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for hip young Jews
Will it succeed where others have failed before?
By Chanan Tigay
There have long been publications like Commentary that have had a strong appeal among Jewish scholars and intellectuals, but efforts to create a magazine for young, hip Jews have seldom gotten past the wonderful-idea stage.
Those that have didn't last long; an issue, perhaps two, and they were back on the heap of wonderful ideas.
Now a young woman in New York is about to launch her take on this notion, called Heeb. Set to debut in January, Heeb will be about "interesting Jews doing interesting things," says Jennifer Bleyer, 25, editor and publisher.
"Jews are smart and Jews are funny; this magazine has to be smart and funny," she says.
Bleyer is an Ohio native who graduated from Columbia University in 1998. She is a writer by trade, freelancing for magazines like Spin and Salon.
In all, there some two million Jews in the U.S., and Heeb will have a target market of 60,000 readers in their 20s and 30s, with an initial print run of about 20,000 copies.
So far, Bleyer has received a $60,000 grant to launch Heeb, courtesy of a conglomerate of progressive Jewish fellowships backed by big-wigs such as Steven Spielberg and Seagrams magnate Charles Bronfman.
That's hardly much money, when it comes to launching a magazine, but Bleyer says she's going to launch Heeb as a three-times-a-year publication, which will allow her breaks between issues to sell advertising and raise more money from investors. Ultimately, she expects she will need $300,000 to get the magazine through its first year.
Modest as $60,000 may seem, Bleyer insists it's what sets Heeb apart from several now-defunct predecessors.
Most notable among the flops is Davka, the short-lived "magazine of radical Jewish culture" launched in San Francisco in 1996 by renowned poet Alan Kaufman, who now sits on Heeb’s advisory board.
Despite resounding buzz and a talented staff, Davka, which Bleyer cites as Heeb’s closest ancestor on the evolutionary chart of Jewish magazines, "did not have $60,000, which I do."
"It wasn’t the idea. The idea people loved," she says. "It was a great concept. People were really psyched just to see something Jewish come out."
Heeb’s editors include Bleyer, who put out punk-rock zines during her teens, Michael Schiller, who heads a video production company that produces media packages for Universal Records artists, and Nancy Schwartzman, to a grant writer at the Foundation for Jewish Culture.
Heeb will feature stories on such eccentric Jews as rapper MC Paul Barman, "dyke painter" Nicole Eisenman, and Peaches, a Berlin-based performance artist with a penchant for crooning about oral sex.
"I just looked around and I was like, ‘God. I see all these Jewish people I know and am meeting and they’re making films, they’re writing books and being activists.’ I just thought there should be something like this," Bleyer says.
"Also it was my effort, basically, not to have to work a real job."
That's not to say that Heeb isn't proving to be a major undertaking.
In addition to courting investors, Bleyer says she hopes to secure advertising from such national giants as Tower Records, Apple and Barnes and Noble. She's also counting on attracting local advertising, finagling ad trades with other magazines and "relying a lot on free publicity."
"We’re targeting a market that reads more than the average American and has more money to spend," says Bleyer.
Taking a page out of the hip-hop industry’s advertising book, Bleyer will also dispatch "street teams" to distribute flyers and other Heeb paraphernalia to curious passers-by.
July 30, 2001 © 2001 Media Life
- Chanan Tigay is a freelance writer in New York.
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