It started with a sexual encounter.
I was walking out of the Brown library when the image of a barechested man caught my eye. Tefillin were wrapped tightly around one arm and his hands were grasped firmly just above his crotch. Emblazoned across his midsection was “The Sex Issue.” Intrigued, I picked the magazine up, flipped through a few articles—”The Precarious Art of Foreskin Restoration,” “Confessions of a Jewish Dominatrix,” and the “Pimping of Israel”—and wondered to myself, “Who the hell is putting this out?”
Following that initial encounter with New Voices, I almost forgot about the magazine. I graduated and moved to Israel a week into the intifada. In need of a job, I wrote dozens of e-mails to American Jewish publications. New Voices wrote back: They were looking for a new Israel correspondent.
More than a job, writing for New Voices became an extraordinary vehicle to explore the ever-escalating situation in Israel. On bus rides criss-crossing the country, I interviewed soldiers on their attitudes about serving in the occupied territories. In the desert, I spoke with aging kibbutzniks about the shortcomings of their communal practices. And in Jerusalem I heard from some idealistic immigrants on their call to create a more just Israeli society.
After finishing my stint as New Voices’ Israel correspondent, I headed south to a kibbutz in the desolate southern Arava. There, I received an e-mail from New Voices offering me an editing position in their New York office. I had my doubts. Beyond the meager pay, I wondered if I was the right person for the job: I had stayed away from Jewish activity on campus as a student. The editors assured me that this wasn’t an issue.
While I had been in touch with the editor of New Voices for several months, I was in for a surprise when I joined him as associate editor. I quickly learned the challenges in being an independent, youth-run organization: The two of us, working shoulder-to-shoulder in a windowless office, were responsible for everything from fundraising to accounting to running the database system, in addition to putting out the magazine.
Nonetheless, last summer, at 24, I became editor of New Voices. Unlike any of my friends, I am my own boss, running my own organization. When things went wrong this year, like when the fonts mysteriously didn’t load and I had to throw away more than 8,000 copies of New Voices printed without apostrophes or quotes, I had to take the blame. But when I wanted to give the Latin America Issue a glossy cover, I had the power to use the money I had raised (and overdraw our account) to make it happen.
As editor of New Voices, I’ve tried to stay true to our name and seek out compelling voices that aren’t commonly heard in the mainstream American Jewish community: Jewish students who question Israeli policies, Arab students who study in Israel, a Venezuelan Jew reporting about the crisis in her country, a Colombian lamenting kidnappings in his, and an ultra-Orthodox matchmaker, to name a few.
This year, I learned the hard way that not everyone appreciates the freedom afforded by New Voices. When we ran an article in which Jewish students criticized Israel advocacy efforts on campus, a leader of a pro-Israel lobbying organization accused New Voices of having a “reputation for being anti-Zionist.” After we ran a piece denouncing birthright israel for accepting funds from a fugitive, a prominent philanthropist told me that the piece was simply “dumb.” And when I was quoted saying a certain Jewish campus organization is not perfect, I was told that if I wanted to continue to develop our funding relationship I should curb my remarks.
You’d think by now, this being my last issue as editor, I would have learned to keep my mouth shut. But the magazine should never be the voice of an institution, or a communal cheerleader. I came to work at New Voices because I wanted to help create a Jewish culture of ideas and action that was meaningful to me. If I hadn’t used the power New Voices gave me to seek the truth, I wouldn’t have been doing my job.
