The following piece by Ari Y. Kelman, Professor of American Studies and Director of the Graduate Group in the Study of Religion at UC Davis, is an excerpt from a soon to be published study entitled “Reality of the Virtual: Looking for Jewish Leadership Online” that Jack Wertheimer introduced here.

While this particular segment is focused on our friends at MyJewishLearning, we asked to post it because not only do we get name-dropped in section 4, but we just read the whopping 74 page study and it says some nice things about us.  Things like: “Jewcy is among the most significant websites in the online Jewish world, outpacing traditional news sources and the establishment of Jewish organizations.”  We also think about this shtuff all day long.  Mapping (and measurement in general) is a necessary, but tough task.  We surely want to have an impact on others, but no matter what anyone says, the dashboard of analytics, survey results, and studies is tough to read.  Moreover, who cares about measurement?  Do you as a reader?  Does your mother?

Jacob Harris, Jewcy’s Publisher, discusses this a bit more in his response to this excerpt.  But don’t skip ahead – check this out and let us know what you think.

If you want to understand the Jewish internet, don’t look at the Facebook Hagaddah or the YouTube video of a youthful Paul Rudd as a Bar Mitzvah DJ, or even the successes of JDate.  You’ll have to look past the MASA advertising flare-up from September 2009, and beyond the hype that surrounds the blog-two-point-oh-Facebook-Tweet-YouTube-podcast-live-stream-flash-animation-social-media-wikification of virtually every part of Jewish life.   Really, if you want to understand the Jewish internet, look at MyJewishLearning.com.

MyJewishLearning is a project of the Samuel Bronfman Philanthropies and several other foundations, and it serves as an outlet for information, commentary and opinions by authors from across the Jewish world, covering topics from the silly to the holy.  It is a robust multi-media site that is basically a broadly constructed resource for information about things Jewish.

Although its content tells us something, the site is important for reasons other than its content.  It is the most valuable site in the network of Jewish websites, and if we are going to understand the generational and cultural shifts in our Jewish communities, we had best take a good, close look at what is happening online because that is where those changes are most pronounced.

Within the network of Jewish websites (which, for this study included the 150 most popular sites, along with 279 blogs (the sites and blogs had to promote themselves as Jewish)), MyJewishLearning plays a powerful role.  Highlighting its place in the network allows us to measure four ways in which the network online reveals patterns that are shaping Jewish life offline.

1. Links are the Currency of a Network.

For all the talk about The Jewish Community and membership or peoplehood or klal Yisrael, a community is still built out of relationships.  Online, those relationships are built out of links.  At the time of this study, MyJewishLearning had 752 links to its site; the UJC had 714.  It’s not much of a difference, especially when we consider that Jewschool had just over 4,000 and FrumSatire had over 1700. Nevertheless, comparing links in reveals a leveling of the playing field when it comes to evaluating the role of an organization, or website, in the larger community.

Looking online reveals that one of the most powerful institutions in Jewish communal life offline — the Federation system — does not exert a similar force online.  In terms of links, in fact, it is dwarfed by websites that hardly have an offline presence.  As increasing numbers of people turn to the internet as the first source of information about Jewish life, the relative popularity of a site as measured by links suggests that power online may translate into power offline, but not necessarily vice versa.

2. Powerful websites broker relationships between other websites.

To be sure, measuring importance is not just about the gross number of links, but it can be measured in the quality of links, as well; it really is about who you know, not just how many people you know.  When accounting for what social network analysis call the “prestige” of one’s neighbors (and calculating what is known as the Bonacich Power Measure), we find that MyJewishLearning is nearly four times as “powerful” as the UJC’s website.  Despite the relative parity in links between the two sites, MyJewishLearning is linked to sites with greater “prestige,” and thus it plays a role not only in brokering relationships between sites in the network, but in brokering significant relationships, as well.

MyJewishLearning looks even better when we account for links to it from less “prestigious” websites, retaining connections to less powerful sites who would otherwise find themselves further on the margin of the network.  Accounting for this finds the UJC further marginalized and MyJewishLearning increasingly important.  In other words, MyJewishLearning is more valuable to a greater diversity of sites than is the UJC website, and thus comes to occupy a far more important role in the network.

3.  Transgression Creates Community.

MyJewishLearning is powerful because it has succeeded in attracting links from across the Jewish world, crossing social barriers online where doing so offline would have proven too difficult.  Transgressing geographic, political, religious and social barriers has resulted in MyJewishLearning becoming as central as it has.  Building links online is, of course, easier than building coalitions offline, but symbolically, the ability to navigate through religious and secular, Israeli and American, Ashkenazi and Sepharadi and Mizrachi websites suggests both a greater fluidity and a stronger unity to “the Jewish Community” than has been evidenced elsewhere.

