Pornographic film reviews, fawning references to Noam Chomsky, and a visceral contempt for the Jewish state— such is the stuff of Heeb magazine, a fledgling new satirical quarterly taking on all things Jewish. Archly calling itself “The New Jew Review,” the magazine, which recently published its fifth number, was the brainchild of Jennifer Bleyer, a twenty-something journalist-cum-activist backed by the financial largess of such influential Jewish-Americans as Steven Spielberg and Charles Bronfman.

From its inception, Heeb began to ruffle feathers. The very title of the magazine, after all, was a snub directed at anti-Semites and uptight Jews alike. Explaining the title to The New York Observer, Bleyer asked, “Who wants to call themselves ‘Jew”… We’ve been called Jews for 4,000 years. It’s played out. Heeb just sounds so much cooler.” In accordance with this mindset, Heeb’s inaugural issue included a fawning profile of Peaches, “the queen of porn-pop,” and a constant stream of profanity.

Accordingly, Jason Moaz, senior editor of The Jewish Press, referred to Heeb as “a slur of a magazine,” and inveighed against its insipid commentary. Reasonable though this may be, condemnation in the established press only adds to the pseudo-radical bona fides of a magazine aimed at hipper-than-thou post-religious Jewish adolescents and post-adolescents.

And Heeb is feverishly attempting to stay afloat, as the hasty departure of Ms. Bleyer from the editorship and lagging sales attest; under such circumstances, any publicity is good publicity. As such, new editor-in-chief Joshua Neuman, a professor who teaches courses at New York University, appears positively desperate to offend.

The latest issue’s cover story is a send up of The Passion featuring a member of the indie-porn site Suicide Girls as the topless and nipple-pierced Virgin Mary and Jesus as sex symbol, his genitalia wrapped in a prayer shawl. (Suicide Girls has advertised in Heeb, and interviewed Neuman on its site.) When the Anti-Defamation League took issue with this photoshoot, Neuman replied, “I loved it when Abe Foxman [of the ADL] publicly excoriated us…. I wish he’d do it more.”

There is much more, though, to be gleaned from Heeb magazine than the poor taste of much of its humor. Although, to be certain, a fringe publication of limited interest even to its intended demographic, the magazine’s contents speak to a contempt for ethnicity and religion among a certain strain of young Jewish Americans.

Though the magazine’s meager articles may be peppered with hints of Yiddish, pretty much any Jewish sacred cow, so to say, is ripe for satire. This can range from the nugatory (e.g., Jewish hairstyles) to the deeply serious (e.g., remembrance of the Holocaust).

There’s a political spin to this banal irreverence. Joseph Lieberman was featured as a paper cut-out doll in one issue, dressed in only his underwear, withered and pasty. Neuman elsewhere has claimed that “no one is less Heeb” than the “totally un-self-conscious” Lieberman, and the magazine regularly takes aim at Ariel Sharon and neoconservatives. In fact, as Ms. Bleyer explained to Cynthia Cotts of The Village Voice, Heeb’s unsophisticated wit is the “the sugar to make the medicine go down.” Of the Chomsky interview, Bleyer bragged that  “as an activist, it’s more important than anything kitschy and Jewish.”

For all its carefully targeted vulgarity and blasphemy, however, it is clear that many topics are beyond the reach of Heeb’s satirical barbs. The magazine mocks traditional attitudes while touting predictable left-wing shibboleths. Heeb has no qualms mocking Judaism’s scorn for tattoos; anti-fur activism, however, is no laughing matter. Those utterly unacquainted with Judaism who read a few issues of Heeb might think that anti-capitalism and indie-rock were cardinal Jewish virtues.

The magazine also dotes on what it deems marginal voices in the Jewish community, thus aping the tired regard for “The Other” so typical of the academic Left. Profiles of Jewish graffiti artists, Jewish reggae singers, and Orthodox comedians abound. Instead of the portrait of the American Jewish community as a Likudnik cabal surreptitiously hijacking Bush’s foreign policy, Heeb makes it seem as if Jewish youths are one grand collection of transgendered performance artists. One wonders how many Jewish heavy metal groups dedicated to “rock[ing] the Ten Commandments” it can drudge up.

The appropriate response to such palaver is not shock, but pity. Sure, Heeb offers sundry forays into the realm of tastelessness such as tin-eared poetry with lines like “I’m convinced you gave me my yeast infection.” But it’s all so manifestly calculated to offend that it isn’t worth getting one’s dander up.

