Eek! To “Zeek”

The two-year-old magazine Zeek (www.zeek.net) declares that its mission is “to present alternative Jewish voices of criticism, literature, and religious thought, in an intelligent, but non-academic, context.” Indeed. In his recent “I Hear America Bling-Blinging,” Jay Michaelson writes about all of the overweight Americans he sees while visiting his mother in Florida. “In Tampa at least, you see people at the mall who could only belong to the circus in most of Europe, Africa, or Asia,” he writes. “I look at and invariably wonder: just how do they have sex anyway?” Another Michaelson piece talks about what it feels like to be mostly-gay-but-not-completely at strip clubs. If by “non-academic” the editors—four Jewish males—mean denigrating women and using cruel descriptions of overweight people, they’re right on the money. But as for labeling themselves “intelligent,” now, that’s a stretch. Sorry, guys, your magazine is downright offensive.