In theory, sure, why not? If prefer to swipe right for another Jew, that’s your prerogative. But in an effort to reach out to diverse Jews, JSwipe’s publicity strategy falls into catering towards the lowest common denominator, which usually means a lot of jokes about matzah ball soup, unfortunate puns on the word “Jew,” and Seinfeld references.

But sometimes these awkward/annoying attempts to be hip bleed over into offensive. Take this recent  Facebook post:

It’s hardly worth explaining why this is offensive (to keep it brief: it’s an overly stereotyped image of a Mexican person on Cinco de Mayo, and also the joke is rooted in the idea of a Mexican Jew being incongruous when there are totally Jewish Mexicans).

But most of the offensive online content is rooted in sexism, because, well, it’s a dating app.  For example, JSwipe was recently the partner at a “#CrazyJewishMom” event, because there’s nothing funnier than an overbearing Jewish woman, am I right?

Or take a recent tweet, since deleted, that joked that you should marry a Jewish woman, since it would be the last decision you’d ever make.

(To be fair, I once heard a similar joke made by an officiant at a Jewish wedding. It wasn’t funny then either.)

If JSwipe is trying to make good-natured in-jokes about Jewishness, they’re missing the mark, and attacking the very women they want to be part of its clientele (and the app itself isn’t sexist). Rather than letting dating in the faith be what it is (complicated), JSwipe has to represent men there by coercion, women as nagging shrews,

Maybe it’s an effective strategy, but that doesn’t make it not stupid.

Nor is JSwipe the first Jewish dating program to be embarrassing.  JDate (which acquired ownership of JSwipe some months ago), has been using flimsy stereotypes as part of its marketing for ages.  Take this commercial from 2014:

(That blonde will never understand you, Jewish man, because the entirety of your identity can be summed up by a Jewish summer camp experience that all like-minded Jews know and love.)

All that pandering, and JDate can’t even spell “bashert” right in an ad:

Sounds like “sherbert…”

Also, guys, since you like Yiddish 101 catchphrases? Try “shandeh fur di goyim,” which means, non-Jews on the Internet can see you being awful when you’re claiming you represent young Jewish adults so stop embarrassing us.

Plus, you’re alienating young Jewish adults. You know, people you want to use your service?

@JSwipe using a damaging stereotype about jewish women to boost it’s popularity?! now that’s a shonda. #deletejswipe https://t.co/J9g1TNjfok

— Sandy Fox (@sandy__fox) May 18, 2016

So even if its service is fine, is the advertising such a turnoff that you should swipe left on JSwipe in its entirety?

Ah, well. JWed it is.

Image Credits: Facebook and Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein

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Texting on the Sabbath? There’s an app for that.

The appropriately named “Shabbos App”—which is in development right now—will hit the market in 2015, allowing users to text on Shabbat within the confines of halacha (Jewish law). This is no cynical, gimmicky ploy: the developers (themselves observant Jews) have outlined all of the potential problems with texting on Shabbat, and explained how each one is circumvented by the app. For example, the app prevents the phone screen from turning off, skirting the prohibition against turning electrical items on and off.

The app has already stirred up debate over whether this would violate the spirit of the Shabbat, even if it is technically permissible. Rabbi Moshe Elefant of the Orthodox Union told Vos Is Neias that “it is very distasteful and not permissible on Shabbos.” Others were unconvinced: the concept struck Rabbi Yaakov Menken as so implausible that he described it as a “farce.”

But The Shabbos App is indeed real. One of the developers, Yossi Goldstein, sees it as the next step in what has been a long tradition of adapting technology around halachic restrictions. In a phone conversation, he compared the app to other items that have been permitted and accepted by the Orthodox community over the years, even if they were at first regarded as controversial. “Look at the Shabbat-mode ovens that are becoming popular, or Shabbat-clocks. Rav Moshe Feinstein [an influential 20th century Orthodox rabbi] prohibited Shabbat clocks. Yet many many people use them today.”

