A new low for Kamien's Shmooze column

Not enough for Adam Kamien that he dedicates his weekly page-2 Shmooze column to the grubby and sordid alcoholic and drug-induced adventures of showbiz drekerati. Nor his recent despicable piece poking fun http://tinyurl.com/kmcqud at the painful plight of an injured young boy, this week he adds smut to his page by depicting some chazerei ‘artwork’ of an Israeli unknown.

Which other family-orientated journal would permit the publication of this soft-porn? None that we can think of. Only the AJN, which claims to represent the entire community, has no values or standards at all. Keep this up and you’ll soon have no readers at all.

To quote recently sacked-editor Ashley Browne http://tinyurl.com/m5km9d : “The readership at the Jewish news is quite elderly. One of the things I tried to do, with some success I think, is take it younger…we did a redesign to freshen it up and make it more visually appealing. It’s very hard, because you’ve got people in their mid-40s who won’t buy the paper because they flick through it at shabbos dinner at their parents’ place. The challenge is to make people buy it. “

People – young and old – are not going to buy a newspaper that offends their morals. Childish and odious writing will not persuade the average Jewish family to spend $3.50 for the paper.
On the other hand the growing band of Hamodia readers have no problem to spend $6 every week to get their dose of news and features.

Maybe now that publisher Robert Magid has started a clean-out by letting go of editor Browne, he should continue the process by ridding himself of the embarrassing Kamien http://tinyurl.com/l45ggd .
(He's the one who arrogantly greeted our blog by warning http://tinyurl.com/nszlfz that he will be ‘watching the watchers’. Strangely we never heard from him again…)