The new Jewish magazines came all at once in the first years of this decade. September 11 formed their background more than it informed their contents; further back and more explicit was the breakdown of the peace talks at Camp David in the summer of 2000 and the start of the Second Intifada that September.

A certain period of confidence for American Jews began in 1967 with the Six-Day War, as people watched on television the reuniting of Jerusalem and thousands of Israelis streaming for the first time to the Western Wall. (Those television-watchers ignored the acquisition of the West Bank and Gaza.) The period of confidence ended in three stages: July 2000, when Arafat and Barak could not reach a settlement at Camp David; September 2000, when Sharon walked atop the Temple Mount; and September 2001, when Islamic terrorists attacked the United States. The proximity of the Intifada to the terrorist attacks made something clear, finally, to younger American Jews. Israel was not a metaphysical abstraction. It was a country with a particular politics (which happened to be a bad politics). It was not the only place where Jews lived, and it was not the only place where Jews could die. The attacks meant that the Holocaust was suddenly toppled from its status as the national trauma par excellence. Almost immediately the production of Holocaust literature ceased. It was as if American Jewry had been called into history once again, not as a successful group looking backward to a historical catastrophe and sideways to a troubled distant country, but as contemporary actual living Jews. And what was our response? A restructuring of secular young Jewish life around religion was no longer an option for an urban and suburban middle class one or even two generations removed from orthodoxy. So we got the rise of JDate, the triumph of Birthright, and a group of lavishly funded Jewish magazines. Read More

You may have seen a small and strange article in last Monday's New York Times, buried beneath the fold in the back of the business section: "Fiction, Hoax or Neither? A Literary Dust-Up." The article reports on an essay by Paul Maliszewski in the April/May issue of Bookforum, in which he argues that a lecture given several times by Michael Chabon constitutes a deliberate and dodgy attempt to hoax his audience. In the lecture, titled "Golems I Have Known," Chabon describes, among other hoaxsters, a Jewish writer writing under a good Waspish pseudonym, CB Colby, who then publishes a Holocaust memoir in his own name, Joseph Adler. But it seems that Adler isn't his real name either, and the author of the memoir is not a survivor but a Nazi named Fischer. As it turns out, Colby/Adler/Fischer never existed, and the fake Holocaust memoir The Book of Hell, which Chabon says is owned by his father, his father-in-law, and perhaps by members of the audience, and from which he goes on to quote a passage, is a novelistic invention of one Michael Chabon. Maliszewski argues that Chabon is taking advantage of his audience's gullibility in order to show off, and thereby edits out history's CB Colby, a real man with no connections to Nazis or Jews whatsoever. In Maliszewski's eyes, this amounts to unethical fiction writing. Read More