19 Heeb; The New Jew Review

How do you start a new magazine? Get a $60,000 grant from Steven Spielberg and take a pejorative term like “Heeb” and make it your title. It worked for Jennifer Bleyer, a 25-year-old Columbia graduate and freelance writer. She writes in Volume 1, Number 1, Winter 2002:

“There is absolutely no uniform experience of being or feeling jewish in this country. In meeting tons of people through this magazine, I’ve been exposed to every possible gradation of humor, discomfort, nostalgia, animosity, devotion, authority, pride, curiosity, unfathomable skepticism and immeasurable love toward this thing that we have in common. . . So here it is--a little mirror held up to the new jewish world, with all its dirt and glitter. . . check your neuroses at the door.”

According to a July 30, 2001 article in The New York Observer, the initial funding for Heeb came from the Joshua Venture fellowship program, jointly supported by Mr. Spielberg's Righteous Persons Foundation, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, the Walter and Elise Haas Fund, the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies, as well as several others. Heeb is among the first of the eight grants the program awarded earlier this year [2001].

I’ve looked through the first issue--but can’t begin to describe what it is about. Check out the web site, which says Heeb is now in its fifth issue. So, whatever it is about, it caught on.

Heeb; the New Jew Review
Winter 2002, Volume 1, Number 1
ISSN: 1535-0134
Subject: American Jews
Publication schedule quarterly
Heeb Magazine, Inc.
P.O. Box 20074
Brooklyn, NY 11202
http://www.heebmagazine.com
$4.50; $17.99 for 4 issues
Editor: Jennifer Bleyer