• An Israeli Facebook group is asking Netanyahu to wait until after Madonna’s May 29 concert in Tel Aviv to attack Iran. [Haaretz]

• Attention Long Islanders: your synagogue’s caterer might have cooked coconut shrimp in the temple’s kosher kitchen. [NYT]

• Major Republican donor Sheldon Adelson’s business, Las Vegas Sands, is under federal investigation. [Reuters]

• A timeline of the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s changing story on the Planned Parenthood funding cut (and an open letter to CEO Nancy Brinker). [ProPublica]

• A Marine sniper team posed with a flag that looked a lot like a Nazi SS flag in Afghanistan. [AP]

It’s Oprah! on Chabad TV!

• The Obama administration may be looking to weaken sanctions targeting Iran’s central bank. [Washington Jewish Week]

• If President Abbas chooses not to seek re-election, Prime Minister Fayyad may run to replace him. Unfortunately, Thomas Friedman has been denied the franchise in the Palestinian territories. [JPost]

• Former President Katsav, who’s going to prison for rape, requests our sympathy. [NYT]

• Corruption at Budapest’s Jewish cemetery. Sounds like a Kafka story! Except in Budapest, not Prague. But still! [JTA]

• Yossarian was not a Jew, according to his creator Joseph Heller. [JTA]

Mark Zuckerberg’s photos were leaked because Facebook’s privacy protections are poor. I’ll turn this over to Morpheus:

But it seems appropriate to remember Ilya Zhitomirskiy, who was found dead Saturday in San Francisco, likely the victim of suicide, at 22 (I know). With three friends from NYU, he created Diaspora*, a social network intended to be the open source antithesis of Facebook—and what could be more Jewish than that (and that name!)? Born in Moscow to two mathematicians, Zhitomirskiy was, according to Diaspora* mentor Eben Moglen, the most idealistic of the site’s founders.

Ilya Zhitomirskiy Dies at 22; Co-Founded Social Network [NYT]
Earlier: The Facebook Diaspora*

• Former President Jimmy Carter on what should happen following the likely U.N. status upgrade. [NYT]

• The 18-year-old Palestinian convicted of murdering the five Fogel family members was sentenced to five consecutive life-sentences. He expressed no regret. [Ynet]

• A half-Arab, half-Jewish woman provokes basically a bomb squad for riding on an airplane on 9/11 while looking Mideastern. [The Atlantic James Fallows]

• Diamonds are the Jews’ best friend. [TNR The Book]

• Faceglat: kosher Facebook. (Faceplant.) [The Telegraph]

Danny Ayalon reports (with cartoons). You decide?

• The grandson of the sage Baba Sali and a rabbi considered a Kabbalah expert in his own right was murdered, stabbed, at his yeshiva in Israel. He was 70. A suspect is in custody. [Haaretz]

• Ahmad Tibi, the Knesset’s deputy speaker and likely the most prominent Israeli Arab politician, calls for a boycott of all companies aiding the settlement enterprise and decries the anti-boycott law. [IHT]

• A judge removed the circumcision initiative from the San Francisco ballot, and appeal may be prohibitive. [Ynet]

• Of course, in the Bay Area, many including Jews are rethinking the practice nonetheless. (Hint: that’s how it’s supposed to happen, not with coercive laws imposing norms.) [NYT]

• The latest Facebook revolution? It’s in Israel. [Haaretz]

• Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak will be visiting his home-away-from-home—the New York-D.C. Acela corridor—tomorrow and Friday. [The Envoy]

• Facebook will not close pages that deny the Holocaust, for reasons of free speech. A survivors group has criticized the company. [JTA]

• Harold Bloom’s favorite book in the Bible is Jonah, and here he explains why. [NYRB]

• French President Nicolas Sarkozy became the first European leader to call for a two-state solution that recognizes Israel as “for the Jewish people.” [Contentions]

• The skinniest house in the world is being built in Warsaw for Tablet Magazine columnist Etgar Keret. [Fast Company]

We all need someone …

• That said, the P.A. also expressed willingness to enter talks even without a settlement freeze, a recognition of their weakened position. [AP/WP]

• The Hamas-Fatah honeymoon really does seem to be winding to a rapid close. [JPost]

• Secretary of State Clinton said the flotilla that plans to sail for Gaza soon is not “necessary or useful.” [Ynet]

• Prime Minister Netanyahu’s son, 19, has posted fairly nasty things about Arabs and Muslims on his Facebook page. At least there were no crotch-shots! [AP/WP]

• Glenn Beck will visit Auschwitz and broadcast from nearby. This will end well. [TPM/Vos Iz Neias?]