Heeb’s political spin, though is worthy of serious consideration. In this realm, at least, the magazine often drops its breezy, satirical air and begins to preach. In the latest number of Heeb, a short profile of an underground Israeli magazine offers tacit approval to Adbusters, another hipster staple whose most recent issue contains a list of neoconservatives with a dot next to each Jewish member of its ranks (perhaps a Star of David was too tricky for its art department). There’s also a letter to the editor that refers to Lieberman, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle as “fuck-ups.”

These are odd choices for a magazine that quibbles with The New York Times’ assessment of it as “earnestly anti-Zionist.”* But the most questionable portion of Heeb’s latest issue is surely its softball interview with academic superstar Cornel West. Conducted by Elliot [corrected spelling] Ratzman, a graduate student and left-wing activist at Princeton University (where West currently teaches), the interview allows West to defend many of the anti-Israeli (if not outright anti-Semitic) stances he has taken in the past without any serious rejoinders to West’s less-than-satisfying responses. This is a man who, as Gabriel Schoenfeld notes in his recent book The Return of Anti-Semitism, added his name to “a full-page ad in The New York Times in which, in classic anti-Semitic form, either Ariel Sharon or one of his ‘supporters’ was presented in a cartoon caricature as a hook-nosed, evil-looking Jew, the state of Israel was characterized as a ‘Pharaoh,’ and Israeli soldiers were likened to Nazis blindly ‘following orders.’”

Still, Ratzman fails to question West’s assessment of “the late, great Said and Chomsky.” He fails to point out the implications of West’s support for the presidential campaign of Al Sharpton, or his association with Louis Farrakhan. Ratzman also fails to respond when West opines that only those Jews who take his side on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are engaged in “serious self-criticism, self-questioning and self-interrogation.” To West (and to Heeb, it would seem), Jews cannot investigate the history of the Middle East and side with Israel; on the contrary, such support is likened to sheer mindlessness. (And no fun is made of that easiest of targets, West’s rap album, which his web site proclaims is  “In all modesty… a watershed moment in musical history.”)

It’s tempting to dismiss a Jewish magazine whose first editor blithely claimed that “A lot of post-September 11 paranoia among our parents’ generation about anti-Semitism is unwarranted…. And I think it’s significant that this magazine is not all about Israel. It’s not the all-encompassing Jewish identity that it was 30 years ago.”

It’s doubtful whether a magazine aimed at “urban Jews in their 20s and 30s, who’ve very little or no connection to the organized Jewish world” can grow before its readers lose their last attenuated links to their religion and culture. This is Judaism as a scene and lifestyle instead of a culture and faith. Imagine a Norman Mailer essay on “The White Hebrew” and you’ll get the picture.

But there’s cause for real concern about what Bleyer has described as “the demographic of Jews who are not that involved in the community, but still, like, identify …. We’re trying to be as inclusive of everything as we can.” In offering a hip outlook to young disaffected Jews, Heeb presents an unsettling picture of American Jewish youth as militantly secularist and unreflectively anti-Israel. Roger Bennett, vice president of the Bronfman philanthropies, until recently Heeb’s main financial supporter, replied to such charges when he opined that attacking Heeb is like claiming “the Beatles were bad for today’s youth when they appeared on the Ed Sullivan show.”

In his essay “In the Land of the Rococo Marxists,” Tom Wolfe argues that people regularly acquiesce to political correctness “because they know that to oppose it out loud is in poor taste.” If Heeb’s vision of American Jewish youth, for whom support for Israel is treyf, holds true, it would not be surprising if regard for Israel progressively withers. Or if these readers’ children, the next generation of “Heebs,” were to have no connection at all to Judaism save a lingering suspicion of the lone Jewish state and a hearty contempt for its supporters.

* Two weeks later, the Times ran the following, rather bizarre correction: “An article in Business Day on Oct. 13 about expansion plans for Heeb, a magazine for young urban Jews, referred incorrectly to its attitude toward Israel. While the magazine is critical of some policies of the Israeli government, it is not anti-Zionist.”

Eric Adler is a PhD candidate in Classical Studies at Duke University. His articles and reviews have appeared in such forums as The Partisan Review, The Boston Book Review, and The Bloomsbury Review.