You 11 laugh...you'll cry. you'll go home happy
of community alone!'
In this vein, each edition will be con-
nected to interactive Web-based discus-
sion guides.
Editorial Board
The editorial board boasts a series of
well-respected names coming out of a
series of disparate fields. They include
Shteyngart, Vapnyar and novelist
Jonathan Safran Foer; magazine writers
Susan Dominus and A.J. Jacobs; and pho-
tographers/graphic artists Gillian Laub
and Seymour Chwast.
In what may be an unintentional nod
to two icons of Jewish literature —
Kugelmass, of Woody Allen's "The
Kugelmass Episode" and Alexander
Portnoy of Philip Roth's Portnoy's
Complaint — the magazine's editorial
hoard includes scholars Jack Kugelmass
of Arizona State University and Eddie
Portnoy of the Jewish Theological
Seminary of America in New York.
Shteyngart's contribution to the inau-
gural issue is a short play, a fictional
account of an interview between Mikvah
Tannenblatt, senior correspondent for
Kosher Homes & Gardens, and one "Jerry
Shteynfarb," novelist.
It opens with the following exchange:
Mikvah Tannenblatt: Where's your
mezuzah?
Jerry Shteynfarb: My what?
M.T.: Every other apartment on your.
tloor has a mezuzah. Where's yours?
J.S.: Oh, the door thing. Well, it doesn't
really fit in with my aesthetic, which is
more, you know, secular. Besides, every-
one else on this floor is Orthodox. Except
for the nice Chinese lady down the hall.
New Creative Energy
As a "strong proponent" of secular Jewish
culture, Shteyngart — who wrote the
bestselling The Russian Debutante's
Handbook and the forthcoming
Absurdistan — says typical Jewish news-
papers, emanating from a "very organized
community basis:' don't speak to him.
Guilt & Pleasure, which he called a
Jewish Paris Review, does.
"For as long as there have been Jews in
America, there have been Jewish secular
cultural enterprises',' he said. Still, he
sometimes wonders what, if anything,
binds nonreligious Jews.
"What among secular Jews makes us a
community? Are we a community? I don't
have an answer for that," he said. But he's
hoping Guilt & Pleasure will spur some
discussion on the topic.
Sarna said young Jews are fueling a
level of creativity and vibrance not seen
in North American Jewry since the hey-
day of the Chavurah movement three
decades ago. Much of this activity, he
said, is an effort to forge community by
young Jews who want to differentiate
themselves from other whites in North
America.
The new journal is not the first such
effort. In fact, Sarna said, the emergence
of this broader creative energy is a "replay
of a moment I've seen four or five times
in my life — and all of them have had
positive results!'
He cites several examples of related
moments of the past.
In the early 20th century, there was
Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan's synagogue-
center model,
sometimes
called the
"shul with a
pool," which
aimed to
draw Jews
into syna-
gogues by
offering gym-
nasiums,
social halls
The debut issue of Guilt
and schools
in addition to & Pleasure, a quarterly
publication that is "dis-
sanctuaries
tinctively,
if not
and prayer
religiously,
Jewish."
services.
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More
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Then there are entertainers like Sarah
Silverman, a comedian known for point-
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often her own.
She is "somebody who seems to have a
quite deep feeling of what it is to be
Jewish — you'd have to have that kind of
feeling in order to mock the tradition the
way she does," Sarna said.
Silcoff said Guilt & Pleasure hearkens
back to a Jewish tradition that has less to
do with religion so much as wrestling
with Jewishness.
"My mission is not continuity," she
said. "It's not a magazine about keeping
people Jews or getting people to marry
Jewish people and have Jewish babies.
"What we're trying to do is rekindle a
kind of youthful brand of Jewish intellec-
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53