• In response to Hamas’ refusal to let the Red Cross visit Shalit, Netanyahu announced that prisoners in Israeli jails would face tougher conditions, losing privileges such as educational coursework opportunities. “We will give them all that they deserve according to international law but nothing beyond that,” he said. [Haaretz]

• Apple has removed the “Third Intifada” app from its iPad and iPhone app stores, following a complaint from Israel’s information minister (among others). [Ynet]

• Some Modern Orthodox teens are keeping what has become known as “half Shabbos;” that is, observing Shabbat but still texting their way through the day of rest. Texted greetings of “gd Shbs” have replaced the more traditional, wordy “Good Shabbos.” Kids these days. [The Jewish Week]

• Greece’s foreign ministry urged Greek citizens and ships not to take part in the Gaza-bound flotilla soon to depart from Athens. [JTA]

• Contributing editor Mayim Bialik has 7301 ‘fans’ of her official Facebook page. You go, girl! [Facebook]

We are saddened to report the tragic death of Nextbook Press social media manager Margarita Korol’s 14-year-old brother, Eli. Donations may be made in memory of Eli, who was a budding engineer, to the Union of Concerned Scientists. [Margarita Korol]

“Disbelief is the first feeling you have to overcome when you hear that your friend has been detained by Egypt’s dreaded secret police, the Mukhabarat,” Ronen Shnidman wrote about Ilan Grapel, the American-Israeli Emory law student arrested in Egypt on what Israeli officials and Grapel’s friends and family say are trumped-up charges of spying for the Mossad. Grapel is accused partly of playing a role in Egypt’s anti-government protests. Israeli newspapers exhibited a large dose of skepticism about the Egyptian allegations, with Yedioth Ahronoth running the front-page headline “Israel: Egyptian Alila,” which means “false accusation” and is used in the phrase alilat dam, or “blood libel.” In a sidebar headlined “Confused” (Mevulbalim), the paper laid out contradictory reports coming from Egypt about various aspects of the incident, including Grapel’s name. Israel Hayom described Grapel as “Not a Mossad agent, not James Bond: A student arrested on a false charge.”

Israelis are organizing a Facebook revolution of their own. The lofty goal? A consumer boycott of cottage cheese—an Israeli staple that locals refer to as just plain cottage, pronounced “KOHT-edge”—in protest of its rising price. The Facebook protest pages have rather unwieldy names, like “We’re not buying cottage cheese until they abolish the price hike” and “We’re not buying cottage cheese, such a basic product whose price has reached nearly 8 shekels, for a month.” Yedioth announced the arrival of “The Cottage Cheese Protest” on its front page and Maariv ran a graphic showing the price of a standard container of the cheese curd rising from 4.84 shekels in 2006 to 7.80 shekels as of the beginning of this month. It reported that more than 15,000 people have pledged not to buy cottage cheese for the month of July. But Globes, a financial newspaper, said that supermarkets were reporting that discount offers (possibly in response to the protests) had actually boosted cottage cheese sales by between 25 percent and 50 percent by the end of the week.

A minor uproar arose this week over Israel Defense Forces chief Benny Gantz’s decision that the Yizkor memorial prayer for fallen soldiers should mention God. The original version of the IDF Yizkor was written by Zionist leader Berl Katznelson, who referred to the people (or nation) of Israel—“May am Yisrael remember its sons and daughters”—rather than to God. The wording was changed after the Six-Day War by the army’s chief rabbi at the time, Shlomo Goren, and both versions have been used since. Advocates of the secular version say they want to restore Katznelson’s wording, but as a commenter in one Hebrew chat room noted, Katznelson’s version is itself based on the prayer recited on the Jewish holidays that begins Yizkor Elohim, “May God remember.”

