Or at least, that is how it shall be known in the annals of history…the week that Jewlicious co-founders became media whores darlings…
First up, chronologically, is the Gawker and Jewish Week reportage about Gawkerite Andrew Krucoff’s Very Jewlicious Bar Mitzvah Special, “Gawker Frums Out“:
“He looked like any other yeshiva boy, but he isn’t,†said David Abitbol, a Jewlicious founder, who blogs as “CK†— ‘a nice subtle way of saying Christ Killer,†he said — and who helped plan the Krucoff bar mitzvah. “How much having a bar mitzvah at the Kotel is going to change his life, I don’t know, but I do think it was a positive Jewish experience with substance.â€
Then, we have “Pop Goes the Hipster Judaism Bubble,” the Jewish Week’s take on the youth-initiated coolification of Judaism. (That’s my word, hope you like it.)
David Abitbol, a founder of the Jewish culture Web log, Jewlicious acknowledged that the end-all of some fashionable Jewish parties was “pretty base.†“You get Jews drunk, in a room together and let nature take its course.†Abitbol agreed that there is “more to Judaism than borsht belt humor, and hanging out with people named Finkelstein and Goldberg,†but that it isn’t necessarily up to Jewlicious or Heeb or Jewcy to provide answers.
Jewlicious has also become somewhat of a reference point for Gawker; people who read the gossip blog regularly were treated to a 4th Day of Chanukah photo of CK posing with what appear to be Nazis on the streets of Jerusalem (but who are, in fact, actors re-enacting the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising).
This week also saw the publication of Directions, the Jewish Week’s annual themed NYC Living guide/magazine. This year’s theme was parenting, and one of the articles, by their singles columnist, recounted her experience as a babyless single woman in a world that was increasingly babified, including a citation of by Jewlicious co-founder Laya’s famous “Fricken Babies” post:
Recently, my twentysomething friend Laya noted on the Web log Jewlicious that she was weary of her friends’ recent baby-propelled descent into discussions of digestive systems and whether or not smiles are real or gas-inspired. She didn’t see herself having babies and “cooing along with the rest of the pod people†anytime soon, she said. Her remarks provoked an outcry from well-intentioned, but boundary-challenged individuals from all over the world. Invoking imperatives of Jewish continuity and citing Jewish population studies, they demanded that she drop this unpopular opinion in favor of “going forth and multiplying,†preferably immediately. One person suggested that as soon as Laya found Mr. Right, she’d want to “make a lot of babies who look just like him.†I’m no doctor, but last I checked, a uterus was not a Xerox machine.
With blogs being a viral media, press is always good. It’s always great to have more traffic; more traffic leads to more readers, at least ideally. And then, when this influx of new readers fluxes in to our site, they are greeted with the wonderful, mellifluous words: “the virgin Mary bleeding out of its ass.†Wonderful.
With a month of exposure like this, media experts are finding it difficult to predict what may become of the emergent media darlings—they could break away from the blog they co-founded and become a Gawker-rrespondent, much like that guy from Sugar Ray does on Entertainment Tonight. Or maybe they’ll spend the post-Jewlicious sabbatical promoting the Temple of the Ephemeral Jews. Or perhaps inspiration will come at Jewlicious @ The Beach 2 (its own post to come) and the founders will go into full-time conference planning mode, spreading the Jewliciousness across the United States and Canada.
After that, book deals, film and animation rights, image licensing fees, etc will pay for bandwidth and much much more…because this is the glamorous life of Jewish bloggers.
Hovarda tv seçene?i sayesinde tüm üyeler kesintisiz bir ?ekilde canl? yay?n deneyimi sunmaktad?r. Hovarda online bahis sitesindeki tv lobisi yüzlerce …
Thank you for every other informative blog.
Anyway, you misrepresented what people had to say about that post of Laya’s. Calling someone Boundary challeneged, is very juvenile. People had a point to make about her post. Just because someone doesn’t agree w/ some dopey post, does not make them ‘Boundary challenged’.
But I suppose your purpose is to drive traffic, so who will notice anyway?
whatever dude. get some fresh air and stop watching that freaking kumah video that is “spreading across the internet like wildfire.” guten shabbos.
Boy, there sure is a lot of pre-Shabbat sarcasm in the blogosphere. You guys need a day of rest.
No kidding Harry! I mean seriously, badly written words by self appointed experts – who give’s a rat’s ass what these nobodies think? “We’re the voice of the grass roots, man!” Whatever – shut the fuck up, step away from the computer and go out and, you know, DO something. That’s my morning mantra – don’t want to take any of this shit too seriously.
Oh and the “badly written” part? That only applies to me and my potty mouth.
Who really gives a shit about blogs? A little too much self-importance these days, dontcha think?
Yes but who gives a shit about the Jewish Week??
To be honest, I’m not sure what kind of news the article was really reporting; to me, it seemed like an amalgam of “we know about these coolified initiatives, but are they really doing anything? we don’t know, so we’ll just bring them up and see what happens…”
I’m obviously biased, but I think that any time blogfounders or bloggers are consulted as voices within the media, that’s a good thing.
The Jewish Week mentions Heeb no less than 6 times, including the picture next to the story, but doesn’t bother getting a quote from our official Jewish spokesperson to Jewish media.
Why should they? Hell, this story was so reduandant, I bet no one would care if they just reprint some quote from years ago published in the Observer?
It could go something like this,
“Think of it like a Jewish lowbrow Vanity Fair,†Bleyer told The New York Observer, before the magazine launched.”
There, doesn’t that work swell?
They should save time and just reprint New Jew article after New Jew article, instead of trying to find a more “serious” magazine or anything new, resorting to reporting on something much more serious, like say, Israeli Hip Hop, cause we know Jews and Hip Hop is a brave, untouched new subject, and hasn’t been talked to death by the likes of all of us already.
I sure hope someone thinks of it!