Twitter and Jewish Identity

Aaron Keyak — June 12, 2009 – 9:57 am | Comments (0) Add a comment

Today, Washington Jewish Week’s Adam Kredo wrote a piece, “Tweets—with substance Young Jews look to Twitter Web site to rediscover Jewish identity.”

The article begins:

In 140 or fewer characters, Lisa Kaneff can easily tell you why she felt disconnected from the Greater Washington Jewish community: “I couldn’t find my niche. No one was quite as Trendy/Geeky/Social/Goofy and Jewish as I was.”

Writing via e-mail in the breezy style of Twitter—the social networking Web site that requires users to post messages using no more than 140 characters—Kaneff utilized her penchant for pith to join a budding online community of alienated Jews.

After hopping about for more than a year to various Jewish events around the D.C. area in hopes of erasing her religious isolation, Kaneff says that she’s finally found her “kind of people” on Twitter, and she’s hardly alone in that pursuit.

Here were my thoughts:

Aaron Keyak, who uses Twitter both personally and for his job as the National Jewish Democratic Council’s press secretary, noted that because the site allows users to tailor what they see, as well as their interlocutors, users develop “a deeper connection to what’s going on in the Jewish community.”

As opposed to Jewish communal events, where “other factors beside your interests dictate who you talk to,” the online universe provides a larger window into a narrow world, Keyak said.

Click here to read the entire article…

Comments

There are no comments for this entry