Well, yes, actually. Jews are having something of a Hollywood moment. No fewer than three of the nominees for best picture at Sunday's Oscars--Inglourious Basterds, A Serious Man and An Education--deal with issues of Jewish experience and identity. (A fourth, District 9, can be read as a gloss on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but let's not go there today.)

On the face of it, these movies could hardly be more different from one another, at least in the sorts of characters they present. The protagonist of A Serious Man, physics professor Larry Gopnik, is an apotheosis of Jewish stereotypes: the hapless shlimazl, the awkward nebbish, the dutiful mensch. He's every Jewish teenager's embarrassing dad. The Jews of Basterds are something else altogether. Far from overintellectualizing victims, they're men (and women) of action, terrorizing Nazis with knives and baseball bats and incinerating them en masse in a sort of reverse Auschwitz. In between these two extremes-the nightmare and the fantasy versions of Jewishness-falls the complex reality of Peter Sarsgaard's David in An Education: handsome, suave and shockingly unethical.

What these characters have in common--besides their Semitic heritage--is that they weren't created with the favorable perceptions of non-Jews foremost in mind. Historically, if a character in a mainstream movie was Jewish, you could bet he was there either to provide comic relief or to convey some sort of "important" message about tolerance. Of course, the pigeonholing of minorities was hardly unique to Jews, but it was uniquely fraught in that the movies in question were so often produced, directed and/or populated by Jews anxious both to make their dominance of Hollywood nonthreatening and to combat bigotry by presenting themselves in a sympathetic light. The result of this conflicted agenda was a sort of schizophrenia: the Yiddish minstrelsy of Mel Brooks and The Frisco Kid alternating with the earnestness of Gentlemen's Agreement and Yentl.

The protagonists in today's Jewish films, in contrast, are neither shticky clowns nor noble paragons but real, recognizable people. "In the last few years, you've seen an increase in the number of Jewish characters whose Jewishness is something that's not just written off as a silly punch line, nor is it a point of crisis for their identities," says Joshua Neuman, the editor and publisher of Heeb, an indie magazine of Jewish culture. "It's just a part of who they are."

You can't write characters like pathetic Larry and oily David if your overriding concern is doing good PR. Nor can you tolerate a film like Inglourious Basterds, whose non-Jewish director dared to replace "Never forget," the solemn injunction drilled into every Jewish mind from the first day of Hebrew school on, with a breezy "Imagine if." And the response to this act of chutzpah? Not the controversy that the Weinstein brothers, who produced Basterds, feared (and, on some level, probably hoped for), but a warm embrace from the likes of Abraham Foxman, Holocaust survivor and director of the Anti-Defamation League, who called for Mr. Tarantino to win an Oscar.

Not everyone shares his enthusiasm, of course. "I refused to see Inglourious Basterds because it sounded really stupid, and because I refuse to concede that Tarantino knows who Hitler was, and because I dislike the idea of using the Holocaust for pulp-sadistic jollies," says Leon Wieseltier, The New Republic's literary editor and one of the high priests of Jewish intelligentsia. But voices like Mr. Wieseltier's make up a distinct and shrinking minority--and that, in itself, is worrisome to a professional pessimist like writer Shalom Auslander, who fears that for young Jews to be getting so comfortable with themselves and their place in American society can only be a portent of doom. "It sounds like a good thing, but generally it means we're about a year or two out from genocide," he says. "I've seen this particular movie. I know how it ends, and it's not how Tarantino's movie ends."

Perhaps he's right. But in the meantime, it's making for some pretty good movies.

Jeff Bercovici is a columnist at AOL Daily Finance.

I refer here to the anonymous Iranian upon whom, last week, was bestowed a George Polk Award, one of journalism’s top honors, for the video he or she captured of a female protester as she died from a sniper’s bullet during last year’s Green Revolution. The woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, instantly became a national martyr and international cause célèbre. The identity of the individual who immortalized her death—described in the citation as “a brave bystander with a cell-phone camera”—is still unknown, but there’s no reason to think he/she was anything other than a civilian.

The selection was received as a statement—about the democratization that needs to happen in Iran, yes, but also about the democratization and decentralization that’s already happening in the news business. At the risk of giving too much credit to a bunch of awards-committee grandees, there’s an important lesson here. In the latter half of the last century, journalism mutated from a relatively prestige-free trade into a hoity-toity profession that, like medicine and law, involves graduate degrees and six-figure salaries. But journalism is not a profession, or even a trade, really. It’s an act. And anyone who performs that act is, at that moment, a journalist.

