If you get j.’s weekly email newsletter, you might recognize my name. Actually, no, you won’t. I’ve been writing j.’s e-newsletter — a list of the top five or six stories in that week’s paper, along with a brief, pithy summary of each story — for almost a year now. And let me tell you, it’s an entirely thankless job.
I don’t get a byline. I don’t get credit in the paper’s masthead. I’m the Invisible Woman.
Usually, the only comments I ever get on the newsletter are when I make a mistake — like misspell a word. Or forget to put something in the subject line. Or make it “too long.”
But I’m not complaining. Even though the newsletter has been around for several years longer than I’ve been at j., I’ve come to see it as “my baby.” I get a little hurt when someone unsubscribes. I feel giddy when someone signs up. And I’m nervous about handing over the reins when I go on vacation in November.
As the Mistress of the Newsletter, I have a certain amount of power. I get to decide which stories are the most important and interesting and worthy of inclusion. I get to write pretty much whatever I want. And I get to see our subscriber list and learn where most of them come from.
I was surprised to find that the newsletter isn’t popular just with Bay Area denizens – or even Americans. We have subscribers in Austria, Ukraine, Ecuador, New Zealand, Japan, South Africa, Pakistan and dozens of other countries. (There’s even one subscriber in Saudi Arabia.)
Working at j., it’s all Bay Area, all the time — so although I write the newsletter with a local audience in mind, I know that every week more and more “copies” are zooming off to some of the most far-flung Jewish communities on Earth.
Every day I come into work and find a few new subscribers, at least half of whom come from a place that makes me wonder, why the heck do they care about j.? I became so curious that I added a new question to the subscription page: Where did you hear about us?
Some of the responses have been interesting, but in general they don’t tell me much. Most people say they found us via a search engine. My real question is, why do you want to get this newsletter? Will people sign up for anything, or are they genuinely interested?
Really, I wonder why someone in Cape Town or Auckland would want to read about Bay Area Jews every week.
I’m trying to think if there’s ever been a Jewish community, other than my own, that has interested me that much. I can’t think of one.
Maybe that’s a sign of how lucky I am to live in an area with such a big, involved Jewish community. I don’t need to live vicariously through someone else’s world.
Everywhere I’ve lived there has been at least a small Jewish community I could be a part of. In Central Florida, surrounded by phosphate mines and doublewides, there was the synagogue on the banks of Lake Hollingsworth. In the dark, frigid Alaskan Interior there was Or HaTzafon. And of course, my childhood in suburban Washington, D.C., was immersed almost 24/7 in the huge community there.
But what would it be like to live somewhere where I was truly the only one, or one of just a tiny, un-minyan-able few?
The local stories I highlight in the newsletter talk of film festivals, Jewish camps, fundraisers and agencies, synagogue anniversaries and author visits. Not a day goes by where something Jewish isn’t happening around here.
It’s easy to take this for granted, to forget just how lucky we are to have this kind of community. It’s easy to forget that a lot of people don’t.
I know that writing j.’s newsletter isn’t going to save the world. But maybe it’s providing a small sense of community to a few people who don’t have one.
On Pesach we say, “All who are hungry, let them come and eat. All who are in need, let them celebrate with us.”
Let me modify that: All who are hungry for a Jewish community — from Reno to Riyadh, Quito to Kiev — let them come and enjoy a little Judaism, NorCal style.
Rachel Freedenberg lives in Burlingame and is a copy editor at j. She can be reached at [email protected].