While trying to convince me to attend tonight's Lifetime reunion show, my friend Spencer Ackerman linked to a piece he'd written for Jewsrock.org extolling the band's manifold virtues. But uh...JewsRock.org? Seems like an odd concept. So I did a bit of browsing, and here's their creation story, which is actually pretty awesome:
Do you remember the anthrax-in-the-mail panic of 2001? At the time, David Segal, who was then the pop music critic of The Washington Post, was without an angle on the most important news story of the week. He had just one idea: Call the legendary speed-metal band Anthrax and ask if the group was thinking of changing its suddenly infamous name. He wound up on a cell phone with Scott Ian, the lead guitarist, who fired off one quip after another about his group's new predicament. Ian said that friends had been joking about how funny it would be if he were to die from anthrax poisoning, prompting him to start taking Cipro, the anthrax antibiotic. Why?
"I have vowed that I will not die an ironic death," he deadpanned on the phone.
The story ran in the paper, and Segal soon got a call from his friend, Jeffrey Goldberg, who was, at the time, the Middle East correspondent of The New Yorker. Goldberg told him he loved the quote from Ian. "I bet that guy is Jewish," Goldberg said. Segal asked why. It was that peculiar combination of irony and hypochondria in Ian's answer, Goldberg said, that offered the best clue.
A little digging, and Goldberg and Segal found out, of course, that it was true: Scott Ian is a member of the tribe.
Over lunch a few days later, the two journalists, who had long before realized that most of what they talked about was Jews and rock, decided that what the world needed—beyond the defeat of Islamic terrorism—was a website devoted to exploring the Jewishness of Scott Ian, and the thousands of other Jews who have contributed so much to American rock culture.
And that's how Jewsrock.org came about: It was born from a joke.
