Oppositional Culture and the "New Jew" Brand: From Plotz to Heeb to Lost Tribe

Abstract

This essay considers how an amateur literary production, Plotz: The Zine for the Vaclempt, helped to construct both an oppositional and an eminently marketable form of contemporary Jewish identity. Barbara Rushkoff, née Kligman, the wit behind Plotz, yoked zine writing practices and attitudes with Jewish humor and thereby repositioned Jewishness in her zine as a kind of "alt-Jewishness," another type of oppositional culture within zine subcultures of the 1990s. Plotz's cultural significance is evident in the direct and indirect emulations of Rushkoff's formula in Heeb: The New Jew Review and in the visual and editorial packaging of Lost Tribe, an anthology of "Jewish Fiction From the Edge." Both developed that formula into a market brand, thus enabling fans of American Jewishness to buy, and to buy into, the values and practices that currently lend cultural legitimacy and social prestige to Jewish identity.