2010-2016
After six long and wonderful years, it is time for us to say goodbye. Although we haven’t written anything for Hipster Jew in a year (we have lives and maybe even kids at this point, who knows, not us), we found it was time to finally shut the site down. You may be assuming that we are shutting down because blogs are dead, or because we are not making enough money, or maybe because we grew out of bitching and moaning on the internet. All of these would be wrong. We are egomaniacs. We loved that there were people (mostly our parents) who read our daily rants. The only reason we stopped writing was because no one gave us a book deal. Sure, we could have pitched an idea to someone, but we are, after all poor and disillusioned apathetic millennials. If it won’t fall in our lap, we won’t make the necessary effort. And what’s the point of writing if you don’t have a book deal?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
With Am Appy closing down, Gawker being shuttered by a wrestler, Coachella and Urban Outfitters funneling profits to right wing causes, the “alt-right” neo-nazis freely expressing their opinions, a megalomaniac in chief supporting them, the world might need Hipster Jew more than ever. But we’re done. At some point we all agreed that we had enough. What started as a travel blog to chronicle Chicky and Ari’s drive with their parents down to Florida to see their Jewish grandfather turned into something bigger than Jesus* (*at least to us Jews). Near the end, we began to falter. One of us would write three articles a day for a month but then give up. Then someone else would write painstaking posts trying to process the latest jewish accapella cover. But here we are. Almost exactly 7 years since this site first took off. We have moved on and it’s finally time to admit it.
Sure, it bums us out. When I first mentioned to people that we were thinking about taking down the site, the response was of deep sadness. The one thing I kept on hearing from people was how much this site meant to the in their spiritual quest during and after college. Hipster Jew became a place where the confused (and often refused) could join together and feel comfortable, knowing that there were Jewish oddballs and weirdos just like them. For me, I always came to Hipster Jew during my first few post-college years, searching for a purpose and more meaningful work.
We always wanted Hipster Jew to be bigger and better than it was. But the older we got, the more responsibilities we had outside of the site. We had some big ideas that we never pulled off. We wanted to travel, engage with more readers face to face, build companion books to inform people about the true humor (and horrors) behind Jewish holidays (but honestly mostly just to keep you from scratching your eyes out during boring holiday services). We wanted to build a more engaging site, really push our shidduch section of the site which was pervertedly called “Who Wants a HJ.” (We fought long and hard over whether it should be “Who Wants an HJ” or Who Wants a HJ” until we realized we didn’t actually care and neither did you.) More shirts, more art, books of dirty poetry.
Here are some things we will never forget.
- The 2009 Christmas pilgrimage to Florida with our parents that started this website as a travel blog.
- The time we pissed off every longboarder and their lame insults that followed.
- The time we wrote about a bigfoot porn parody while the actor that played bigfoot responded with some religious rant.
- Our many friends and writers that filled out our fake dating profiles, specifically ones that mentioned bagels.
- Discovering (on the internet) and briefly friending Haim.
- We won’t forget the dozen or so writers that helped create such hilarious content.
- That party we once did
- One of our most culturally aware writers, and long time friend who passed away last year, IronyOnRye. RIP our good friend.
- Remember lists?
- The friends we made.
Here are some things we will always hate
- Writing reviews for things we don’t care about
- Jewish Republicans
- Lists
- Mondays
- The whole Rap-Rock genre
- People who call everything anti-Semitic
- Unleavened bread on Passover
- Authoritative figures
- Blogging
- Jewish Acapella Parodies (debated)
We would like to thank anyone that has ever read our blog, shared a post, written for us, bought a shirt, talked trash about us, believed in us, made a voodoo doll of our logo and stuck it with pins, put up stickers, or attempted to hack us. We would also like to thank Weed for being the only drug people care about and Hanukkah for being the only holiday people make decent memes about.
We would also like to apologize to the many horny people still searching for Jewish related porn links and only getting our crappy blog. I hope you one day find the heimeshe booty you’ve been looking for.
If you want to stay in contact with us, we still sometimes read check our email (info [at] hipsterjew [dot] com), post on facebook, and tweet on twitter.
in lieu of flowers, please send money to the following organizations:
Planned Parenthood
American Civil Liberties Union
Southern Poverty Law Center
Anti-Defamation League
NAACP
Council on American-Islamic Relations
Jewish Queer Youth