For a generation of Jews, it's kosher to be cool

Growing up in Levittown, N.Y., Saft, 26, admits he felt "ashamed and embarrassed about being Jewish." He wanted to be like all the other kids at Division Avenue High School, which is to say, Irish or Italian.

That was before he got in touch with his "kosher fabulosity," as he likes to say, and helped stoke a worldwide pop-cultural movement. A year and a half ago, after brainstorming with friends about cutting-edge Jewish humor for a new theater, Saft printed out their logo, ironed it onto a T-shirt, and went walking around Manhattan with it plastered across his chest.

The message was simple, racy and undeniably proud: "JEWCY," it said.

"I was mobbed," Saft says. "People were coming up to me on the street, Jews and non-Jews, saying 'I have to have that shirt.' "

Suddenly, as Saft discovered, it had become hip to be Hebrew in America. From the website JewLo.com, which proclaims that "Jew and cool are not incompatible, but go together like peanut butter and Kosher-for-Passover chocolate," to the arrival in downtown movie houses of the Hebrew Hammer, the first Jewish action hero in the guise of a Yiddishkeit Shaft, a younger generation is creating new narratives of what it means to be Jewish in America.

And JEWCY has become one of its emblems, capturing the flip attitude of a largely secular group weaned on rap, hip-hop and the new American love affair with multiculturalism.

With no advertising save Web logs and word of mouth, the T-shirt has become the accouterment of choice for a new breed of Jewish hipsters from Manhattan to Los Angeles. They listen to bands like the Hasidic New Wave and Hip Hop Hoodios, delight in the Yiddish-inflected humor of the magazine Heeb: The New Jew Review, and read a new raft of young, transgressive Jewish writers.

"I think it's too soon and too inchoate to call it a movement yet, but I really do believe there is something profound and exciting going on right now with young Jews who are trying to connect with Judaism in thoroughly untraditional and in thoroughly new ways," said Joshua Neuman, 31, publisher and editor of the 2-year-old Heeb.

"These are people who are really comfortable in their identities and so they can be playful about boundaries and make fun of themselves," says Alicia Svigals, a Jewish music pioneer whose work with the Klezmatics starting in the mid-'80s set the stage for the hipsters.