Report to Our Readers and Editorial Advisory Board
PERSPECTIVE Report To Our Readers and Editorial Advisory Board Recently, at a meeting of our editorial advisory board, I gave a report on the first year of the new stewardship of MOMENT....
...The criticism, I've decided, can pretty much be summarized as follows (I'll leave it to you to supply Jackie Mason's inflections): Tour articles are too long...
...But our circulation has jumped from 18,000 to 30,000...
...We also try to look ahead...
...Are Jews today the People of the Book...
...You function in much the same way as the official editorial advisory board, giving counsel—wise and foolish—making suggestions and, thank God, providing much-needed psychological support...
...in mathematics) from MIT in the same amount of time, 42 years earlier than Harel...
...This past year MOMENT again lost 5200,000...
...Only 15 percent of you wind up as bad debts...
...September 1987...
...We don't want to give you what you read elsewhere...
...Too Jewish...
...It's good to have you on our editorial advisory board.—H.S...
...From all of this, I have concluded we must be doing something right...
...From the serious to the humorous, from world affairs to the intensely personal, from the things we glory in to the things we're ashamed of, from the religious to the secular, from the things we fight about to the things that unite us, from the highly intellectual to some "chewing gum for the eyes...
...We try to help you to think, not tell what to think...
...An officer himself, Alex was killed while trying to save his commander...
...With all that, we want to be different from other Jewish publications—and we think we are...
...I don't think it need differ very much, if at all, from my report to the editorial advisory board because you, our readers, are in a very real sense, an extended editorial advisory board...
...That's why we discussed despair in the territories in our November 1987 issue, before the intifada...
...You don't have a voice...
...Too short...
...We have to tell the young kids who take these calls to be prepared for it...
...We've published articles on Jewish mourning (September 1987), divorce (May 1988), hi-tech birth (November 1987), intermarriage (January/February 1988), conversion (December 1987), and when we may pray for a loved one to die (June 1988...
...Our readers too are entitled to a report...
...Too many interviews...
...We've talked to the children of Nazis to see how they felt about their parents (March 1988...
...Anyway, as a group you're not quite the same as the readers of the other two magazines...
...When the intifada broke, we published exclusive interviews with Defense Minister Yitzchak Rabin and a leading Arab merchant (May 1988...
...You're also more easily offended by letters we send you asking you to pay for your subscription...
...We also commissioned a debate, before the intifada, on whether the occupation was brutalizing Israel (it appeared in our April 1988 issue...
...in electrical engineering) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1 year and 8 months...
...For those who want to be led, who simply want their views and biases confirmed, this is discomforting...
...When are you finally going to get rid of the Spice Box...
...Someone has said, ' 'The Jews wrote it, but the Baptists read it...
...And we've shared our grief at the loss of the 25-year-old son of our executive editor Suzanne Singer in a terrorist ambush in Lebanon (November 1987...
...Sometimes too full...
...for most, however, it helps them, in the end, to reach more confident conclusions of their own...
...More recently we've published one of the few intelligent discussions of the merits of recognizing the PLO Quly/ August 1988) and (in this issue) the merits and dangers of a Palestinian state...
...Financially, it's been a difficult year...
...Moreover, our reader surveys support this conclusion, as does most of our mail...
...Tou're trying too hard...
...Too many voices...
...Our interview with "Bibi" Netanyahu (March 1988) gave our readers unusual insights into the man who, as I write, emerged with the largest number of votes on the Likud list for the Knesset...
...We've covered the salami wars in New York (March 1988), the beatification of Tante Edith (September 1987), and the borscht-belt humor of Jackie Mason (July/August 1988...
...At the risk of sounding self-congratulatory (and we've been accused of that more than once), on the whole, we're very pleased with the editorial product of the past year...
...The articles are too intellectual...
...Surprising as it may seem, with the last issue we completed our first annual cycle...
...I don't like your fiction Not enough Jewish content...
...Not enough fiction...
...The vision we have of the magazine is coming into ever sharper focus: It is simply this—to cover thoughtfully, readably and beautifully all aspects of Jewish life...
...We published one of the first, if not the first, stories on Kitty Dukakis as a Jew in the White House ["Will the First Jew in the White House Be a Woman...
...And you are a very vocal group...
...We also published criticism of what we're doing—and some praise...
...Give us another year or 18 months and we'll be able to stand on our own feet...
...Too popular...
...When you call up with a circulation problem, you yell more...
...We're still hanging by a thread, determined to become the only, or at least the first, self-sustaining Jewish magazine in history...
...It has been brought to our attention that the late Professor Bernard Friedman of El Cerrito, California, earned a master's degree and a Ph.D...
...In the other two magazines, it's 20 percent...
...It's been a full year...
...You're not trying hard enough...
...We're looking for the unique angle, the anticipatory view...
...We've published fiction by Amos Oz and Henry Roth (Aharon Appelfeld coming up...
...But in the end you pay up better...
...We salute Friedman, as well as anyone else who has accomplished such a remarkable feat...
...At a planning session for the current issue, the staff brought an ice-cold bottle of champagne-looking sparkling cider—pop-top and all—to toast the occasion and to pay special tribute to managing editor Charlotte Anker on our first anniversary...
...You differ in some ways from the readers of the other two magazines we produce out of the same office, Biblical Archaeology Review and Bible Review...
...When all those people decide (we hope) to renew their subscriptions, we'll be in better shape...
...A surprising statistic...
...Not enough interviews...
...We try to provide a forum for a range of views...
...Our analysis of the Le Pen factor in the French election (April 1988) helped our readers to follow that election from the Jewish viewpoint...
...Over 90 percent of the readers of those magazines are not Jewish...
...Correction In "Growing Up with the State: Prominent Israelis Under 40" (June 1988) we said that David Harel had set a record in acquiring a Ph.D...
...Poetry and prose, interviews and fiction, free-swinging debates and beautiful pictures—it's all here and all Jewish, a kind of Jewish celebration, exploring all aspects of what it means to be Jewish...
...The Spice Box is the only thing Hike...
Vol. 13 • September 1988 • No. 6