This is Goldstein’s first time developing an app and the only one that he and his team, which includes programmers, marketers and rabbis, are working on. A Kickstarter campaign to raise money and gauge interest went live before Sukkot, and will conclude on December 5. (To date they’ve raised $2,000 of their $30,000 goal.) Come February, the Shabbos App will be on the market for iPhone and Android users for a cool $49.99.

So far, reactions in the press and on social media have been mixed, varying from outrage to delight. There’s even a Facebook page called “Ban the Shabbos App.” (Ironically, the URL ends in “banshabbos”.)

Most responses seem to take issue with how this will impact the tone and feel Shabbat, which many Jews—Orthodox and otherwise—cherish as a day of rest from screen time. Goldstein recognizes that this is something that people will feel “won’t be in the spirit of Shabbos,” although that’s “the only” issue he sees as a possible problem. One commenter by the name of Yoni, wrote that “one of the things I love about Shabbos is that it forces us to disconnect from the outside world so that we can focus on Hashem and the holiness of the day.” Kate Barnes, who does not “keep Shabbat in an Orthodox fashion,” believes it is an “improbable excuse to try to technicality your way out of observing Shabbat properly.”

Writing in The Forward, Julie Sugar framed the Shabbos app as a tool that may draw people closer to Shabbat observance: “we’re making a grave mistake when we judge someone who is already struggling with Shabbos and is seeking a kosher balance.”

Goldstein, who plans to use the app, argues that not only should it be permitted by the rabbinical authorities, it should be openly embraced. He makes a strong case, pointing out the fact that many Shabbat-observant teens are already using their phones on Shabbat anyway. “People realize today most teens are already texting on Shabbat,” he said, “so how do we create something that allows them to do so in a halachic way?”

There’s room yet for consensus. Exceptions to halacha are routinely made for life-saving situations and medical emergencies. Tiffanie Yael Maoz, another commenter, wondered if this “would this allow parents of special needs kids to set up a geo-fence to notify them if their kid wanders too far?”

Goldstein believes that most of the controversy surrounding the creation of the app is a classic case of the “old guard” taking a stand against something new. He encourages people to keep an open mind about the app and see how it can enhance the Shabbat experience, instead of detract from it. “The real question is,” he said “do we embrace change or do we fight it?”

We should know by December 5.

Related: Shabbat Is a Day of Rest—But Does That Mean I Can’t Text My Friends?

(Image via Shabbos App/Facebook)

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But to place the Jewish Music Stream (JMS) on the same psychic or spiritual level as comfort food or television bingeing is to trivialize its higher significance and, indeed, its sheer awesomeness. The Stream plays solid, 24-hour blocks of contemporary Jewish religious music in stunning digital quality, and without the glitches or gaps in connectivity that are so common to small-cap internet radio stations. The website, which was created in 2009, has somewhere between 250 and 400 listeners at any given time, although that figure likely shortchanges the station’s actual reach through the Intersect World app.

After all, we’re Jews: Klezmer is our jazz, the Banai clan is something like our Rolling Stones (or maybe The Killers), and the Pro Musica Hebraica series, organized by the columnist Charles Krauthammer, even attempts to give us our own place in classical European art music. The music the JMS plays is our gospel; our soul music, even. As I’ve discovered, much modern-day yeshivish music comes from a place of emotional or spiritual jouissance. The semi-orchestral religious music played on the JMS reaches epic heights; it soars, tapers, and then soars even higher still. Musical cultures often have genres or modes of expression reserved for feelings, ideas or experiences that are too vast and too immediate for any other artistic form to contain (Robert Johnson and Brett Michaels both belong in this category). We Jews are no exception. Yeshivisha music is melodramatic and emotionally overstuffed, but even in its textures it is fundamentally, recognizably ours. It’s our people’s attempt at achieving something that, through pure feeling and sheer earnestness, aspires to a kind of musical transcendence.