Israeli newspapers devoted a lot of space to the 50th annual Hebrew Book Week, which features book fairs and sales across the country. In a Maariv article titled “Week of Magic” (Shavua shel Kesem), prominent Israeli novelist Zeruya Shalev compared Book Week—which began this week and will last for 10 days this year—to other annual celebrations, like birthdays and the Passover Seder. “In no other country is there a week like this, which has come around every summer for 50 years, just like the heat waves,” she wrote. A Yedioth article headlined Dapei Zahav (literally “Pages of Gold,” which is what Israelis call the Yellow Pages) also reflected the idea of Book Week as a national celebration, but put it a little differently: “And here, finally, is a holiday that doesn’t involve kugel.”

One bright spring afternoon, the Communist Party U.S.A., the Socialist Party U.S.A., and the Democratic Socialists of America each sent a representative to an agreeably neutral spot—they picked the Hungarian Pastry Shop in Morningside Heights, for its lack of Wi-Fi and unlimited coffee—to lay out how the three mighty wings of the American Left would merge into one, and go from there to kickstart the revolution (an admittedly Leninist kink that the higher-ups had smoothed over by letting the Democratic Socialists keep single-payer health care).

Hands were shaken, hamentashen noshed (the Communist briefly objected to the delicacy’s religious provenance, but relented when it was noted that Haman was an oppressor of the lower class if ever there were one), and notebooks taken out. The task? Devise an effective social media strategy for the revolution.

The Democratic Socialist spoke first. “Friends,” he began, “we must begin the revolution on Facebook. Everyone is already on it, it is the most mainstream of social network platforms, and it allows everyone a presence while allowing the very best to enhance their profiles, all in a pre-set framework that ensures ultimate equality.”

“Heresy!” cried the Socialist (at the Democratic Socialist). The Communist sat silently sipping his thick, black coffee, wearing a pompous smirk. The Socialist continued: “Facebook unduly restricts the user’s freedom, and therefore inequalities shall inevitably arise. It is only, rather, with MySpace,” she concluded, “thought obsolete I know, that the user gains true liberty to do whatever he or she will with his or her page, and thereby fulfill the dictum: ‘To each, according to his need; from each, according to his ability.’”

“MySpace!” snarked the Democratic Socialist at the Socialist, as the Communist continued to sit quietly. “You can’t start a revolution on MySpace! Half the people won’t know what it is!”

“We shall teach them!” the Socialist replied.

“Moreover,” the Democratic Socialist continued, as though not having heard the Socialist, “only rank materialists rank sites. Never! The Democratic Socialists shall never allow it!”

The Socialist began to respond, but the Communist just began laughing. This confounded the Socialist and the Democratic Socialist, and they remained silent as the Communist, turning suddenly fierce and intense, began:

This is all so like you, comrades, of you and your accomodationist, incrementalist, lax ways of thinking. Equality! Freedom! Liberty! Bah! We must apply dialectical rigor, always. Capitalism is not the enemy—it is our unwitting and inevitable partner in revolution. Facebook and MySpace are ways of working against the system, within it. The care one takes, the curatorial capacities—all of these inhibit the gaining of a true class consciousness. They will fail at revolution, and at everything else besides. Only a social media that replicates capitalism, in all its monstrous sublimity, its ever-increasing and seemingly frictionless velocity, its discursivity and its arbitrary gangs and its instantaneous transactions and flow, only this will heat the system to the breaking point and bring about the New Society. @Socialist, @Democratic Socialist, the revolution may not be televised, but assuredly the revolution must be tweeted. The revolution will be tweeted. #unite!

And with that, the Communist stormed out of the pastry shop.

“Typical Communist dogmatic insolence,” the Socialist sighed, turning to the Democratic Socialist. “He left without paying his bill.”

The game’s dark, dystopian tenor and its plethora of stars—Lost’s Harold Perrineau plays the terrorist, comedian Margaret Cho and former 24 president Cherry Jones also play supporting parts—aren’t the only things setting America 2049 apart. Created by the human rights group Breakthrough, the game was designed to raise awareness for an array of social-justice issues, from immigration to racism. Clicking on a grid representing realistic maps of major American cities, the player uncovers videos, encrypted notes, newspaper clippings, and other information relevant to the mystery at hand. As is the case with every worthwhile game, the clock ticks here, too, urging the player not only to find the alleged terrorist but also to decide whether it is the fugitive or the federal government he should fear.

