Heeb aims to shock
HEEB is published four times a year and is aimed squarely at hip, young American-Jewish university students and recent graduates.
HEEB is published four times a year and is aimed squarely at hip, young American-Jewish university students and recent graduates. Steven Spielberg is among those who helped finance the magazine when it was first published in 2002.
Its aim is to shock, and its latest edition certainly delivers on that front, with an image featuring Roseanne Barr, former star of the TV series Roseanne, dressed as Adolf Hitler and serving what she calls “Jew cookies”, fresh out of the oven.
The picture and accompanying story has sparked outrage across the United States, even among its own readership.
According to the magazine’s US publisher Josh Neumann, Jews have been joking about the Holocaust, “since the Holocaust”.
“Naturally, our editors couldn’t help but wonder whether something new was happening in the culture -— whether the taboo against joking about the Holocaust and the Nazis exerted as much power as it used to,” he wrote on the magazine’s website.
“But these jokes have largely been uttered in private or underground. In recent years, they have been finding themselves in the most public of conversations.”
One person comfortable¬† enough with the image is Josh Levi, publisher of Heeb’s Australian edition, which will hit the streets of Sydney and Melbourne for the first time later this month. According to Levi, a former journalist with The AJN, the image is “not offensive to me, but I have a lot of tolerance”.
“If you look at the history of Heeb, it is designed to poke fun at some of what it means to be Jewish. It attracts an audience not just interested in Jewish community issues, but a whole range of Jewish themes.”
Heeb will be distributed free of charge in Australia, at least initially, and according to Levi, the Roseanne Barr feature will not appear here.
“We took the view that the picture would not have related well to the Australian market so we have decided not to go with it, but the story may run.”
Levi would not say who the editor of the Australian edition is, but he has assembled a group of young Jewish writers to be involved in the new venture, which he claims will not compete with any existing Jewish publications in Australia.