Technology
How to Be a Jew …. Who is Starting a Print Magazine, with Alana Newhouse
In this episode of 'How to Be a Jew,' host Courtney Hazeliff and co-hosts Rabbids Ion and Josh Cross welcome Tablet Magazine's editor-in-chief, Alana Newhouse, to discuss the magazine&#...
How to Be a Jew …. Who is Starting a Print Magazine, with Alana Newhouse
Technology •
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Interactive Transcript
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[♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪
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Shlom, hello, what is up?
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I'm Courtney Hazeliff.
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This is How to Be a Jew.
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I'm joined as always by the glowing Rabbids Ion of First Go.
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So good to be here.
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Always good to have you here.
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And of course, Josh Cross.
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Shalom.
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Shalom, Shalom, Shalom Manishman.
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This week we're doing something a little bit different.
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We're in the midst of a seismic change at Tablet Magazine.
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We've been talking about it.
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You've been hearing ads about it when
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you listen to any of our podcasts.
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You've probably been getting newsletter after newsletter
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after newsletter talking about it.
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And it seems high time that we bring in the visionary
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behind this whole thing.
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Our editor-in-chief, Alana Newhouse, Alana, welcome.
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Thanks so much.
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Great to meet you.
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Great to have you here.
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So I thought it would be best for everybody
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listening to hear from you why we are taking this step.
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I would say into the future, but it's also back to the future.
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Tablet is embracing print.
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That thing of the past, actually, how I got my start in journalism
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was in print magazines.
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And so I have a special affinity for it.
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But for people who haven't had the pleasure of actually receiving
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something in the mail, reading something in their hands,
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I wanted to hear from you why this change in thinking.
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So to start with, I've always loved print.
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Tablet actually had a short-lived print quarterly 10 years ago.
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So this is a move I've been wanting to make,
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mainly because I felt that it was right
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for what Tablet was trying to do for our readers,
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almost since the very beginning.
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But what happened recently is that the market joined me.
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And the thing, the way that I can explain it is,
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you already have no idea whether what you're reading online
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was produced by AI.
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You already can't tell.
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And to the extent that you can't tell now,
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you definitely won't be able to tell a year from now.
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And what Tablet is is it's a magazine produced
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by human beings with a lot of care and concern
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for other human beings.
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And I needed to figure out a way to package that
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in a form that people could trust.
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And people could know was made for them.
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And so when you think about it,
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I guess I could have had our staff come to everyone's homes
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and done interpretive dances for them.
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But this seemed actually like a much easier route to go.
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You published a piece about this that you called,
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I think you are not the media, right?
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You know, I shared with you a teaching from the Talmud
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that your piece made me think of.
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And the takeaway of the teaching is prisoners
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cannot free themselves.
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Like you can't free yourself from prison.
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I hear what you're saying about AI, you know,
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and that's wonderful.
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I love things written by humans.
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They're much more interesting.
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But I also sense just from being a tablet reader
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that there's something deeper going on
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that you're trying to achieve.
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So tell us more about like the sort of philosophical goals
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of a magazine here.
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The piece that I wrote starts with an anecdote
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that turned out to be something very central
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to the magazine over the last decade,
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which was this experience I had in Cleveland giving us speech
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and a man walked up to me.
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He, during the Q&A, he asked me what I thought about
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the, what was then emerging a rendezvous.
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And I basically bullshitted my way
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through a kind of vague answer.
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And he approached me before I left.
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And he, sweetly, but pretty firmly said,
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listen, kid, I'm a dentist.
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It's my job to wake up every morning
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and fix people's teeth.
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It's your job to tell me what to think
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about the Iran deal or the environment or whatever else.
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That's what you've made a decision to commit your life to.
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And you have to do it.
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You can't, he didn't say it this way,
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but he meant you can't half-ass this and cut corners.
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Because that is the form of the relationship
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that you have to other humans in this life.
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So if you cheat and don't give them the thing
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that you've committed to wake up every day and give them,
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then you're breaching that trust
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and you're weakening your commitment to other human beings.
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People on tablet staff know about this dentist from Cleveland
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because I talked about him and have talked about him
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on staff for a decade.
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And the purpose that he served in those intervening years
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is that I would look at stories sometimes and say,
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how is a dentist in Cleveland supposed to understand this?