More than 20,000 players have played the game since its release, according to a Breakthrough spokeswoman, a small number compared to the hordes who flock to a megahit like Farmville but an immense one considering America 2049’s demanding gameplay and thought-provoking themes. In addition, Breakthrough produced a series of events, held in institutions such as the Tenement Museum on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Mich., allowing players to explore in person some of the real-life issues raised by the game.

For America 2049 to be both entertaining and educational, however, Breakthrough needed a scholar who could help to weave a rich historical fabric into the game’s fast-paced action. Enter Hasia Diner, a professor of history and the director of the Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History at New York University. Diner is best known for her most recent book, We Remember With Reverence and Love, which puts to rest the myth that American Jews were silent in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. She has rarely played video games, she said, but when Breakthrough approached her two years ago with the idea for America 2049, she was intrigued. Together with three of her graduate students, she put together a treasure trove of historical artifacts—from the New York Times’ coverage of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911 to a poster for the 1928 movie Abie’s Irish Rose, about an interfaith relationship between a Catholic woman and a Jewish man—that are strewn throughout the game. These historical objects both help make the game world feel more realistic, and allow players the opportunity to examine these rarely seen gems firsthand.

The game, Diner said, was an elegant way to bring to the fore a host of historical facts crucial to our contemporary political debates yet often drowned out by the din of popular culture. On immigration, for example, “so much of the discussion that goes on now is disconnected from history,” she said. “From the right, it is as though this is the first time the society has faced this issue, and we’re standing on the verge of the apocalypse. Many on the left are also wrong, saying that because most immigrants are non-white, their patterns of integration are going to be different.” Neither position is correct, she argued, and the game, by introducing such historical figures as the thinker and immigration activist Jane Addams, might help disabuse players of some of their misconceptions.

That, of course, is a tall order, particularly for a bit of software that resides amid status updates, pokes, and other distractions. Although games are increasingly being viewed as tools for raising awareness for some of the world’s thorniest issues—next week, a conference for Games for Change, the leading organization promoting the development of high-minded interactive software, attracted hundreds of programmers, activists, and keynote speaker Al Gore—the majority of games that achieve mass popularity are like Angry Birds: fun, fast, and free of any larger meaning. Still, by allowing players to experience decision-making, even of a simulated sort, firsthand, games continue to attract social entrepreneurs who seek to capitalize on the medium’s multimedia capabilities and mass appeal.

“It’s important to us to move beyond conventions, to really look at the fabric of values that underlines human rights, and engage a community of people across issues and across identities,” said Mallika Dutt, Breakthrough’s founder and president. It was a hard-learned lesson: In 2008, the organization produced another game, ICED, or I Can End Deportation. It was popular, but it received divisive reactions, depending on where players stood on the issue of undocumented immigrants. The idea behind America 2049, Dutt said, was to create a more inclusive and comprehensive game.

“We see human rights not as an us-and-them proposition, but as an we’re-all-in-this-together proposition,” she said. “The game grew out of this philosophy. Gaming allows folks to be in the shoes of someone else, and experience a set of issues differently than just listening to a talk or reading an article.”

This, Diner believes, is a good approach to ensuring that the game’s message will eventually trickle down and inspire its young players to learn more about the subject matters under discussion. “Somebody playing the game may see a course in immigration history in college and take it,” Diner said. “They might be listening to Fox News and say, ‘Wait a minute, that’s what they were saying about the Irish.’ Hopefully something will click.”

And even though the work on America 2049 was far removed from Diner’s usual scholarship on American Jewish history, she said she had found much in the process of digging up documents about disease outbreaks, immigration woes, and prejudice that correlates with her traditional expertise. “A lot of what Jewish studies looks at is not unique to Jews,” she said, “and needs to be put side by side with like content. Much of what was posited as a specifically Jewish story is not.” Unlike England or Argentina, Diner added, “where Jewish immigrants were the stand-outs, Jewish immigrants to America were protected by having all of those other folks come in at the same time.” To truly understand Jewish American history, she said, “we have to understand the larger picture.”

But you know who doesn’t like Facebook? Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He called it an “ugly technology,” its pages “ugly and horrible.” If you agree with him, why not show your support by becoming one of the nearly 800,000 who Like his official Facebook page?

