Found any magazine of literary or cultural value that is explicitly inflected by the dialect of the tribe and you risk running into the same uneasy joke, time and again. "It's like a Jewish Slate," I once informed an editor at Slate by way of describing the nature and form of my old start-up haunt Jewcy. "So you mean just another Slate" came the reply I might have expected.
Where once ethnicity was a subtle or implicit characteristic of the highbrow publication (Partisan Review, Dissent), now it's simply bad manners to put out a new journal of criticism that doesn't claim to answer to a higher authority than Conde Nast.
I kid, but only a little. Here's Abe Socher, editor-in-chief of the already remarkable Jewish Review of Books, in his inaugural editorial:
This is an especially good time to launch a Jewish magazine of ideas and criticism. Perhaps it has always been a good time: the history of Jewish thought over the last two hundred years could be charted through a dozen periodicals in a half-dozen languages. But we live at a moment in which more Jewish books, and books of particular Jewish interest, are being published than ever before. Of the making of such books, it seems, there is no end. But of real criticism, considered judgment rendered in graceful, accessible prose, there is something of a scarcity.
The problem is not a lack of interesting Jewish writers, thinkers, or scholars. There are, to begin with, dozens of journals of Jewish Studies, for the most part geared to specialized academic work. Such scholarship is necessary and often important. But it does not suffice for understanding what it means to be a Jew in the modern world, or what Jewish texts and ideas might have to contribute to the larger discussion of important issues—religious, philosophical, political, ethical, literary—of the day. Then there are the newspapers, magazines, and websites that make it their full- or part-time business to report on Jewish culture. Here, with noble exceptions, the pressure of timeliness and the constraints of space combine to restrict the full, measured consideration that Jewish books and issues, in the widest sense, deserve.
Any endeavor that can meld art criticism of R. Crumb with a learned discussion of Israeli settlements is off to a good start. I also like the aura of assumed interest that most of the pieces in this maiden issue adopt. There's no attempt to talk down to the reader with my-bubbe-made-a-kishke folksiness, or titillate him with his own demographic inclusiveness. "Hey, did you know J.D. Salinger was Jewish?" Nor, I sincerely hope, will Mosaic patrimony be used as a moral standard for celebrating or scandalizing those who meet or fall short of it: "How does one quarter of Madeleine Albright live with itself?"
These are the vices of a niche magazine uncomfortable with its own mandate.
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