Banging It Out for 25 Years
If you were 20-something, single, and living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the early 2000s, you’d likely be at Congregation Oheb Zedek on Friday night checking out the social scene and at the Great Lawn at Central Park on Shabbat afternoon interacting with friends.
And your go-to website would certainly have been BangItOut.com.
Founded in 2000 by Isaac and Seth Galena (siblings), the site was started in order to more widely distribute videos, articles, pictures, and links that the Galena boys and their friends commonly exchanged online.
Even though I was happily married and in my early 40s at the time BangItOut.com arrived on the scene, I was a loyal follower – its clever and somewhat irreverent humor definitely spoke my language, and I was also privileged to publish a couple of original Top 10 lists of mine on the site.
BangItOut.com began as a playful side project among friends, but it quickly grew into a cultural touchstone for Jewish humor and community in New York City. It has impacted both online and real-world Jewish life through consistently fresh content, grassroots-classified offerings, recurring holiday projects, and popular community events. Its recognition by notable media outlets, sustained readership, and local institutions are the hallmarks of its enduring success.
It’s hard to believe that the site – which still operates today – is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year.
I had an opportunity to speak to Seth Galena about the early days of BangItOut.com and its enormous growth and popularity among Orthodox Jewish singles. Below is a transcript of the interview:
What inspired you and your brother to start BangItOut.com back in 2000?
Boredom? And a need to do something creative together. It was at a time of the great dot-com boom, where everyone wanted to purchase a URL, and startups and IPOs were everywhere. I was working at a digital ad agency, so websites were all the rage … and we wanted in. We just had no idea what to make the site about. So, we started with what we knew: Jewish humor. Or more the humor of being Jewish.
Was there a particular moment or need in the Jewish community that sparked the idea?
Email forwarded jokes and humor bites were what we shared with each other all day to pass the time at work, but there was no central repository of it online. I learned HTML and web stuff at my job, and we began to post these things online. Then we realized we were funnier writers, and the stuff we were sharing was mainly dated Jewish humor someone wrote a generation ago. We started writing our own things and got our friends to do the same. It was all about being Jewish in the modern world.
What was the first piece of content or feature you published on the site that really caught on?
We loved Letterman’s Top 10s – they were quick, sharp, and easily shareable. But not Jewish. When we developed our own Top 10 lists about the real-world realities of the Modern Orthodox Upper West Side scene as single 20-somethings trying to navigate work/Jewish balance, single life, and making Shabbos on our own, it exposed a world of humor that many young Orthodox Jews also had struggled with … but nobody seemed to want to talk about. We somehow were able to capture a shared experience and trauma through humor. It was fun, reckless and “now.”
Do you remember any early feedback that made you feel you were onto something?
As soon as we started getting hate mail around embarrassing klal Yisrael by airing the idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies of being Modern Orthodox, we knew we struck gold — and it drove us to go deeper into our collective shared trauma and joys that only those who lived through Jewish day school, summer camp, and a year in Israel could relate to.
How did you come up with the name “BangItOut”?
My boss at my first job, a hip digital ad agency, would always speak in business cliches. “What’s on your plate today?” “Let’s get your ducks in a row.” “Are we on the same page?” It was my first job, and this kind of language was so fascinating. He often would ask the following about work deliverables: “Can you bang it out over the weekend?” Sure, I can bang it out! And from then on, I couldn’t stop using that term “bang it out” to signal getting jobs done. I bought the URL bangitout.com on a whim, thinking it would be a site about work humor. But since it was my first job, I didn’t have much experience with the working world. But then we thought about growing up Modern Orthodox and going through the system, and all the Jewishy borscht-belt-forwarded emails we had. The content was endless.
Your “Top 10” lists, videos, and Jewish satire became a signature. What was your creative process like?
Every Friday morning, my brother and I would start an instant messenger chat to decide what our weekly Top 10 should be about? We’d scan the news and gossip websites — and then we’d think about the most relevant topic that day and how we could “Jewify” it in a funny and satirical way. If nothing resonated, we’d go to our shared memories of weekly shul activities, bar mitzvahs, and memorable dates and think about the characters and moments that everyone has experienced … and try to work from that vantage point. The shul candy man … a chazzan singing off-key or taking too long … a bad kiddush … awkward shidduch blind dates … these are some of the moments in time that only existed in our universe. However, they also resonated far beyond the Jewish Upper West Side. They were universal.
