Fifteen years after its last issue was printed, the Gen X Jewish media darling Heeb Magazine is making a comeback.
In its early-2000s heyday, Heeb (yes, like the slur for Jewish people, but with the subtitle “the New Jew Review”) was probably the only outlet you could turn to for an interview with the Beastie Boys, a photoshoot of Roseanne Barr dressed as Hitler, and an article titled “Joe Lieberman Is (Still) a Dickhead.”
Subversive and unafraid to ruffle some feathers, the slick magazine, which first launched in 2002 with seed money from the Joshua Venture fellowship program, took off with its young, left-leaning American Jewish audience, with an estimated circulation of some 20,000 — though its reach often seemed far greater. In 2004, for example, Jon Stewart famously remarked on the “The Daily Show” that international terrorism could be solved with a giveaway: “For any international terrorist who turns himself in — a free lifetime subscription to Heeb.”
After the magazine parodied Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ,” the Anti-Defamation League issued a statement calling Heeb’s “irresponsible attempt at parody … deeply offensive and blasphemous to both Christians and Jews.” The 2009 photos of Barr wearing a Hitler mustache, which the then-editor said was a comment on the taboo about Holocaust humor, earned an on-air rebuke from Fox News host Bill O’Reilly.
In 2004, the Chicago Tribune named Heeb one of the 50 best magazines in America, calling it “intelligent, provocative and oh-so Jewish.”
But in 2010, with a piece titled “So Much for Controlling the Media,” the magazine announced that it would stop its print edition, becoming fully digital amid a dry-up in funding and a rapidly changing media landscape. By 2019, it had faded entirely; new articles no longer appeared on the website, and its social media pages went completely silent.
Until now.
“I’m posting to share some exciting news,” Mik Moore, who’s leading the charge on Heeb 2.0, wrote on Facebook last month. “[U]nder a new leadership team, and with incredible support from the old leadership team … Heeb Magazine is being rebooted as Heeb Media, a nonprofit media and e-commerce business!”
The new iteration of Heeb will be as irreverent as its predecessor, said Moore, but it will also aim to do something new: bridge the gap between solidly middle-aged Gen X and their Gen Z offspring. To that end, Moore said that the new Heeb will focus primarily on three formats: digital video series, podcasts and collaborations with individual creators who already have social media followings. (For those craving some physical media: Moore also has plans for a yearly print issue.)
“The 2000s are sort of in again,” Moore said, pointing to the ‘80s nostalgia of “Stranger Things” as a successful example of “generation-crossing entertainment.”
Moore, a digital media campaign strategist, has so far assembled a team of four paid part-time staffers — the original Heeb maintained no more than a handful of salaried employees, plus a team of volunteer editors and contributors — plus a four-person governing board and a 14-person advisory board. He’s hoping to raise $300,000 to $400,000 this first year to help expand the team and develop original content.
Moore had no previous involvement with Heeb, though he’d known its founder, Jennifer Bleyer, since before the magazine’s inception. He’d also previously been director of the Jewish Student Press Service and editor of its New Voices magazine.
“I was very sort of in that world in the 2000s, and I knew that space,” Moore told the New York Jewish Week. “I’d been a fan of [Heeb], and I’d been loosely following it, but sort of lost track of it.”
Moore learned in 2023 that Heeb had “more or less closed its doors” four years earlier.
“And so I took that as an opportunity to talk to some folks who I knew who also knew Heeb from back in the day,” Moore said, “and we started to think about what it would mean to reboot Heeb for the 2020s.”
While the media industry, technology and, well, pretty much the entire world have gone through immense changes since Heeb’s launch, Moore pointed out some similarities between 2002 and 2025.
“Heeb was founded right after 9/11, when the Bush years began,” he said. In his post announcing Heeb’s return, he pointed to the aftermath of 9/11 as “a moment of tremendous upheaval and uncertainty, but also of creativity and community,” adding that it’s “fair to wonder if we are entering a similar moment today.”
One major difference between now and then, however: The current, post-Oct. 7 climate, in which the topic of Israel has come to dominate conversations — and form stark divisions — in many Jewish spaces.