Inspired by Facebook, Israeli Couple Names Their Daughter Like [DPA/Haaretz]
Turkey’s Erdogan Slams Facebook [Ynet]
Related: Web Jew.0 [Tablet Magazine]

• Sidney Harman, the prominent California industrialist, wife of Rep. Jane Harman, and chairman of Newsweek, died at 92. [NYT]

• You know the really salty lox that you call “belly lox”? Well, all really salty lox is lox. The non-salty stuff isn’t lox, it’s smoked salmon. Consider yourself educated. [Diner’s Journal]

• The lost Jews of … Indianapolis! [American Thinker]

• The legend of Sam Fuld grows: He could have hit for the cycle Monday night, but instead, despite his own manager’s entreaties, instinctively took second base for his second double of the game. [Kaplan’s Korner]

• Egypt’s government plans to raise the price of natural gas it sells to Israel to match it to world prices. [JPost]

Apparently, early on, an alleged collaborator suggested to Mark Zuckerberg that Facebook have a “Christian corner.” The related Social Network parody below is old, but I hadn’t seen it, so maybe you haven’t, either?

This week’s winner is frequent commenter “fw,” who writes, in response to Facebook’s explanation that it removed a page calling for the “Third Palestinian Intifada” because comments had devolved into direct incitements to violence: “The difference between calls for violence and calls for protest is all the difference in the world. It’s the difference between suicide bombers and peaceful protesters in Tahrir Square, between the dignity of the Egyptians and the depravity of Hamas.”

“fw” will receive a copy of Deborah Lipstadt’s brand-new The Eichmann Trial, which provides eloquent evidence that evil should never be ignored, and that its manifestations are never, in fact, banal.

The Eichmann Trial [Nextbook Press]

The reversal came, not after complaints, but because “after the publicity of the page more comments deteriorated to direct calls for violence.” While initially administrators deleted these comments, eventually they actually “began to participate in the calls.”

Not to ascribe motives to strangers, but it sounds like the administrators, who were repeatedly warned to cut it out, decided to change strategy and provoke a confrontation. Dislike.

Facebook: Intifada page removed when comments ‘deteriorated to direct calls for violence’ [Haaretz]
Earlier: Facebook Pulls Down ‘Third Intifada’ Page

I also recall reading on the page the threat that, should Facebook take the page down, all Arabs would boycott Facebook. We’ll see!

Facebook Page Supporting Palestinian Intifada Pulled Down [CNN]
Related: Israel Tells Facebook: Remove Intifada Page [Ynet]

But Yuter’s Internet presence is more than just an outlet for a self-proclaimed “geek” with a background in computer science. It is an important part of his strategy as a religious leader. Complementing liturgical and pastoral activity with a tech-savvy approach, Yuter seeks to engage online those whom he might not reach in his pews. After all, he explained, a rabbi’s task is to determine how to apply ancient traditions to the present. “It seems hypocritical to say you can engage in the modern world if I’m unwilling to do so myself,” he told me.

As proof of his belief that being religious means interacting with your world and your surroundings, Rabbi Yuter operates a lively Twitter feed and has regularly updated his blog for almost a decade. “Embracing Twitter is not in any way at odds with the religious side,” he maintained of his tweets, which are also synced to appear as status updates on his Facebook page (he’s been on that other social networking site since 2005, back when only college and graduate students were allowed to join and my grandpa wasn’t on it).

“If a rabbi knows Twitter, and knows it well, it’s reassuring for the people who engage with them,” he insisted. Although very few of his congregants are Twitter users, Yuter has gained quite a virtual flock: 1,399 Twitter followers, to be precise. With 9,262 tweets and counting (no, seriously—he’s probably tweeting right this second) since joining in 2009, Yuter has clearly embraced this new way to reach people.

A look through his feed reveals tweets about synagogue goings-on (“Shiur went for 1:20ish today, working on condensing the audio for uploading #whatrabbisdo”), general rabbi thoughts (“I really wish Rabbis would be better about footnoting their articles—sweeping statements w/o citations are not helpful”), and an awful lot of puns: “Don’t try riding livestock unless you know how to steer,” “Baritones and bassists tend to be low key,” and—my personal favorite—“The importance of Tu Bishvat in Judaism has gradually been reseeding.” Did I mention his blog is called Yutopia?

