Tikkun Magazine, January/February 2007 

MASH DOWN BABYLON

Word to the Mothership

By Joel Schalit

It was one of those moments that every editor lives for. Arriving at the end of one of the busiest years in our history, the initial results of our first-ever readership survey made it clear that our subscribers approved of what we've been doing. Overwhelmingly, readers indicated that they're satisfied with the new editorial division of our content, and how it is reflected in the re-designed edition of the magazine we debuted last March. For what is arguably the most ideologically experimental political periodical in the U.S., receiving this kind of affirmation from our readers was truly gratifying. Unlike any other publication of its kind, Tikkun has always been willing to take enormous editorial risks, even if it meant being ahead of the so-called curve. To learn that we are more in sync with you than we believed confirms that we can indeed trust our intuitions. That in itself is a huge relief. Every periodical has to periodically reinvent its own wheel to stay relevant, and you've told us that we've done so correctly.

From this editor's perspective, the key appears to have been how we divided our features section into our historic areas of specialization: Spiritual Activism, Politics and Society, Israel/Palestine, and Judaism. By making these editorial categories more distinct, our readers indicated to us that they better understood the whole of the magazine. This was something of a revelation, because over the years, we've found our audience to be relatively divided. Some people read the magazine only for its Israel/Palestine reportage, others solely for its spiritual writings. Now, it appears, there's a greater appreciation for how all of the material fits together. This does not mean to suggest that our readers didn't indicate their own content priorities in the survey results, because they did. Sure enough, many of the same divisions amongst our readers still strongly persist. Nevertheless, our editorial eclecticism appears to be more understood than it has been in the past, and those segments of the readership that we've always encountered to be less inclined toward a specific kind of content have indicated that they accept the connections we're drawing.

Given the highly compartmentalized character of progressive politics in the U.S., I could not resist but be moved by the metaphor that this implies. Our readers have told us of their interest in religion and Middle East politics—topics that constitute two of the most important areas of concern in the contemporary world. Nevertheless, amongst U.S. progressives, they have not always coincided. Though there are many leftists in the United States engaged in faith-based activism to end the Arab-Israeli conflict (witness the Christian Peacemaker Teams courageously working in the Occupied Territories), this specific constellation of interests has been more typical of right-wing, religious Americans than our largely leftist readership. Similarly, many of our Jewish readers who come to Tikkun because of the unique character of our Israel/Palestine coverage, tend to self-identify more as secular than religious. Yet, very few of them strenuously objected to our interfaith religious content as we assumed they would. What surprised me the most was the similar level of appreciation shown to our Jewish and Israel/Palestine coverage by our self-identified Christian and "spiritual but not religious" readers. One thing we've always been worried about was that our non-Jewish audience found this material off-putting due to its culturally specific nature. Evidently, this was not the case.

Surprisingly, the one content category that a significant number of readers said they wanted to see more of was culture. This is an especially significant request for two reasons: First, because our Culture section takes up nearly a quarter of Tikkun's pages; Second, because progressive periodicals tend to deemphasize cultural coverage, traditionally limiting such reporting to book reviews, and in certain instances, politically charged films such as Borat and An Inconvenient Truth. Our response to this has been to strike what we believed to be a better balance between cultural and political writing, while encouraging explicitly political readings of books, films and music that fall within our areas of interest. In this issue, Shai Ginsburg's meditation on Jean-Luc Godard's legendary 1976 film Ici et Ailleurs is exemplary in this regard. Check it out.

Joel Schalit is managing editor of Tikkun.

Source Citation

Schalit, Joel. 2007. Word to the Mothership. Tikkun 22(1): 16.