Were you and your team writing late into the night, or was it more spontaneous?
Always late at night, after work or after a date or whatever we got busy with. We all usually ended up online making jokes on the instant messenger chat – and it just spiraled into a 2AM hilarious article with many spelling mistakes but even more laughs. We wanted to think of new ways and new things nobody had discussed, and it always hit us between the hours of 12-2AM. We couldn’t wait to wake up and remember what it was we wrote and what people thought. When we got emails saying how insane a particular article or list was, we knew we nailed it. We couldn’t wait each night to regroup and think of the next thing to write about.
Looking back, what do you think BangItOut.com contributed to the identity of young Jewish professionals in NYC during that era? Was it just humor — or something deeper?
The humor was just a foil to unearth the shared experiences we all had as Jews in the modern world. The pain and tears of humor connected us all. For the first time, we were on our own. And we were talking about it. Authentically, without the Artscroll filter. And others started talking about their lives — their likes and dislikes. What we all went through, and how funny and traumatic it was. Post-college there is no playbook. And so, in the day-to-day trials and tribulations of living on your own, your values, beliefs, and circle of friends all are questioned. Having a fun outlet to share Jewish nostalgia, joy, and the broken beauty of what makes our community so interesting was a breath of fresh air.
The site wasn’t just funny — it was functional too: roommates, mincha maps, classifieds. How intentional was that balance between entertainment and utility?
There was zero intention, but we had the ear of the Jewish singles world at the time better than anyone. And every Jewish person had A LOT to say and ask. But our strategy was to always listen and always say yes. We would just bang it out.
And so, when a friend asked if we could post his apartment on our site, we added a Jewish apartment finder (apartments that bang) … and then overnight we got 50 others asking to post their listings. And when all the shul and institutional singles events were so awkward and lame, we decided to do an event for all our followers that was actually Jewish AND awesome. We started a Tu b’Av White Party and a Lager b’Omer party … and they kept going.
Whatever people asked, we did … and it was incredibly functional and dysfunctional all at once. But we were very real. We made so many mistakes, but people loved the joy we brought to it, and of course the authenticity.
What are some of your fondest or funniest memories from running the site? Any wild stories, emails from rabbis, celebrity encounters, or backlash?
Every so often a famous rabbi or a now-important person will meet me, and then afterwards, when no one was looking, whisper how much they used to love BangItOut. A couple once told me they met through a BangItOut apartment listing that was mistakenly listed as looking for a male roommate. When he showed up to see the apartment, a girl opened the door, saying the room was for a female. He didn’t get the room, but he ended up getting her number, and they are married now. All due to us posting the apartment incorrectly. My sister met her husband at one of our parties.
Did you ever imagine that BangItOut would get mentioned in The Forward and The Jewish Week, or be considered a cultural phenomenon?
Nope. But when we walked into an UWS shul one week and the rabbi’s speech was about the dangers of sites like BangItOut, we knew we were pioneers.
What does that recognition mean to you now?
I’m proud of how we connected and built a community in a new and unexpected way. I’m proud of how we opened the floodgates to Jews sharing their real lives though humor and fun. I’m proud of how we had a creative outlet which got us through the many hard times we faced during our young lives.
What are you up to now—personally and professionally?
I still work at an advertising agency, and my brother Isaac works at a bank. We are boring, but we still have about 100 startup ideas we noodle about all day but never do.
Do you still dabble in comedy, Jewish media, or community work?
If being kiddush-clubbing leaders, WhatsApp group rock stars, and the funniest dads for our kids count, then yes. Our annual Tu b’Av party still occurs annually. 30+ marriages to date. It’s really a mystical and magical outdoor event. Also, we also produce our Seder Sidekick every year in our dad’s memory.
Do you think a site like BangItOut could succeed in today’s social media-dominated landscape?
If content is authentic, irreverent, and true, it will always succeed. It’s also about the storytelling now. We should get the Top 10s on TikTok and X. Maybe AI can help us restart.
If you were starting it now, what would you do differently?
Get a business partner to help fund us, so we could quit our real jobs and just focus on being funny.