When she secured Heeb’s initial funding in 2001, Bleyer, then a 25-year-old Columbia Journalism School graduate, was looking to publish a magazine “about cool Jews,” she told the New York Observer at the time. Part of her mission, she told the New York Jewish Week in a recent phone interview, was to “assert that Jewish identity is more than the twin poles of the Holocaust and Israel.”
Bleyer, who left Heeb in 2003 to work as a freelance journalist and is now a social worker, noted how things have changed since an interview she’d done with journalist Michelle Goldberg back in 2002: “And I’d sort of scoffed at the idea that antisemitism still existed,” she said. “And now I certainly feel that that was really naive, you know?”
She added, “Not that everybody’s going around, cowering about being attacked on the street. But I, as many Jews [do] now, have a different understanding of what antisemitism is, and how it’s woven into the unconscious fabric of a lot of the world.”
“That said,” Bleyer added, “it’s not that we still shouldn’t have fun, and poke fun at ourselves.”
Moore hopes the new Heeb will push back against what he calls a prevalent “litmus test culture,” wherein people determine whether they want to consume something based on perceived political leanings “before [they] even engage.”
“I think there are a lot of significant divides, both within the Jewish community, and between Jews and other communities right now,” he said. “And I think culture, at its best, is a space that can bridge those divides.”
Heeb’s cultural coverage was the magazine’s calling card; they regularly interviewed Jewish celebrities for their quarterly issues, with notable covers including a nude Sarah Silverman posing behind a bedsheet and Jonah Hill applying KY Jelly to a bagel.
Since Heeb made its official return in early February, its focus has been on promoting their streetwear line, resurfacing old articles and selling back issues for $29 apiece. It’s an effort to build brand awareness and generate revenue as they look toward publishing new content. (Messages on their T-shirts include “Moses is my Homeboy” and “F— Kanye,” one of several defiant Jewish-themed items made in response to the rapper’s swastika shirt that he advertised during the Super Bowl.)
“I think Mik has a great sense of cultural and political sensibility,” Bleyer said, adding that she gave Moore her blessing and is on Heeb’s advisory board. “If anyone can bridge the gap between these generations, I imagine it’s him.”
One of the most frequent questions that Moore gets, he said, is about bringing back events — like the magazine’s signature Christmas Eve party, Heebonism.
“It was like the cooler, hipper version of the MatzoBall, for people who wouldn’t be caught dead at the MatzoBall,” said Jeff Newelt, Heeb’s comics editor from 2006 to 2015, referencing a Christmas Eve event for Jewish singles launched nearly 40 years ago. Newelt met his now-wife at Heebonism in 2011, during which, as with other Heeb events, he performed reggae music under his stage name, JahFurry.
Newelt laments that many of Heeb’s articles, while still available online, no longer feature images. “I’d be thrilled — and I’m sure hundreds of former Heeb contributors would be thrilled — if the actual archives of the original Heeb were in better shape,” he said.
Newelt hasn’t been in contact with the new Heeb team, and doesn’t know yet if he’ll have any involvement. “I’m at a wait-and-see point, in terms of what the content is like, or what they’re planning,” Newelt said. “I am definitely down for being involved in some way once I see what’s going on, you know, if it’s a match. But I’m excited.”
With the return of Heeb, American Jews will once again have access to a publication that’s all about “making Jewish fun,” as former editor Josh Neuman wrote in 2010. “I’m trying to emulate Vice in that this is more than a magazine, but a lifestyle,” Neuman told the New York Times after taking over from Bleyer as EIC in 2003. “As Vice is to cocaine, we are to chocolate layer cake.” (Neuman, who was EIC until 2010 and continued overseeing Heeb after it went digital, declined to comment for this story; Neuman is on the advisory board for the rebooted Heeb.)
According to Newelt, there is “absolutely times a thousand” a demand for “the quality, and edge, and insight, and aesthetics, and humor, and curation — on a high level — of Jewish-related content, that Heeb achieved.”
“But,” he added, “there’s not really demand for a shallow imitation.”
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