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What I’ve Been Up To Lately
- mazel tov to @bluenatic and @grandstreet on the birth of their baby girl 2 weeks ago
- RT @JTownCrier: Tropper? Kolko? Margulies? Balkany? Dwek? Rubashkin? NO. Moetzes Gedolei Torah condemn AVI WEISS as more offensive. 2 weeks ago
- Rorschach from Watchmen is the new Freddy Krueger http://bit.ly/7s61Cj 2 weeks ago
- More updates...
Lamed Hei
In today’s Forward:
Scurrilous barbs and sharp-tongued insults are routinely tossed back and forth through cyberspace from one Jewish blogger to another, appearing in long threads in the sections reserved for reader comments. The invective often revolves around political stances on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with bloggers on the left and on the right painting one another into corners and caricaturing one another’s beliefs.
“Because of the challenging views I’ve expressed with regards to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I’ve been called a Zionazi by Left-wingers and a self-hating Jew by Right-wingers,” Daniel Sieradski, founder of the blog Jewschool.com, wrote in an e-mail to the Forward. “I’ve had people write that I, personally, am why the Holocaust happened.”
In recent months, Sieradski said, he has begun editing reader comments on his blog to keep the conversation civil. But his first attempt at reconfiguring Jewish blogger etiquette came in 2005, when Sieradski, 28, launched a campaign to lift the language out of the gutter. “Jewish Bloggers for Responsible Speech Online” invited Jewish bloggers to insert a photograph of the Chofetz Chayyim, a 19th-century Lithuanian Jewish scholar who redacted the religious laws governing speech, on their Web sites. The picture would then link to an explanation of the edicts against speaking negatively of others, known in Jewish law as lashon harah. The move, Sieradski said, grew out of his frustration over verbal skirmishes with a competing Jewish group blog, Jewlicious.com, founded by David Abitbol. Dozens of Jewish bloggers have since added the link, Sieradski said, but Abitbol’s operation is not among them.
Abitbol, a 42-year-old Jerusalem resident, said that to adopt a code of speech for the Jewish blogosphere would tamp down the free and open debate that gives it its zest. “There’s a lot of testosterone on the Internet, a lot of swagger,” he said. What makes “the blogosphere interesting is the fact that it is dynamic and anything can happen.”
I realize you’re in a bubble. The shape of the geopolitical reality from whence you came has shifted immensely in the past few days. Are you up for offering analysis?
CD
Good luck with that anti-loshon-hara campaign… you’ll need it. Not listed among the Jewish world’s many strengths is the ability to really listen to each other respectfully and have civil dialogue. We’re just not good at it. Polarization, disrespect, lack of moderation, and ad hominem attacks are hallmarks of Jewish discussion in just about every part of the Jewish world, religious and secular, left and right. Only a few exceptions, who usually get attacked from every side…
we need to hang with Quakers more, IMO. They have that respect and listening thing DOWN.
To quote Kurt Tucholsky, “Most people’s cruelty is a lack of imagination, and their brutality [is] ignorance.” At least it has been my impression that the less people actually know about a subject they are “discussing”, the more likely they are to take their exchange of thoughts onto an inappropriately humiliating personal level of conversation. On the other hand I can understand that people may get a little hot under the collar if a certain subject is of high importance to them, but then again, I assume most bloggers / chatters are adults, and I can only just kindly require them to behave accordingly. Just as I would not let a guest in my house behave in a way that purposedly upsets me, I would not find any kind of behaviour in the blogsphere acceptable, Jewish or what-not. BTW, one of Europe’s most important databases of Jewish intelligencia (www.hagalil.com – more than 47,000,000 hits in 2006) reflects all kinds of positions on religion and the Middle East, but people there manage to act decently for the most part.
Oooops, of course I meant to say “kindly request”…