It’s hard to believe that 10 years ago this month, New Voices was published for the first time. First of all, it means I am getting older–which is never a pleasant thought–but beyond that, it means that what started off as a fragile idea has managed to withstand the test of time and grow into an established part of the Jewish community.
When I was hired to run the Jewish Student Press Service in 1991, I inherited an organization with a long and proud history–one that had helped produce numerous talented journalists–but one that by the late 1980s was reduced to a shell of its former self. Few students had ever heard of the organization, it had put out almost nothing in several years, and our annual funding totaled something around $10,000–two-thirds of which went towards my whopping $150-a-week salary.
Initially, I tried to resuscitate the projects and activities on which JSPS had built its reputation: a conference for Jewish student editors and a packet of articles that was to be distributed to campus Jewish newspapers. But the university environment that had made those things successful in the 1970s had long since changed, and I quickly realized that to revive the organization we’d need to change too.
To be honest, so much time has passed that I can’t exactly remember how the decision to create New Voices came about–although I do recall an absurd conversation with a friend where we tried to come up with a name for the nascent publication (among them “JewsNews,” “Heeb,” and the absolutely awful “Kike”). Thankfully, we settled on New Voices, since we hoped that the paper would become a forum for a new generation of Jewish journalists and students.
With the name, and a $1000 pledge from the Jewish Agency that was supposed to cover the printing costs for our premiere issue, we launched New Voices at the 1991 General Assembly of the Council of Jewish Federations. Unfortunately, we never actually got that money, but the buzz created by that first issue helped us scrape together enough donations and ads to pay for it and produce a second one.
And so it went for a little over a year-and-a-half, publishing about a half dozen times–never quite sure that we’d have the funding to pull it off, but somehow always managing. Because we had no computer, I’d often have to sneak into my other job (I was a production manager for a number of community newspapers) to edit and lay out the then-tabloid-sized newspaper between the hours of 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. Days would go by with little or no sleep and then, after getting the 25,000 copies back, we’d have to box and mail out copies to over 300 campuses–by hand.
Thankfully, I was assisted in these tasks by a handful of talented students and recent grads who volunteered their time to help me get the paper out. Among them were Faye Penn, who is now the Features Editor for the New York Post, Yossi Abramowitz, who went on to found Jewish Family and Life! media, and noted journalist Matthew Fleischer.
And then there was the ever-changing cadre of campus writers, who gave life to their articles in an always thoughtful and independent way. Just like today’s New Voices, we published a wide range of stories that both covered student life and the important issues in the Jewish community. My favorites among them tackled subjects that many other Jewish publications shied away from, whether it was gays in the Conservative seminary, the treatment of Ethiopian Jews in Israel, or a scathing two-page critique of the popular March of the Living program. The latter article led to a flurry of calls from Jewish leaders who threatened to have our funding cut off, but we stood by the piece and the publication survived.
By the fall of 1993 and after nearly two years at the helm, it was time for me to leave New Voices and the Press Service. Fortunately the chain of editors who came after me made sure the paper not only survived but flourished.
That’s not a bad legacy to leave behind and even today it is one of my proudest accomplishments. I congratulate the current and former staffs for all their hard work and only hope that New Voices will continue for another decade and beyond. Mazel tov.