While Yuter credited Twitter with granting him access to a wider audience, he doesn’t think it’s the right approach for everyone. As a part-time rabbi at a small synagogue, Yuter has spare time to dedicate to his online efforts, including fielding various questions posed to him by random followers. And, of course, if someone discovers him on Twitter and then decides to check out Stanton Street Shul the next weekend, all the better (don’t forget to check in!) Still, he understood that his approach might not be for everyone. “I’m going to reach people that others can’t, and others will reach people that I can’t,” he said. “And I’m okay with that.”

“Happened to hear” is putting it mildly; an aficionado of good gossip, I tuned in attentively as soon as the first snippets of conversation made their way across the airplane’s narrow aisle. A quick glance taught me that the conversationalists were both in their twenties or early thirties. One, a gaunt young man, hair down to the nape of his neck, chin unshaved and clothes unwashed, was, he said, a musician, traveling south to get in touch with the blues. The other, a petite woman wearing tights, boots, and a dress on which three different animal-skin prints each vied for supremacy, introduced herself as an associate publicist at a large fashion house.

The man enumerated his favorite bands; the woman nodded her head and named some of her own. Then, she named five of her favorite movies. He reciprocated. They went on like that for two or three hours, listing favorite this and favorite that, from restaurants to Disney rides. Their conversation was inane, but it stayed with me long after I landed; listening to the two, I realized, was less like eavesdropping on people and more like watching two Facebook profiles communicate—the personalities they presented were nothing more than an amalgam of preferences, a thick but meaningless pile of likes and dislikes. I went to bed that day feeling utterly hopeless.

Reading this week’s parasha made me feel a bit better. It begins with a strange last request. On his deathbed, the ailing Jacob summons Joseph and delivers some concrete instructions: “If I have now found favor in your eyes,” he says, “now place your hand beneath my thigh, and you shall deal with me with lovingkindness and truth; do not bury me now in Egypt.”

Taken literally, this is not a complicated moment—like his ancestors before him, Jacob wishes to be buried by his father and grandfather, in Canaan. But if that’s all there is to it, why use terms like lovingkindness and truth, terms that introduce a moral dimension to what at first seems like a straightforward question of real estate?

The reason, I believe, has to do less with location and more with affirmation; by asking for a posthumous trip to Canaan, Jacob demonstrates to the next generations that he hadn’t abandoned his spiritual and historical commitments. Life in Egypt may be comfortable and convenient—the whole business of slavery is still in the distant future—but Jacob knows that his heart lies in that same sliver of earth on which Abraham, acting on God’s orders, settled years ago, and he realizes that to be true to himself, he must return there.

It’s a profound lesson in authenticity, and one that my generation would do well to learn. Selecting Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, as its person of the year, Time magazine largely failed to observe the very same point that Jacob, begging Joseph for truth and lovingkindness, understood intimately, namely that even the most elaborate and efficient constructs mean very little if they don’t represent who we truly are and what we really want. Egypt was grand, but it just wasn’t for Joseph. And Facebook is terrific, but it just isn’t for real people.

Writing in the New York Review of Books last month,  Zadie Smith captured this point neatly. “It feels important to remind ourselves, at this point, that Facebook, our new beloved interface with reality, was designed by a Harvard sophomore with a Harvard sophomore’s preoccupations,” she wrote. “What is your relationship status? (Choose one. There can be only one answer. People need to know.) Do you have a ‘life’? (Prove it. Post pictures.) Do you like the right sort of things? (Make a list. Things to like will include: movies, music, books and television, but not architecture, ideas, or plants.)”

Smith’s sentiments would’ve been all but inscrutable to the young things chatting each other up on my flight. In Facebook, the scruffy musician and the perky fashionista found more than a communications tool; in Facebook, they found a cognitive system, a grand metaphor, a way of life. The brilliance of Facebook, after all, is its ability to transform the messy business of living into a series of coherent, undemanding actions and statements. The way to like something is to “like” it by pressing a button. The way to talk to someone is by posting a few words on their wall. The way to be yourself is to pick a few favorite bands.

