Heeb Kisses the Fringes

Once again we were stranded on the frigid Lower East Side seeking refuge last Tuesday while a hostile world sharpened its knives for both our expulsion and our return. Patiently seeking our turn on an Essex St. line, we shifted our weight from foot to foot, breathing warmth onto our dirty fingertips. From the unforgiving hinterlands of Hudson County we arrived, from the brutal wastelands of New Jersey, the ravages of goateed Brooklyn, of razor-manicured uptown, and we demanded the ancient homeland of the American Diaspora: the promise of Essex and Rivington Sts., where our grandparents lived one on top of the next in squalid tenements and used the dozens of nickelodeons as secret burrows for furtive encounters. We returned as the Zionists of pleasure, waiting outside the Essex Restaurant to guzzle drinks at a magazine launch party. We were no longer Jews. We were Heebs.

And when this Heeb, past the velvet rope, whined over paying $7 for a scotch, he found himself rebuked by the lead Heeb, a Cheshire-toothed and braided grinner named Jennifer Bleyer. "Shoulda got on our press list, sucker," she gloated the next night, recounting how Stella Artois and Tanqueray sponsored the VIP bar at Heeb's bar mitzvah. So we were out a little money to a very worthy bar and an extremely worthy magazine, but the scotch tasted better when washing down one of the finger knishes Bleyer arranged to provide.

The knishes, the location?oy. Kinky-haired Jewesses, the kind celebrated in the inaugural Heeb's exquisite "Jewfros" feature, squealed and backed it up to "Murder She Wrote," symbolically returning to a now-Caribbean Flatbush. And they did it not without an element of disaster, as one giggling woman learned when her gorgeous head of thick hair caught on fire. The bar was past capacity, and we were packed in together like?no, I would never make a joke so horrible?causing some Heebs to turn up their noses and shuffle out into the Diaspora. But what made the party successful and what makes the magazine great is Heeb's skillful ability to navigate the treacherous seascape of identity.

It's by no means easy. The self-proclaimed "New Jew Review" quarterly arrived last week with an initial press run of 18,000 into a world where Britain's New Statesman ran on its Jan. 14 cover a giant gilded Star of David impaling the Union Jack over the headline, "A Kosher Conspiracy?" French Jewry is seeing a spate of synagogue arsons. Axis-of-evil Iran's defense minister promised retaliation "unimaginable to any Israeli politician" if Israel attacks Iran's nuclear power plant. Heeb's premiere issue has a Neil Diamond center spread; someone's bubbe reviewing Alicia Keys and Atom & His Package CDs; Orthodox homosexuality; and J-Date recollections. Some, like Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League ("Abe Foxman should suck a fat one," Bleyer declares) and WABC's Steve Maltzberg, wonder if a magazine that would call itself Heeb can really shoulder the burden of Judaism.

The day following the party, Bleyer found herself opposite Maltzberg on CNN's Talkback Live?she thought she'd face Foxman?and he pointed to the article about an out filmmaker from a Conservative background, inveighing, "No wonder [Heeb] is not called Hebrew Pride, because it is not about Hebrew pride. It is about heeb. It is about making fun of the Jewish religion. It's about showing sideshow events of the Jewish religion." I wanted to introduce Maltzberg to a family friend of mine, a Reform rabbi who is a lesbian, and see if he thinks the rabbi belongs in a sideshow.

Bleyer and her magazine understand a deeper truth than Maltzberg does, the simple and almost platitudinous fact that "there is absolutely no uniform experience of being or feeling Jewish." Heeb follows the tradition of Lenny Bruce, Philip Roth, Woody Allen and Sholem Aleichem instead, proving its understated brilliance when it quotes Bubbe Miriam commenting on Macy Gray, "I think blacks should be very proud of who they are." That's Jewishness.

An earnest new-technologies analyst named Morgan loves the magazine, but bellowed across a table at the Essex St. party that he "was hoping for a hipper version of The Forward" as the sound system blared "Groove Is in the Heart" for the second time. "My cousin Murray Baumgarten at U. of Cal. Santa Cruz is the editor of a fine academic journal called Judaism that I'd be glad to refer to anyone unsatisfied by the weightiness of Heeb," Bleyer e-mails. But for the Heebs who excavate their identities when reading that Sen. Dianne Feinstein is "the uber-carpool mom," there is a home for us.