4.  Players are changing the game.

One of the most obvious and well-documented facts about the internet is that it provides massive broadcast outlets for people who would otherwise not have access to them.  In the network online, those examples include FrumSatire, Jewcy, Tablet, and MyJewishLearning, all of which vie with the traditional Jewish news outlets for traffic, stories and attention.  And the presence of these alternative outlets is changing the shape of the community.

There’s no longer a newspaper of Jewish record.  Instead we have a host of bloggers, journalists, editors, writers, curators who are all helping shape the broader Jewish communal conversation.  It’s not that traditional news outlets have given way to alternatives; they have not.  But the chorus of voices speaking to and speaking for the larger community has expanded as a result of these changes in communication.

Mapping the Jewish internet provides a greater depth to our understanding of just how communications are changing the community.  Alternative sites like MyJewishLearning and FrumSatire have emerged as credible forces in the network of Jewish websites and they are challenging the inherited claims of established organizations to leadership.  The questions we ought to be asking at this point should no longer focus on how the internet is changing our community, but what we ought to do now that the changes are already well underway.

Research for this article was conducted under the auspices of the Avi Chai Foundation’s project on young Jewish leaders directed by Jack Wertheimer.

The post Mapping The Network Of Jewish Websites appeared first on Jewcy.

Mishna (Avot 3:2) tells Jews to pray for their government regardless of who is in charge, and Jews have been doing so for hundreds of years—but we do not live in Israel. Why a prayer for a state and a government which is not the place where we live?

When the Prayer for the State of Israel was published in Israel in 1949, not everyone was immediately on board. The prayer was omitted from the 1951 Conservative High Holiday prayer book, and it does not appear as a formal element in Conservative worship until the 1957 edition of the Conservative Prayer book. In its 1975 prayer book, Gates of Prayer, the Reform Movement included a paragraph, in English, under the heading “For Our People and Our Nation,” praying for Israel’s peace and protection. The first stand-alone Prayer for Israel in American Reform liturgy doesn’t appear until 1978, when the High Holiday Prayer book, Gates of Repentance, includes it.

Even Orthodox Jews, who are the most inclined to closely follow the liturgy, exhibit some hesitation around the prayer’s inclusion in worship. The ArtScroll Siddur, one of the most popular prayerbooks among the Modern Orthodox set, comes out in two versions: One that contains the prayer, and one that does not.

As you might expect, the contents of the prayer differ from prayerbook to prayerbook. Each of the four major American denominations has its own version of the prayer, and organizations and publications like Rabbis for Human Rights and Tikkun magazine have penned and published their own versions of the prayer to suit each of their respective relationships with Israel. Some might be considered revisions; others are totally new creations.

What can we learn from the history of this prayer that might help us make sense of why we—who live at a distance and who feel ambivalent at best about Israel’s political leadership and policies—might want to offer a prayer at all. And what, finally, should American Jews pray for when they pray for Israel? I’m reminded of that joke from early on in Fiddler on the Roof:

Jew: Rabbi, what kind of prayer should one say for the Czar? Rabbi: May the Lord Bless him and keep him…. Far away from us!

Essentially, the original version of the prayer beseeches God to bless and protect the State of Israel, guide and counsel its leaders, strengthen its defenders, and so on and so forth. Pretty typical of prayers for one’s country, written by inhabitants of that country. In fact, it resembles (in sentiment) other traditional prayers for one’s Jewish and broader communities. This semblance is reinforced by its placement within the structure of a worship service, where it appears alongside prayers for the Jewish community, the community of worshippers, and for the government of one’s home country.

There is however, one striking difference: It does not stop with supplications for the land itself, its leadership and governance, but adds a paragraph for Jews in the Diaspora and for the hope that they will “return” to the land.

When the Conservative Movement issued its new prayer book in 1985, it decided to omit the prayer’s lengthy paragraph about “speeding the return” of Jews to Zion, focusing instead on Israel’s well-being, peace, and strength. Oddly, however, the Conservative Movement retained a phrase that has recently raised questions and eyebrows about whether or not it belongs in American Jewish prayer. The phrase refers to Israel as “reshit tzmikhat ge’ulateynu,” or “the dawn of our redemption,” which sounds a little too messianic for many American Jews. Moreover, and maybe more troubling: Why would our spiritual redemption be connected to the State of Israel?

