ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, April 4, 1996 TAG: 9604040064
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 4 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: BOSTON
SOURCE: IRENE SEGE THE BOSTON GLOBE
Just in time for Passover comes a glossy new national magazine that features items such as Steven Spielberg's fried matzo recipe to promote close encounters of a Judaic kind for Jewish parents and their children.
With a mission as bold as the exclamation point at the end of its title and a circulation of 200,000, Jewish Family & Life! aims to do nothing less, says editor Yosef Abramowitz, than ``transform American Jewry one family at a time.''
The magazine is the brainchild of three people - Abramowitz, a former student activist; his rabbi wife; and a publisher who converted an obscure journal about biblical archeology into a coffee table magazine with a paid circulation of 250,000.
It is hip enough to tell readers that Madonna (no, she's not Jewish) is a life member of the Jewish women's organization Hadassah. It's gossipy enough to announce births to actresses Jane Seymour, nee Joyce Frankenberg, and Marlee Matlin (yes, they are Jewish). It's practical enough to print tips for a child-friendly seder, or ritual Passover meal, and to list top programs for Jewish teen-agers.
It is also well connected enough to get an exclusive from Hillary Rodham Clinton on children's spirituality and to put Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel in charge of its editorial advisory board. Abramowitz says he's a friend of a friend of Bill and Hillary, and he took Wiesel's course on rebellion at Boston University.
Drawing as much on People magazine as on the Talmud, this is Abramowitz's answer to a stable of traditional Jewish journals that tend to draw an older readership. It's for parents, ages 25 to 49, looking for ways to connect with their heritage but unlikely to browse the Judaica section of their local newsstand.
That's why Barnes & Noble is stocking the quarterly, whose address is in Boston's Brighton section, in the parenting section of its periodicals racks. It's why the logo is designed to emphasize the words ``Family & Life!'' and understate the word ``Jewish.''
``Israel and the Holocaust were unifying issues for the last generation,'' says Abramowitz, a 31-year-old father of two. ``The future of American Jewry is in the hands of those who can answer the spiritual needs and questions of parents in the home.''
In one article, Spielberg recalls making matzo brei, fried matzo (unleavened bread) and eggs, for the crew of ``Close Encounters.'' His mother, who owns a kosher restaurant in Los Angeles, remembers the night 10-year-old Steven smeared peanut butter on the windows of neighbors in Arizona who taunted the family as ``dirty Jews.''
Turn the page, and strategies for raising moral children come wrapped in the Talmudic aphorism ``Let the dignity of other people be as important to you as your own.'' Turn again, and there's Dr. Ruth Westheimer on ``Jewish sex,'' complete with the Talmudic tale of a rabbi who finds a student hiding under his marital bed to learn the mitzvah, or commandment, of intercourse.
The magazine enters the market with a clear demographic niche. Although national surveys find that fewer than half of Jewish households belong to a synagogue, the number jumps above two-thirds among Jewish families with school-age children under 13, or bar mitzvah age, suggesting an opportunity for connection the new magazine hopes to exploit. Likewise, Jewish leaders lament an intermarriage rate that exceeds 50 percent, but more than a quarter of intermarried couples raise their children Jewish.
If it succeeds, Jewish Family & Life!, with its cluttered editorial offices in a Brighton synagogue, will be another in a string of Boston-born publications that have gone on to become benchmarks of a national resurgence of Jewish culture, including The Jewish Catalogue, a Jewish whole earth catalog, and Moment magazine, a journal of Jewish ideas.
The new magazine, which costs around $200,000 an issue to produce, is propelled by investments Washington-based publisher Susan Laden, 53, describes as ``well into six figures'' from several wealthy Southern Jews. She hopes to attract national advertisers with the journal's upscale readership. The first issue opens with a two-page advertisement from Microsoft and closes with a full-page Levi's ad.
Abramowitz and Laden met at Moment, where he was assistant editor and she was publisher. Abramowitz, whom BU president John Silber tried unsuccessfully to expel for hanging banners scrawled in red with the word ``Divest'' from his dormitory window, met his wife at an anti-apartheid vigil outside Silber's office in 1986. Now they have two daughters, ages 3 and 1.
``Launching hunger strikes to get people out of prisons in foreign countries and a parenting magazine are on a continuum,'' Abramowitz says. ``Even though this is not as sexy as chaining yourself to a fence, in fact it's a greater task. Trying to transform a community of 6 million people is a tall order.''
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