Nextbook is a generously funded non-profit purportedly devoted to Jewish intellectual life.
According to the April 20 Jewish Journal:
First to arrive was the Nextbook Web site, a compendium of the best new Jewish-themed writing on the Internet that is supplemented by original essays commissioned by Nextbook’s editorial staff. Newsweek recently described Nextbook’s site as a cross between Slate, the New York Review of Books and online intellectual clearinghouse Arts & Letters Daily, combining links to Jewish content around the Web with New Yorker-esque essays and personal material.
Are we talking about nextbook.org? I’ve checked it out many times, hearing that it is good, but there’s almost no compelling content on that site aside from the odd Shalom Auslander column.
Nextbook is throwing a "festival of ideas" at UCLA April 22 but I can’t find anything on the agenda that would justify my time. I can’t imagine anybody leading a Jewish life would have the slightest interest in anything on the agenda, including the views of the loathsome David Mamet who is "in conversation" with the Jewish Journal’s tiresome columnist Tommy Teicholz.
This Nextbook festival is Jewish to the extent that its featured speakers are born of a Jewish mother but there appears to be nothing Judaic (nothing Jewishly intellectual) on the agenda, just pointless discussion by Jewish goyim of the sensitivities and neuroses of other Jewish goyim.
I’m sure I am missing something here so perhaps you, dear reader, could add something in comments about why Adam Gopnik (he married a shiksa) on the history of Jewish comedy is just so compelling.
Incidentally, has Jewish Journal managing editor Susan Freudenheim ever written anything remotely interesting? If so, I’ve missed it. Every time I have forced myself through one of her banal pieces, I’ve regretted it.
To complete my out-to-lunch blog entry, I need to know why anybody cares about 110 years of the Forward in pictures. Alana Newhouse is delicious but who would spend $20 to hear her talk? For that much money, I’d want her to do a lot more than just talk. Sheesh, for one Alana Newhouse presentation, I could get four Rav Adlerstein shiurim.
I’m probably wrong, but I suspect that anybody busy leading a Jewish life has little interest in these folkways of Jewish goyim.
Joe writes: "I agree that there is something toothless in their culturally Jewish (if that) crowd of invitees. I suspect that any treatment of Jewish topics will be shallow. But I am still in favor of any program that causes non-religious LA Jews to think about their Jewishness in any way. It it self-evident that religious Judaism (Orthodox and the liberal movements) is not engaging roughly half of the Jews out there, so we need to try something, anything, to keep alive any spark of Jewishness, and NextBook seems like an effort to do that."