So what does the Jewish Music Stream play, exactly? Female voices are regrettably assur, or prohibited, so a good amount of airtime is devoted to various boys choirs. The Yeshiva Boys Choir likes adding techno beats to traditional zmirot, although purists are sure to thrill to the Kol Noar or Shir Hadasha Boys Choirs, both of whom are in the JMS rotation. And then there’s the grandaddy of them all, the Miami Boys Choir. I’ve been somewhat disheartened but nevertheless fascinated to learn that AutoTune has made its way into even the most established choir-based acts in yeshivish music—as if the angelic counter-tenor of a nine-year-old cheder student can possibly be improved upon.

The JMS is delightfully Ashkenazi. There’s the occasional Sephardi tune but for the most part there is no Torah on the JMS. There is the Toyrah. Today is not hayom, it’s hayoim; this morning is haboyker. Melachto? Puh-leeze: Our King is Melachtoi. And so on. I don’t mean to mock—indeed, this antediluvianism (I’m a hard-tav pronouncing, largely assimilated American Jew, thank you very much) explains much of the JMS’s power over me. This is the music of a mythical and most-likely imaginary before-time; a time when dybbuks existed and Chelm was best known as a real place, and when Warsaw (or possibly Baghdad) was the center of the Jewish world. Some of the music the JMS plays is actually in Yiddish!

At the same time, it is the JMS’s modernity—its connection to a real and thriving and even Yiddish-speaking now-time—that makes it so consistently surprising. The studio version of Yoely Greenfeld’s “Zemer” ends in a New Orleans jazz breakdown; Dovid Gabay’s “Berum Olam” begins with a pretty mind-wrecking (although obviously synthetic) blast of bagpipes. Ya’akov Shweky’s infectious “Ten Lo” has a slow-building, almost dub-like lead-in, complete with a meandering and virtuosic oud solo. Even in the famously internet-averse ultra-Orthodox community, Yisroel Werdyger has won over 1,000 Twitter followers. And why shouldn’t he, considering the presence, the subtlety of feeling—the kavana, for lack of a superior English equivalent—with which he sings?

The JMS showcases musical eclecticism, and, the heck with it, cultural modernity within an ultra-orthodox Jewish context. My intrigue at such a harmony of apparent opposites might simply be the result of false preconceptions. I can’t say that my pre-JMS world allowed for the possibility of zmirot capped with power ballad-worthy electric guitar solos.

When I reached out to the man responsible for the JMS—an IT professional and sometimes computer-programmer who runs the site anonymously and asked not to be named—he was somewhere between winding down from work and preparing for a night at the Beit Midrash. He created the site, he said, because “I saw what was out there in terms of Jewish music streams and saw that I would be able to build a better system.”

“I’ve met a lot of these artists,” he continued. “They’re regular people who happen to be blessed with these talents and are happy to have others enjoy it.”

The clash between the ultra-Orthodox and modern technology has been in the news lately, and the mere existence of the JMS suggested to me that this relationship is more complicated than many have given it credit for. The JMS founder and proprietor actually attended the recent Ichud HaKehillos asifa against the Internet, which packed Citi Field and nearby Arthur Ashe Stadium with nearly 50,000 ultra-orthodox Jewish men, who had come to hear their teachers’ concerns over the web’s effects on religious practice and communal life. After the speech, more than a few attendees took to the web to share their reactions. Some argued that the Internet could be helpful so long as it could be controlled. Others insisted that the technology itself was irredeemably evil.

Unsurprisingly, the JMS’s founder sits on the more liberal side of this simmering communal debate. “Personally, I do computer work most of the day, and from a general background perspective I use the Internet all the time,” he told me. “But I’m always pushing myself to make sure everything’s filtered.”

For him, having a “Jewish listening experience” is one way the Internet can foster and celebrate Jewish culture. “If you try to take all these types of sites offline, people aren’t going to listen to Jewish music,” he said. And people like me will likely never hear a techno version of Kol Hamispalel.

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