We’ve had an amazing year at JewishPress.com, providing opinionated news with hidden and unhidden agendas, breaking many rules of proper journalism and celebrating with you the wonderful circus show also known as Jewish News.
A team of dedicated editors, who are also writers, who are often bloggers, and are for sure pundits, too, we’ve been hard to define as news outlets go, but in your Jewish hearts, pounding inside your Jewish chests (under your full-length sleeve Jewish shirts), you knew exactly what we were doing, and it tasted so good, you kept coming back for more.
More than anything else, we’re proud for the job we did, transforming JewishPress.com from a very traditional website, essentially re-posting the print edition Jewish Press, a time-honored institution in its own right, into one of the most influential Jewish news websites on the Internet today – in a sense recapturing the muscular, feisty Jewish Press of the 1970s and ’80s, back when the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, may God avenge his blood, was on the team.
We’ve taken up his mantle of calling a spade a spade: if it’s a U.S. president with a suspiciously pro-Islamist agenda – we called it; if it’s a Reform rabbi who appears not to have taken the time to become Jewish (she did, we found out later) – we called it; if it’s a Jewish organization contemplating dropping “Zionism” from their mandate, because someone thought Zionism isn’t popular with the donors anymore – we called it; if it’s a wavering Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu planning to give away Jewish land in exchange for, well, we’re not exactly sure what for – we called it; if it’s President Shimon Peres shaking hands in warm agreement with the EU’s Ms. Ashton, as she tightens the screws on Jews in Eretz Yisrael – man, did we call it.
But while other right wing, pro-Zionist websites have been delivering a very similar message to our own, over a gray background, with grim-to-angry headlines – we’ve been doing it with color, with funny images, with a celebration of all the media, like the happy go lucky Israelites that we are.
We also celebrate courageous Jews around the globe, when Israel quietly helps victims of Syria’s civil war, welcomes home new Olim, produces a cure or invention that helps the world, when a young Jewish woman wins an Olympic gold medal, and when Israel launches a new satellite into space.
Now, all that’s a killer combination: right wing and lighthearted, halachically observant and carefree fun. No one else does it quite like us, and you love us for it.
Well, we love you, too. We can’t have enough of your comments. We are absolutely hooked on them. It’s hard to do any work around here, because all of us are busy reading you. And so much of our editorial content comes from articles you’ve sent us. We don’t know any other website, other than discussion message boards, that integrates this much reader-generated editorial content. And we treat your submitted works with the same respect we do any other editorial contribution – we don’t segregate reader articles, we publish them right up front with everybody else’s work.
And you reward our love and respect by visiting us daily (sometimes hourly), subscribing to our mailing list, The Jewish Express, filling out our petitions, giving us feedback (both good and scary critical) and supporting our advertisers with your clicks, purchases, and donations. So much so, that despite not (yet) being the largest Jewish news websites (compared with, say, Ha’aretz and the Jerusalem Post) – JewishPress.com’s lead generations and sales results for our advertisers are among the highest in our category. That’s all you, dear readers.
We are deeply grateful.
May this coming year bring only sweet things for us, both in (greater) Israel and in all the other places where you guys live. May we all experience the much anticipated grand meeting of the entire tribe (actually, all the tribes), at the large plaza currently occupied by two Islamic structures. Short of that, we bless all of you and ourselves with health, wealth and happiness.
Shana Tova,
David Schwartz, Stephen Leavitt, Yori Yanover, Lori Lowenthal Marcus, Asher Schwartz, Tzvi Ben-Gedalyahu, Marc Gottlieb, Yishai Fleisher, Shalom Bear and Sara Miriam
p.s. We will be back on Saturday night, after the Rosh Hashana holiday weekend is over.