long beach | When Birthright Israel and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation were looking to bring young Jewish innovators to Jerusalem for a conference on Jewish identity, they used the fastest, most effective way to get out the word: a blog.
Sure, they also had a mailing list of former Birthright students — the conference is being timed to celebrate the arrival of the trip’s 100,000th participant. But in hiring the team behind Jewlicious.com, a popular Jerusalem-based blog, to advertise and run the four-day event, organizers knew they’d get applicants from around the world and attract cutting-edge project ideas.
They succeeded: Participants are coming from Hungary, Russia, Venezuela, India, Holland and a host of other countries.
“We were looking for people with strong opinions of what the Jewish community should be doing, or who are already putting those ideas into play,” says Jewlicious co-founder David Abitbol. Even before the conference gets under way, some participants are beginning to talk to each other online, creating the basis for what organizers hope will become a community of young Jewish activists that crosses international boundaries.
“They’re moving from being a virtual community to a physical community,” says Roger Bennett, vice president of the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies.
Abitbol and other bloggers shared their thoughts recently at [email protected], a conference for Jewish students and recent college graduates organized by Rabbi Yonah Bookstein and Rachel Bookstein, campus rabbi and director, respectively, at several Hillels in Southern California.
This spring’s conference was the Booksteins’ second effort at turning virtual communities into face-to-face friendships.
It seemed to work. All over the conference, people smiled and hugged as they put faces to the personalities they knew from Jewlicious, Jewschool, Canonist and a dozen or so other blogs.
“You’re TAltman?” one young man shouted gleefully as he outed a popular blog contributor.
The personal bonds created by these ongoing Web conversations can be strong. New York writer Esther Kustanowitz, who runs three blogs and contributes regularly to others, met several bloggers from her sites at the conference. They’d never met before, but she says they felt like old friends.
“It’s a subversion of the usual construct of celebrity,” she says. “You know people not by how they look, but from the inside out.”
But are those virtual ties real? Not always, Kustanowitz cautions: “The intervening layer of technology can create false intimacy, as well as bring people together.”
Katlyn McKenna begs to differ. A communications lecturer at Beersheba’s Ben-Gurion University, McKenna researched relationship-forming on the Internet for her doctorate. She found that people who meet online reveal more about their true selves, like each other better and stay together longer than people who meet first in person.
McKenna started her own blog a year before she moved to Israel last fall, and found herself part of a worldwide discussion about aliyah. Within 24 hours of her arrival, she was hearing from people who read her blog, and had “an instant community” of new friends.
“The federations are freaking out,” says Abitbol, who says Jewlicious.com gets 10,000 hits a day. They needn’t feel threatened, he says, if they would accept that young Jews are scattered, secular and unaffiliated, and that the old ways of bringing them together no longer work.
“In the past, if you wanted to communicate with fellow Jews, you went to synagogue or the JCC. Now some people are uncomfortable in those traditional places; they want to get together online. We’re trying to offer a Jewish option,” he says.
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