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And I was applying him, he was this voice in my head
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around whether or not a story or the words
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that we put together would give readers what they want.
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Somewhere along the way in the last couple of years,
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his voice changed from one that was about the stories themselves
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to one that was about the form that we leave the stories in.
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And I started to feel that I was shirking my responsibility
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to do the thing I committed my life to do
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for other human beings if I continued to let them
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only receive understanding about the world online
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and only receive it from increasingly from bots.
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By the way, I think AI is amazing.
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And I'm not a lot right.
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And I want us to lean into technology.
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I want us to understand that I want us to get sophisticated
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about it and the only way to get sophisticated about it
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is to richly engage with it.
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So I love it.
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But that's not higher order thinking
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and it's not thinking or work or writing or analysis
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made by another human being.
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I think that the Thomas idea that you can't for yourself
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is based in this idea that we need other human beings
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and we cannot live on our own.
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And so then if I think about it that way, I think,
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right, we need other human beings.
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People, there are a set number of people who need us
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in this world and they need us to produce something
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for them that they can trust.
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And it is our responsibility not only to make sure
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the words are trustworthy,
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but that the form they come in is too.
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So everything you said, I think you could say
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about a secular magazine so far.
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But that's not what tablet is, at least to me.
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You know, I've been a long time reader,
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I've watched it change, I've watched it grow.
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You know, it's like so interesting to me.
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It's not boring to say the least.
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Why does this matter for Jews now?
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And like, what's your vision?
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Like, why is this still a Jewish magazine?
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One of the principles that runs as an undoccurrent
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in Jewish history is this idea that as the world changes,
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it's very, very important for Jews in particular
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to be vigilant to those changes,
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not only because we wanna be protective
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because Jews tend to be vulnerable in times of flux
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when societies break apart, change.
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One of the consequences is often a turning against
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vulnerable groups or minority groups.
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And historically, that's happened a lot with Jews.
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But it's not just defensive.
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It's also about leaning into societal change.
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Jews have also been at the vanguard
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of taking advantage of flux
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and helping the societies that they live in
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figure out ways to make that flux
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generate more safety, more richness, more art
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for not just themselves, but for everyone around them.
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But you can't do it unless you engage
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and you can't do it unless you decide to commit to it.
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And so for me, I know that print for a lot of people
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feels like a way to look backwards,
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but I really emotionally don't see it that way.
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It very much for me is a forward thinking medium.
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I feel that this is a way of sharpening people's brains
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for what's already a time of massive transformation
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and going to probably get even more intensely so.
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One of the transformations that we're asking people
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to come along the ride with us on is that we are asking you
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to pay for this.
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I think that it's a little bit the elephant in the room
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and as someone who sees the emails coming in from people
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who are longtime tablet fans and they're saying,
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wait, can I not get this for free anymore?
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Can I just look out on the internet?
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The answer is actually no.
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And I was hoping you would talk a little bit about the shift
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in like the widening and shallowing of what was available
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on the internet in journalism
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and why we're using this moment also to harness a turn around
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from that.
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Look, I'm a capitalist.
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And part of the reason for me to be a captain,
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there are a lot of reasons why I became a capitalist
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why I still believe in capitalism.
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But one of the reasons is emotional.
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We value what we invest in and we allow it to take on a role
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in our lives that we do not permit things that are free.
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And tablet is not a newswire.
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We are not a feed.
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We produce work that is meant to change your higher order
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thinking.
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In order for me to change your higher order thinking,
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I need you to be awake and focused and invested.
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So the truth of the matter is is tablets and non-profit,
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it's still a nonprofit.
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I still raise money from foundations and donors
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to keep tablet afloat.
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But I think that as the universe changed
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and we got back to a place where now information is so widely
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available that that more sophisticated layer
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or higher order analysis and insight can command value.
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It's time for us to reestablish that bilateral relationship
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where we're not infantilizing our readers anymore.
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It wasn't the readers fault, by the way.
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This was the market's fault or the market's gift to media,
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whatever way you want to look at it.
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It felt like a gift at the time, right?
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It was like, look at all this that I can get at my fingertips
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and as fast as I want and from his varied sources,
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sources kind of in quotes,
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but there's many varied sources that I desire.
