Washington Jewish Week Profiles NJDC’s Innovative Social Networking

Aaron Keyak — March 5, 2009 – 12:00 pm | Democrats Comments (0) Add a comment

This week’s Washington Jewish Week includes an article titled, “‘Tweeting’ Shabbat Online: social network offers Shabbat reading for the new media masses.”

Shabbat reading is a weekly NJDC blog post with interesting articles from the past week. Come join the conversation tomorrow by following and contributing at #shabbatreading. (If you don’t have a twitter account yet, sign up now!)

Here’s the beginning:

Newspaper publishers cringe at the thought of someone like Aaron Keyak.

Though the 24-year-old had long received The New York Times on weekends, economic straits forced him to make “the painful to decision to cancel” his subscription earlier this year.

“The only reason I continued my Times subscription was because I read it on Shabbat,” said Keyak, who wouldn’t use a computer on the Sabbath. “Then I realized that I could just print out the articles before Shabbat.”

With the keyword “free” in mind, the D.C. resident began bringing home a stack of articles Friday afternoons with the thought of “making online media available on Shabbat.”

The experiment, he says, led him to stretch the concept to his job at the National Jewish Democratic Council. As the NJDC’s press secretary, Keyak is the gatekeeper of the group’s Web site and blog, where each week new and old media collide into the definitive Shabbat Reading list.

“NJDC has been working on expanding our presence on the blogosphere so I decided if this is something I’m doing for myself, others may be interested, too,” Keyak said.

On Jan. 30, Keyak wrote his first Shabbat Reading blog posting, where he included several links to feature-length articles published in a variety of mainstream news organizations.

His goal, Keyak said, was to get people reading and thinking during the Sabbath.

“Too often we read the same topics every single day, so I’m hoping to have some diversity,” he said. “I’m using Shabbat as an organizing principle [and] since it’s fundamentally Jewish, it’s a unifying factor; this isn’t Democratic reading, it’s Shabbat reading.

“Since that initial post, and with the help of the nouveau networking Web site Twitter, Keyak said his concept “has really taken off. People really know what Shabbat Reading is!”

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