Granted I’m biased, but I believe the Jewish Student Press Service, publisher of New Voices, is one of the most important organizations in the Jewish world. On a dwindling landscape of independent Jewish student groups in America, New Voices stands alone as a forum for students from both inside and outside the organized community to write about the Jewish issues they care about most. What makes New Voices so special, I think, is its independence. Thanks to a handful of wonderful supporters who recognize the importance of Jewish students developing their own ideas and searching out their own religious identities, the magazine has complete editorial freedom.
The editorial independence of New Voices is so unusual that I could hardly believe it myself when I took over as editor in 1998. The first issue I put out was fairly tame. The cover story outlined new trends in Jewish philanthropy, and the only humor piece was a list of ways to annoy your roommate with gefilte fish. (“Shove small pieces of gefilte fish into his/her disk drive–insist it adds 32 megabytes of memory.”) With the second issue, I felt a bit more confident and decided to go with a cover piece on the pitfalls of the March of the Living program. The article may have broken the magazine’s record for angry letters, but, somewhat to my surprise, no one was trying to shut us down. Only then did I stop and think, “Wait a minute. Nobody can shut us down. We’re independent.”
After that I lost control for a bit and started publishing large humor sections in the magazine with headlines such as “Orthodox Rabbi Declares Own Saliva Unkosher” and “Jewish Philanthropists Announce Birthright Mission to Mars.” Luckily, the invaluable associate editors I worked with, Shira Schnitzer and Lisa Keys, kept me somewhat in line. (In successive years they both vetoed the Jews and Postmodernism issue, which I had intended to be 40 blank pages.)
But while I loved working on the New Vices humor sections, I am most proud of the serious articles we published: the March of the Living piece, which explored the problems of a Holocaust-based Jewish identity, an editorial exposing the ugly underside of Jewish fraternities and calling for their termination, a piece about the Jewish community’s mistreatment of the children of mixed marriages, an in-depth look at troubled Jewish-Arab relations on campus, and so on. These were subjects I felt no one else in the Jewish community was addressing, and it gave me great pleasure to edit young writers who were so passionate about their critiques of Jewish life.
Working with these students was the highlight of my tenure at New Voices, and I’m happy to report that some 30 years after its inception, the Jewish Student Press Service is still fulfilling its mission of developing the next generation of Jewish journalists. Two writers I worked with are now on staff at the Forward, and quite a few others have been published in Jewish periodicals across the country.
This is not to say my two years at New Voices were problem free. Frankly, I don’t think there was a day that was problem free. I made a number of editorial decisions that I now regret (note to future editors: most readers won’t find fake interviews with angry Jewish monkeys all that funny), and the magazine’s unstable financial situation occasionally made life miserable. (By the way, if you’ve read this far and you have money, please remember that donations to the Jewish Student Press Service are tax-deductible.) But I think New Voices is a great and important publication, and I feel lucky to have been a part of it.