Is the State of Israel—this State of Israel—really a sign of the dawn of the messianic age? What does that mean for the majority of American Jews, for whom Israel is more a vacation destination or an ideology than a sign of the messianic age? Is there a more suitable metaphor for the State of Israel, whose imagery and echo might resonate more deeply with Jews in the diaspora?

To be sure, this is not exactly a crisis for American Jews. Traditional worship is full of strange phrasings and theological assertions that I would venture most of them do not exactly believe (the issue of God’s “chosen people,” to name just one). So why does the phrase “the dawn of our redemption," with its eschatological overtones, appear so troubling that it's become the subject of debate at this moment? Israel holds a unique place in the minds and hearts of Jews. Even amidst reports that illustrate a declining attachment among younger Jews to Israel, such a finding is “news” only because certain segments of American Jewish life are worried about this changing attitude. Since the early 20th century, American Jews have invested a lot of time, money, and energy in Israel. Buying trees, donating to UJA, sending teenagers to visit, volunteering on kibbutz, eating falafel, and learning Hebrew all illustrated American Jews’ commitment to Israel. So what now, that American Jews’ relationships to Israel are in the midst of a moment of significant change and interrogation?

Many American Jews’ attitudes about Israel are best characterized as ambivalent or contradictory. The “pro-Israel” and “anti-Israel” rhetoric that organizations like AIPAC and others like to throw around don’t serve us particularly well when trying to describe the complicated feelings that many American Jews hold toward Israel. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb here, but most American Jews—even those most critical of Israeli politics—are not “anti-Israel” any more than they might be “anti-China” for its violations of human rights.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the mish-mash of feelings goes something like this: I like the idea of a Jewish home, but I’m pretty uncomfortable with the policies of the State, particularly as they pertain to the treatment of Palestinians. It’s a beautiful place, but so is Paris. It’s an historical place, of particular importance to “my people,” but most of my immediate family has never spent a whole lot of time there. The historical importance of the place is ancient, which makes it important, but I can probably name more famous Greeks than I can Ancient Israelites who lived in Canaan, back in the day.

To be sure, ambivalence is not new for American Jews—nor is it only directed toward feelings and attitudes about Israel. The majority of American Jews have felt and acted on a commitment to Israel since the establishment of the State in 1948, but most American Jews never planned on moving there. So much so, that in 1950, American Jewish Committee President Jacob Blaustein had to tell Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion to stop hawking the idea of aliya (migration to Israel), or he would alienate too many American Jews and sabotage his own fund raising efforts.

Israel, in the minds, hearts, and actions of American Jews, has best been observed at a distance.

Which brings us back to the central question of what, precisely, American Jews ought to be praying for when they pray for Israel on her 60th anniversary, and into the future. Maybe the new versions of the Prayer reflect and give voice to the conflicting emotions American Jews hold toward Israel. And maybe that fictitious rabbi from Fiddler (itself a modern American re-visioning of a place and a past) revealed more than a quick wit and a sense of humor.

Maybe it’s the things that we find most challenging that are most in need of our prayer.

The post How Should We Pray for Israel on Her 60th Anniversary? appeared first on Jewcy.

The New Jew Canon is a long-term project that seeks to canonize essential Jewish (and some Non-Jewish) reads as recommended by extraordinary rabbis, experts, and cultural leaders. Suggestions are welcome via comments or email.

Title: The Black Atlantic Author: Paul Gilroy Description: Much hay has been made of life in the diaspora, and this book—while occasionally a little theory/jargon heavy—is an incredibly rich conceptualization of the material and cultural life of diaspora. For Gilroy, it's not diaspora as a sense of exile in which one is always longing to return "home," but rather about the ways that culture, ideas, and material circulate in and around diasporic communities. This is not a book about Jews, but it sheds important light on life in the diaspora. Recommended By: Ari Y. Kelman is an assistant professor of American Studies at UC Davis. Most of his research focuses on popular and unpopular cultures, both Jewish and not. He's working on a book about recorded sound, and has co-authored two studies and a series of reports with Steven M. Cohen about contemporary Jewish culture and identity. His first book Station Identification: a cultural history of Yiddish radio in America will be published by the University of California press.

The New Jew Canon is a long-term project that seeks to canonize essential Jewish (and some Non-Jewish) reads as recommended by extraordinary rabbis, experts, and cultural leaders. Suggestions are welcome via comments or tips.

Previously: Isaac Bashevis Singer's The Family Moskat, The Manor & The Estate, Shadows on the Hudson, recommended by Jennifer Moses

The post The New Jew Canon: The Black Atlantic appeared first on Jewcy.