Guilt & Pleasure

I've been working on an interesting project recently, as temporary copy editor of Guilt & Pleasure Quarterly, whose tag line is "Making Jews Talk More." The magazine sprang from the salon on Jewish culture that Mireille Silcoff (whom I met when we were working at Saturday Night magazine) set up when she moved from Montreal to Toronto. Her goal was to bring together young Jews, not necessarily affiliated with religious organizations, to talk about what it means to be Jewish today. She hooked up with a group called Reboot to launch salons all over North America and is editor in chief of G&P (I think their backing comes from the Bronfman family philanthropical funds). The quarterly is great fun; it's a literary magazine of ideas, with lots of historical and archival stuff on Jewish traditions of the past, but the tone is often edgy, comical, and hip/serious, never politically correct, much like Mireille herself. She's the epitome of cool while being painfully bright, and what I thought was simply cleverness has turned out, as seen in this magazine, to be a keen intelligence and concern about community.

G&P is also highly visual (designed in Toronto by illustrator Marco Cibola of Nove Studio). Beautiful layouts of old "Hebrew Comedy" sheet music, striking photos of young casualties of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and excerpts from graphic novels make it great to look at. Articles are by prominent Jewish writers from around the globe, many of them academics, playwrights, comics. The upcoming third issue, whose theme is magic, contains everything from an examination of the figure of the golem by Nathaniel Deutsch, to a memoir about the near-conversion of the writer Lisa Crystal Carver (formerly sexually outrageous punk rocker Lisa Suckdog), to a hilarious excerpt from a play in progress by David Auburn (Proof, The Lake House) about Harry Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle, to a piece on Hitler's Jewish psychic.

I'm just filling in as copy editor because of a maternity leave, so I won't be doing it after this issue, but it's been a pleasure to work on a magazine of ideas again. (Interestingly, G&P is published out of New York, but Mireille lives mainly in Montreal, and the editors and art director are in Toronto -- and mainly, like me, aren't Jewish.) You can read G&P online, too, at www.guiltandpleasure.com, and here's a link to an article in New York's The Jewish Week about its founding.