I Heart Heeb

Jewcy was recently asked to sponsor a night of avant-garde Jazz interpretations of traditional Jewish music—the kind of ingenious, rooted-in-the-past-but-not-limited-by-it cultural event that we’d love to get involved with. The catch: Heeb was also sponsoring the event. Would we be willing to co-sponsor an event with Heeb? I mean, don’t we want to distinguish ourselves from that awful epitome of vacant New Jew posturing? God, am I sick, sick, sick of this anti-hipster backlash, if I see the word edgy in scare quotes one more time I'm going to hurl. Heeb is constantly being pissed on as the mother of the Jewish hipster Frankstein, and I can’t count the times people have challenged us to show we're not tawdry and worthless like they are. Well bullshit, Heeb was good and important, limited though it was/is. No one else did what they did, when they started doing it, no one else showed that Jewish media could grab you by the balls and squeeze, instead of serving you the warm milk with piss of stultifying, blandly self-celebratory Jewish media. Yes, we’re bringing more substance to the table, we think that iconoclasm and irreverence is most potent when wielded in the pursuit of substance, as well as thrills. But if, in their zeal, anti-hipster militants fail to note the distinctions and group us together with Heeb, I can’t for the life of me see why we should care. It doesn’t matter how many searching articles we run on atheism, Zionism, whatever: Some people will still shout out our names during their "hipsterism is sooo lame" jerk-off parties. And what does it matter? Heeb made a huge contribution to Jewish media, it’d be great to collaborate with them. And that jazz night sounds awesome. Let’s do it.