveness is in the eye of the beholder,” Ratzman said. “I think it’s a sign of the maturing of the Jewish community that it can laugh at itself and its own faults.”

The Bayit has a subscription to Heeb, and the magazine is available in most large bookstores or online. Ratzman has an interview with gay rights activist Larry Kramer in the most recent issue.

Neuman is also co-author of The Big Book of Jewish Conspiracies, scheduled to come out this month. The book serves as a history of Western civilization told from the perspective of every Jewish conspiracy theory being true, Neuman said.

VJU President David Koren ’06 said this was the first Tuesday night event that brought in a speaker from off-campus since the Bayit community-building program began in October. An average of ten to 20 people go to each event, and the program tries to attract a different audience each week, he said.

Ratzman said he brought Neuman to campus because he thought non-observant but still culturally involved Jews, like many of those at Vassar, would enjoy the magazine. “I would like to see more disaffected Jewish students at Vassar reading Heeb next year.”