Joel Schalit

Dead and Gone

It was to be the magazine’s first issue in quite a while. How long, I didn’t quite know. About the only thing that was clear was that an edition had previously been published out of Chicago, in the late 1990s.

The magazine was called LiP. It only made it seven issues. However, the relaunch turned out to be higher profile than that, at least locally (San Francisco) for the next three years. Hired as the managing editor, I didn’t even make it through my first production cycle. The money dried up immediately, and I left. Two months later, I landed the same gig, salaried, at Tikkun.

Several articles I solicited ended up getting published – an interview I did with the late Tanya Reinhart, a review essay by Jillian Sandell about the DVD release of Gillo Pontecorvo’s legendary Battle of Algiers. A couple of the staffers I recruited stuck around, too. The one article that never materialized was an essay I’d solicited about the conflict in Chechnya.

The subject was to have been the significance of the war for the American left. Why, following the Russian invasion of the country, was it not a topic of debate amongst domestic progressives? Was it because of a lack of expertise on Russian issues? A discomfort with having to talk about the Islamic identification of the separatists? I wanted to figure it out.

Unless I write the article myself, I’m probably never going to get any clarity on the issue. Seeing this graffiti (“Freedom for Chechnya”) in Neukolln, on Tuesday, certainly took me back. We’ll see for how long.

Never Heard of Them

For those familiar with the history of American Jewish magazines, my former employer, Tikkun, was not the first periodical of its kind to break with community publishing conventions. Starting in the 1970s, there were numerous such attempts, of which, until the early 00s, Tikkun was the most visible.

One such upstart periodical was  New York’s New Jewish Times, which ceased publication in 1981, five years before the launch of Tikkun. Remembered by journalist Samuel G. Freedman in Friday’s New York Times, my present editorial abode, Zeek, gets the descendents’ high five, together with our friends at Heeb.

Somebody ought to shine a similar spotlight on the late Davka.

Product Placement

I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve done a mediocre job of keeping track of my clips. Though I’ve kept copies of nearly all of the magazine articles I’ve written, most of the book reviews and all of the travel pieces I wrote for the San Francisco Bay Guardian between 2000 and 2004 vaporized when SFBG revamped it’s website.

In the midst of putting the finishing touches on a brand new personal site (including a Word Press replacement for this blog) I came across a PDF version of this collection of micro-reviews, Sikkum: Tikkun Recommends, that I wrote for the September/October edition in 2005.

Traditionally the domain of the magazine’s publisher, I ended up writing most of these interior back page book reviews my last year and a half as Tikkun’s managing editor. I’ll be posting a couple of more of these, including the color version we debuted with the magazine’s re-design in 2006, shortly.

Click on the image for greater detail.

The Song Remains the Same

The best stocked section (aside from the Health and Diet shelf) in San Francisco’s Green Apple Books bargain media annex.

Perhaps the single most frequently asked question posed by my interns at Tikkun was why we continued to receive so many books about Nazism and the Holocaust to review.

Indeed, every day, new books about the Shoah would inevitably outnumber arriving titles on Israel and Judaism. "It’s one of the occupational hazards of being a Jewish magazine," was my stock reply.