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Yeah, that is also how alcoholics feel in liquor stores.
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Look at everything that I can get.
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And at a certain point, you want to put prices on those things
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because you want to actually establish a sense of some responsibility
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on the part of your customers, right?
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But also, it makes the person, the customer,
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in this case, the reader have to think about what they're taking in
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and what they're putting into their brain
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and what they're inviting because right now,
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there's a lot of drag out there.
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And our brains are precious and we need to feed them responsibly.
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And so I think that part of what we're looking at
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in the next decade is going to be a reality in which readers
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that feed their brain, better food become more competitive
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players in society and at a time of change.
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So I want to at least make the food and make it available.
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Now it's up to readers to decide if they want
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to improve their lives.
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One of the through lines that I think I've seen
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in the evolution of tablet and you personally actually,
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that sort of I think was obvious was going to lead us here
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only in hindsight was coming from everything is broken
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to a lot of conversations about how much analog things are better
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and a magazine is ultimate analog.
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We both agree that vinyl records are better.
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I think Courtney does.
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I think everybody does.
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And even podcasting is Harkens back to the radio era.
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What is it about magazines that make it easier to consume
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and make the world a little less broken if you want?
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The easiest answer is actually neurology,
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which is our brains process things that we hold
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and that are 3D differently than they process what's on screen,
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which is not just necessarily say better.
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It's just different.
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And I think that if we refuse to understand that,
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we are depriving ourselves of something.
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There is one study after another at this point,
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we are literally drowning in studies that show that people,
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if you take one focus group and you give them the same article
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to read in print on paper and hold in their hands
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and you have another focus group that reads the exact same text
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on their screen.
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The level of memory retention is wildly different.
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And not only that, but there have been a couple of studies
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that have shown that not only do the people
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who've read it on screens not remember it for as law,
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they also misremember it.
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Like they completely immediately misremember it,
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which means that their reading comprehension
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is not what it could be.
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Now again, this is less of an issue
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when you're dealing with a 40 word tweet,
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especially one that gets retweeted 1 million times,
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because you can all basically understand
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what that 40 words means,
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especially when you see it retweeted so many times.
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You can comprehend it.
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But when you're talking about ways of understanding the world,
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complicated ways of understanding the world,
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I don't think that the screens are the best way to do it.
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So for me, keeping people on that,
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everything is broken and broken as it has at its heart
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a fundamental prompt for people, which is,
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at times of flux, things break,
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sometimes dangerously so, things break a little bit
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and other things start to emerge that are new.
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My prompt for people is that what I want them to do
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is analyze the institutions, the ideas,
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the spaces in their lives,
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and ask themselves what they're looking at.
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And are they being served properly
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by those institutions, ideas, public figures, whatever?
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I think if we look at news and information and reading online,
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and we ask ourselves that question for real,
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the answer is going to be, we are hugely served
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in a million different ways by the pixels on these phones.
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And we are not served in these other ways.
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And so then how do we fix that?
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How do we fix that part of our own lives that's a little broken?
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And I think that this print magazine is, for us,
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it's our brain to readers to answer that question.
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It's funny because I don't know how you see yourself
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and if you see yourself as religious,
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but everything you say to me, something religious comes.
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So like you say broken ism, I hear she's preaching
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for Ticono love, you know what I mean?
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Like not the sort of cheesy version we have today.
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So why have a rabbi joy in us ladies and gentlemen?
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You're talking about, like I'm just thinking about
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all of the not just creativity,
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but specifically like Jewish writings
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that have come out of absolute prices.
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Like look at Kabbalat Shabbat, look at Lakhadrodi,
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like look at these things that literally come out
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of my mouth and our mouths every single week of our lives
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that were literally written in response
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to exile, destruction, societal upheaval.
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You know, some of the things we're really battling
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with right now.
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So it's funny, I understand like there's a different
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and certain, you know, maybe I'm the most religious one
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on this call, I don't know, but I just hear it all
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as a religious endeavor.
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And I'm just excited to, like I haven't looked
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at the magazine, I'm excited to read it
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and to uncover what's in there, can you give us a little tease?
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Like what kind of things are you gonna cover?
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What are you most excited about?
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Well, what I'm most excited about maybe that's worth a tease
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is the structure of the magazine
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and the basic idea of the architecture of the book.
