Though Yosef Abromowitz usually wears a tailored suit and carries a PDA, he’d probably be more comfortable wearing jeans and carrying a protest sign.
As founder and CEO of Jewish Family & Life, Abromowitz oversees a multimedia publishing empire that has made him an influential Jewish community leader.
But his resume also includes a stint as a professional firebrand. During his college years, Abromowitz helped lead the Soviet Jewry movement. As a journalist in the Jewish press, he took on entrenched interests, infuriating some high-level leaders.
“I’m a self-perceived troublemaker and dreamer,” Abromowitz, who is known to his friends as Yossi, said during a visit to San Francisco this summer. “My goal was always to make the world a better place and to have the Jewish community be a catalyst.”
He’s been reaching for that goal largely through print magazines like BabagaNewz and JVibe, both geared to Jewish youth. His company also maintains Web sites like jbooks.com, jewishfamily.com and shma.com (the online version of the journal Shma, which features essays by leading Jewish intellectuals).
With the magazines, Web sites, books, educational projects and an Internet consulting service, the Boston-based Abromowitz seems poised to become a Jewish Rupert Murdoch. Media maven is a sobriquet that suits him just fine.
“We may be the most successful social entrepreneurial venture in Jewish life in the past decade,” he says of Jewish Family & Life. “I have a certain audacity in thinking what I’m doing is important. I put up with so much of the mishugas in Jewish life because the mission is so important.”
His zeal has won over many big names in Jewish philanthropy, including the Avi Chai Foundation, Steven Spielberg’s Righteous Persons Foundation and several Bay Area family funds (such as Koret, Taube, Goldman and Haas). Their financial support — totaling millions of dollars over the years — has given Abromowitz the freedom to build his company as he saw fit.
Of course, preteens tearing into their monthly issue of BabagaNewz don’t care about well-heeled foundations. They just know they’re having fun with Judaism and Jewish culture.
Inside each issue are pages of kid-friendly copy, girded with Jewish values: Play a game of “seder bingo” or make a batch of matzah crunch (matzah, raisins, apples and walnuts). In another issue, kids get a history lesson about Operation Solomon, Israel’s 1991 rescue of Ethiopian Jews, or a readers’ choice survey (favorite book: “Holes.” Favorite movie: “Cheaper by the Dozen”).
JVibe is skewed to a teen audience. Typical cover stories include profiles of actress Natalie Portman or rocker Avril Lavigne’s Jewish guitarist. In addition to pushing Jewish ethics, the magazine also runs features on topics like job-seeking or how to flirt successfully. “We consulted with rabbinic authorities on that,” he says, “and it’s part of our Jewish values matrix. Hooking up can be holy.”
With distribution direct to Jewish educational institutions, the magazines are read far and wide. And the publishing industry has taken notice.
“BabagaNewz beat Big Bird,” crows Abromowitz. “We were recognized by Association of Educational Publishers as having the best educational supplements in the land.”
So what makes Yossi run?
“I have the curse of being driven,” he says. “I can see where the community needs to go, so I feel a special responsibility to pursue it. There’s a long to-do list.”
Abromowitz grew up in a Boston-area hippie commune while simultaneously attending Jewish day school. One of his early memories is of being pulled out of class at his Solomon Schecter School so he could attend civil disobedience training with his mom. “By eighth grade,” he notes, “I was knowledgeable Jewishly and not afraid of attack dogs or water cannons.”
While still a teenager, Abromowitz lived in Israel between 1969 and 1972. The experience galvanized his dedication to Judaism, and once he returned to America, he embarked on a career as a student activist protesting nuclear proliferation, South African apartheid and mistreatment of Soviet Jews.
He earned a master’s in journalism at Columbia University and launched a career as an investigative reporter, writing for Jewish newspapers and Moment magazine.
One piece, an expose of the Jewish National Fund, revealed that only a small portion of donations to JNF actually made it to Israel. The story caused an uproar, brought down the JNF old guard and sparked what Abromowitz calls a “smear campaign” against him.
In the mid-’90s, after being laid off from Moment, he stood at a professional crossroads. “When I left,” he recalls, “Sue Laden, who had been [at Moment] 18 years, said to me, ‘Let’s do a magazine. Once you figure out what it should be about and if it could speak to the hearts of a million Jews, let me know and I’ll be your publisher.'”
Since the biggest thing in his life then (and now) was his marriage to Rabbi Susan Silverman and their children, he decided a family-oriented magazine would be best. In 1996, with $250,000 in seed money, he and Laden launched Jewish Family & Life — not just a paper edition, but also online as the world’s first Jewish Webzine, jewishfamily.com.
It was an instant hit and the company grew, but within a few years, the dot-com crash that toppled so many others nearly decked Abromowitz. Somehow, Jewish Family & Life weathered the storm.
In the months ahead, Abromowitz will test-market BabagaNewz in Australia and Israel. He’s also one of the key organizers of the first global Jewish social-action month, now set for the Jewish month of Cheshvan.
These days, Abromowitz still counts his family as his top priority (“You’re not the CEO of this house,” his wife Susan likes to remind him.) But after the four kids are asleep, he still likes to dream big for his company and the Jewish people.
“The purpose of the Jewish people in the 21st century,” he says, “is to be an ongoing catalyst for the advancement of morality in civilization. Jewish values are the building blocks of a vibrant Jewish future.”
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