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This recognition comes as the journalistic establishment slides beneath the water line, taking with it the six-figure jobs necessary to pay off all those J-school loans. And the people benefiting from this aren’t just the amateurs. It’s no coincidence that in the same week Neda’s videographer got his due, the Pulitzer Prize committee reportedly agreed to accept a submission from The National Enquirer for its reporting on John Edwards’ extramarital monkeyshines. Tabloid reporters are historically the untouchables of the journalistic caste system, too sullied by the trash-sifting work they do to move anywhere but down the food chain. But that was in the old days, when the logo on your business card meant a damn.

In essence, the market for acts of journalism has gone from a cartel-based system to something approximating free enterprise, where it’s the value of the goods themselves that matters, not the reputation of the vendor. That, in itself, is a great thing. But it has some unnerving implications. Start-ups like Demand Media and Associated Content are taking the free-market ethos to its logical conclusion, producing content based on algorithms that calculate consumer demand and sourcing the production to a far-flung network of low-paid freelancers. (AOL, my primary employer, has a venture called Seed that operates on similar principles.) To say that professional journalists are skeptical that such “robo-content” can ever replace the work of experienced full-timers is a vast understatement. But plenty of smart people think otherwise. Betsy Morgan, the former CEO of the Huffington Post, tells me she believes the new-breed content farmers could do to legacy media companies what the Japanese did to American automakers in the 1980s, undermining their economics forever. “Demand is well positioned to migrate up market with their content as Toyota did with their car models,” Morgan says. “That’s where things could get interesting for the established brands.”

As someone who’s still using his old-media salary to pay off school loans, I hope Morgan’s wrong. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

Jeff Bercovici is the media columnist for AOL’s Daily Finance.

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A.D.D. Men

Tablets from Above

But recently, a new spirit of humility has settled over Madison Avenue. No longer is it fashionable to look down on consumers as soft-headed rubes to be pumped full of artificial desires and relieved of their paychecks.

Instead, they’re being treated as enlightened beings to be flattered, courted and cultivated. The old script went something like this: We’ll tell you what to crave and you’ll crave it because we are the almighty gods of culture and you are a bunch of herd animals in Day-Glo Crocs. The new one says: You tell us what we should be and we’ll become that—and if we’re not doing it fast enough, won’t you please let us know via email/SMS/Twitter/Facebook?

It’s nothing less than a full-fledged power inversion. Nowadays, it’s the marketers who are feeling vulnerable and the consumers who reap the benefits—such as they are.

This sea change owes a lot to what’s newly possible—heeding the vox populi is a lot easier since social networking and microblogging came around to amplify it—but also to what’s no longer possible. “The old model was called ‘command and control’: We will force a message down your throat with a massive media buy,” says Andrew Essex, chief executive of the downtown ad agency Droga5. “You can’t buy relevance anymore.” (And those who try are apt to wind up like Peter Arnell, the guru-cum-laughingstock behind last year’s disastrous rebranding of Tropicana orange juice.)

Command-and-control ad campaigns still happen, of course, but when they do, it’s as often as not under the guise of the New Humility. Witness what’s unfolding in the tech sector, where two of the world’s biggest brands are urging consumers to see them as nothing more or less than gigantic mirrors of their own needs and strengths. Microsoft is currently telling its customers that the new Windows 7 was entirely their idea, and Yahoo’s new slogan, “It’s Y!ou,” assures them that the company exists solely as a vehicle for their self-actualization. (I should note here that my primary employer, AOL, competes directly with Microsoft and Yahoo on a variety of fronts.)

Or consider the industrywide fad for “crowdsourcing.” Everyone from Doritos to Mutual of Omaha is asking customers to create their own commercials on the theory that no one knows the mind of a corn-chip muncher or annuities purchaser like a corn-chip muncher or annuities purchaser.

