There’s a new kid on the Jewish media block. This week, while the older generation was in LA listening to Israeli politicians thank them, the next generation was launching its latest attempt to engage Jewish life with some sophistication and style: Jewcy.com.
Jewcy is a sort-of Slate for Jews, focusing on thought-pieces with an intellectual/cultural bent. But what really sets it apart is its technological ambition. Jewcy President and Editor Tahl Raz maps out the Jewcy plan in his first editor’s column:
Jewcy is basically an online ideas-and-culture magazine. But it’s a magazine born of and for a time when technology has made personal expression far easier and far more democratic. The site attempts to integrate original top-down editorial (hatched, crafted, and made pretty by terrific writers and editors and artists in the traditional production process) with content that users generate with the new tools of participatory media, such as blogs, comment sections, wikis, and forums.
The jury is definitely out on whether the Jewcy experiment will work, but Tahl is one of the smartest folks I’ve met in the Jewish/media world, and he’s got a rare and much-needed eye for quality. So we’re rooting for it…