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It's inspired by the 10 commandments.
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So every issue has 10 sections.
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The 10 sections stay the same,
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although obviously the articles in the way
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that we manifest those sections changes issue to issue,
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but each one of those sections is kind of loosely
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or poetically inspired by the related commandment.
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So section number one, which is, I am the Lord your God,
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to me, that has always been,
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it's almost like this package of hidden truth.
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And so the first section is called esotaraka
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and it's about hidden truths, dispatched from around the world,
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things that we want readers to know that they may not know.
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The second is a column called No Other Gods.
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The third is called Vanitas,
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which is visual kind of mad magazine-esque cartoon.
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Fourth is called Salvo,
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and it's the one place in the magazine
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for a real opinion or argument.
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Five, six and seven are based on the fifth,
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six and seven commandment,
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which is on our your father and the mother.
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Don't murder, don't have sex with your neighbor's wife,
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which to me is basically like family, sex and crime.
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So we call that, that's the well.
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Those are our big stories.
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There are three big stories in every issue.
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Then eight is Don't Steal, that's our money column.
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Nine is the culture column, which is Dopeir false witness.
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And so that's our critics,
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people looking at culture in the arts
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and trying to bear witness to that.
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And ten is coveting,
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which is our merchandise lifestyle,
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what we covet out of life section.
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To me, that's the most fun tease I can give people
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because it's not only about issue one,
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it's also about what they're gonna get every some a month
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when they get this magazine.
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I love it, I'm so excited.
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And I cannot think of anything more jui
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than starting with something esoteric.
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Oh, here are the thing going to be defined.
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It's just so deeply Jewish.
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I agree.
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I've been refreshing my tracking number every minute
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this morning.
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I know my boxes of the issue are on its way.
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And I just have to say,
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it has been such a thrill in honor to be part of this.
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And I can't wait for everybody else to get their issues.
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Everybody else who hasn't subscribed to do it yet,
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you're in for a true, true brain treat.
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It'll make you think, it'll make you feel.
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And I think that's what we're all looking for.
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Lana, thank you for joining us.
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Thank you guys so much for having me.
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I'm sorry.
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I'm sorry.
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I'm sorry.
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I'm sorry.
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I'm sorry.
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I'm sorry.
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I'm sorry.
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Wow.
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I always love talking to a Lana.
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It's such a dose of a different culture than I'm used to.
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And it's such an insight into the mind of a journalist
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and a Jewish creative.
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And I'm just really looking forward
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to having this in my home, touching it, and sitting with it.
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And I never know what tablet will do next.
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So I'm looking forward to being on the journey.
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I'm equally excited.
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One of the things I love most about this conversation
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that we just had is it made me think back to our early days
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of doing this show when we were trying to figure out
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what the show was and you would call me in.
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You'd call me Diana and say,
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what am I supposed to do here?
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And we're like, just say something Jewish.
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And you did that in space today.
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You had all the Jewish takes.
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And it's just me, I'm so grateful to have you
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along to do this because I feel like I live a pretty Jewish life.
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And I work at a pretty Jewish place.
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But it's having these conversations with you
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personally that makes me kind of look at the other side
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of the coin a little bit differently
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and think about how the way that I live makes me think
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about the things that I do.
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So thank you for that.
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My goodness, what a nice thing to say.
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I didn't know I was going to tear up in the middle of the day.
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But like right back up, both of you guys,
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it's just such a pleasure and really like a privilege
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to get to sit around and absorb ourselves
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in Jewish arts and culture.
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And to that end, we're going to do that this summer,
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but by holding magazines and reading books
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and spending time with our families.
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And so this is my long-winded way of saying.
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Thank you for being along for season one
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of How To Be A Jew.
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How To Be A Jew is a tablet studio's production
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and hosted by me, Courtney Hazelenton,
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co-hosted by Rabbi Diana Fersko and Josh Cross.
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We're produced and edited by Josh,
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as well as Quinn Waller.
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Drop us a line any time about this episode this season.
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Let us know if you have questions about
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how to be a Jew or email addresses podcast at tabletmag.com.
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If you want to find more of our shows over here
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at podcast studios, you can always swing by tabletmag.com
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slash podcast.
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The Heathrow have a fantastic summer.
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Music
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he