There’s a deep irony here, and it’s not just the irony of multibillion-dollar corporate behemoths trying to pass themselves off as paragons of grass-roots responsiveness. It’s that they’re doing so despite the existence right in their neighborhood of a big, fat indication that what consumers really want is brands they can follow, not brands they have to steer. I’m talking  about Apple. No other company has been so secretive, so high-handed, so almost authoritarian in its treatment of its customers. (How’s that removable iPhone battery coming along, Mr. Jobs?) And no brand is as universally recognized as cool. “It shows that if you’ve got the right product and the confidence in that product to say, ‘This is something you should want,’ that can still work,” says Jonah Bloom, CEO of Breaking Media and former editor in chief of Advertising Age.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with crowdsourcing or with inviting consumers to see themselves reflected in one’s brand. But, ultimately, it’s a form of punting, one whose current popularity owes less to the promise it holds than to the fear and disorientation that pervades the advertising industry (and, indeed, all media). Truly great advertising still requires individual vision. Ask yourself this: If Mad Men’s Don Draper were a real person living today, would he be working for Apple or Microsoft?

Either way, you can be damn sure he wouldn’t be tweeting about it.

editorial@observer.com

Jeff Bercovici is the media columnist for AOL’s DailyFinance

Step back in time. The old list of possible solutions to the magazine industry’s existential crisis is a long one: a perfect electronic replica of ink-and-paper editions, in PDF format; Web sites loaded with social networking features and user-generated content; mobile phone editions; flexible e-paper; print-on-demand copies and on and on it goes.

Cumulative net difference made by all of the above to the survival prospects of magazines: zero.

But now there’s a new savior on the horizon, and, hoo boy, this one is really going to change everything. The deus ex machina du jour involves notepad-size wireless computers with full-color, touch-screen displays. Publishers are tripping over themselves in their haste to be ready when the first of these devices hits the market later this year. Wired and Sports Illustrated have already shown off demos. (Both feature a gadget thought to resemble Apple’s mythical and much-drooled-over tablet, which may or may not be called the iSlate.) And then, as The Observer’s John Koblin first reported, the four biggest magazine companies (four horsemen?)—Time Inc., Condé Nast, Hearst and Meredith—are teaming up to develop the applications necessary to make such e-editions a reality. Meanwhile, Hearst is working on its own reader, the Skiff (a name that has occasioned the predictable life-raft jokes).

Taken together, it’s a kind of Manhattan Project for magazines. Will it succeed in splitting the atom? Alas, probably not in the way publishers are hoping. Despite the wishful thinking of people like New York Times media writer David Carr, who sees “an opportunity to renew the romance between printed material and consumer,” the tablet won’t be a broad bridge over which magazines will be able to skip en masse across the chasm they’re now toeing. Some of them will make it to the other side, yes, but in much diminished form, while others will get there and flourish but mutate so much in the process as to become unrecognizable.

The fashionable thing these days is to embrace that mutation as though it were in fact the plan all along. If I had a quarter for every exec who smugly told me he’s in the business of selling “brands, not magazines,” I could afford a first-generation iSlate. Or whatever it’s called.

But a magazine isn’t just a brand wrapped around some words and pictures; it’s also a product, one whose nature is decidedly antithetical to the demands of the digital economy. Magazines are, above all, packages for diverse kinds of content: features, celebrity profiles, reader service, fashion, charticles—and, of course, glossy ads whose value to marketers derives from their adjacency to high-grade consumer porn. The digital universe, however, abhors a package. The first law of the Internet—and everything is the Internet now—is this: Anything that can be dis-aggregated will be. Once it was possible to sell albums; now, thanks to iTunes, music labels have to settle for selling songs. Once it was possible to sell newspapers; now the savvy reader cherry-picks headlines on Google News.

Magazine publishers are so gung-ho on the tablet because it holds out the promise of maintaining the integrity of the product-as-package. If an e-magazine is sufficiently beautiful and seamless to browse, this thinking goes, consumers will be willing to purchase and enjoy it as a whole, ads and all, just as they do with an ink-and-paper magazine. But people don’t buy physical magazines because they’re attractive and user-friendly; they buy them because buying a whole magazine was, pre-Web, the only way to get magazine-style content.

That’s not to say there aren’t consumers out there who will prefer complete, artfully packaged e-magazines to a la carte content chunks. There are, just as there are connoisseurs who collect all the back issues of Might and Nest. They’re simply a niche audience.

Nor is it to say some magazine companies won’t create successful products for tablets/e-readers. Some no doubt will.

But whatever they create, it won’t be magazines. Those are going away.

Jeff Bercovici is the media columnist for AOL’s DailyFinance