Announcing...The Maiseh Review!

The world of digital media has certainly opened up over the past several years, including raising up issues and voices that were sidelined for decades, but it still remains a relatively insular place. Pitching as a freelancer means taking your ideas and carving them into a shape that can match your potential publications, making them match the market. This makes sense, you can't really build a functional publication with a financial base by publishing only arcane ephemera, somebody is actually going to have to read it.

But this also leaves out quite a bit, particularly the kind of writing that represents my life outside of politics. The popularity of these new newsletter and microsite publishing options has also allowed individual writers to build brands that can hyper focus on their own, very personalized work, giving people the option to tune in and pay if they choose. This was what I was looking for when seeing my notebook full of fun ideas I would love to pursue, but none that really matched the publications I have in my periphery.

The Maiseh Review (the Yiddish word for "story") is meant to follow, in its own small way, the lead of literary reviews in the past, that will focus on arts, literature, culture, and in this case, Jewish news and ideas, and hopefully become a place where I can put work that fits poorly in the highly mobile world of political journalism. Expect long-form interviews with authors, essays on film and comics, book reviews, and articles about everything from modern Judaism to the rebuilding of Jewish culture and identity. While I am branding it along these lines, expect this to become a repository for everything that can't fit in the world of publishing yet remains where my heart's at.

I will be setting up a subscription system where you can pay a little bit to help keep this thing going, maybe getting a little extra content that way, but I also hope to allow a wide reach on this stuff. Subscribing will be the way that we can sustain a project like this since we aren't exactly pulling millions in ad revenue. I hope you love this project as much I love writing it, and subscribe if you can to keep up with it!

Make sure to sign up here, it's only $3 to be a member and it really supports the project. There will be a few benefits for subscribers and access to a Discord channel called No Pasaran, which I hope will become a lively community to discuss how to fight back against our current crisis.