This, computer scientist Jaron Lanier warns us, is a disaster in the making. The title of Lanier’s new book elegantly captures his main thesis: You Are Not a Gadget. Our enthusiasm about Facebook and the other emerald cities of the Web 2.0 generation, Lanier writes, is “based on [a] philosophical mistake … the belief that computers can presently represent human thought or human relationships. These are things computers cannot currently do.”

What computers can do is think in code, a series of simple, mathematical statements. Human beings, on the other hand, can imagine and dream, hope and despair, hate and love with all their hearts. When they meet—truly meet, face to face and at leisure—with their friends—true friends, not an assortment of barely recognizable acquaintances living on the periphery of an enormous virtual network—they are capable of subtle wonders. If, instead, they opt for convenience, if they reduce their thoughts to brief posts, if they don’t bother finding out who they really are outside the bounds of their Facebook profiles, they’re doomed to wither into a virtual oblivion.

But if they are to resist, they have Jacob to look up to for inspiration. Like him, they can demand, in the name of lovingkindness and truth, that life become a journey away from Egypt and all that is transitory and fake toward Canaan and all that is eternal and real.

In this latest round, Jews include: Sydney Kimmel; Carl Icahn; Theodore Forstmann; Nicolas Berggruen; David and Barbara Green; and Facebook co-founders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz (known in my house as “the other Facebook guy”). So 7 out of 17! 26 out of 57! Not bad at all, and good for them.

Zuckerberg and Icahn Join Buffett and Gates on Giving Pledge List [Dealbook]
Earlier: Generous Jews

• The IDF uses Facebook to find draft dodgers. [Fast Company]

• Settlers. Love. Palin. [Ben Smith]

• The link between Prime Minister Netanyahu and George W. Bush is an author and political adviser named Ron Dermer. [Politico]

• The United States has reportedly put the freeze-extension deal in writing, as Netanyahu has demanded. [JTA]

• Three experts say America should publish a “declaration of principles” concerning the Mideast peace process. More getting things down on paper. [IHT]

Below: An Iranian weightlifter appears on a platform along with an Israeli weightlifter, while “Hatikvah” is played. For this (via Kaplan’s Korner), he has been banned from weightlifting for life.

Of course, as Liel Leibovitz argued in these digital pages, there is something inherently Jewish about Facebook and other Web 2.0 platforms. And something inherently threatening: <--more-->

Under the influence of Wahabism, the new zealots find in Web 2.0 a terrifying threat to an intolerant and hierarchical stream of Islam that spends as much energy crushing intrafaith competition as it does opposing foreign influence. Unlike China, which objects to social media platforms and search engines only when they are used to disseminate anti-government messages … they know that the most radical thing about [Google founder Sergey] Brin, Zuckerberg, and the technologies they created is that they encourage constant commentary, ongoing debate, endless involvement. It’s a way of thinking that is very bad for oppressive corporations, zealous theocracies, and anyone else wishing to exert complete control over information. But it is very good for the Jews.

Palestinian Blogger Angers West Bank Muslims [NYT]
Saudi Arabia Blocks Facebook [Ynet]
Video dispatch 2: Iran: Zuckerberg created Facebook on behalf of the Mossad[Mideast Dispatch Archive]
Related: Web Jew.0 [Tablet Magazine]

This week, writers Liel Leibovitz (today, on Web 2.0), Phil Taylor (on information warfare generally), Amy Zalman (on Israeli information warfare specifically), Mideast columnist Lee Smith (on Hezbollah’s messaging), Michael Tanji (on the Stuxnet malware), and Yossi Melman (it’s a surprise!) will explore the cultural and political implications of Jewish and Israeli use of the Internet. If you want, bookmark this page, where all the Web Wars! articles will be linked to once they are published.

As I say, the week wasn’t timed in conjunction with the Facebook movie, and it also wasn’t timed in conjunction with the revelation that Stuxnet, the computer worm that apparently targets Iran’s nuclear program, contains a line of code with the word “Myrtus”—a subtle reference to Esther, that famed Jewish subverter of Persian power. These coincidences, rather, serve to buttress the resonance of our theme.

Web Wars! [Tablet Magazine]
Web Jew.0 [Tablet Magazine]
In a Computer Worm, a Possible Biblical Clue [NYT]
Earlier: The World’s Most Powerful Jew

After a Pakistani court barred access to Facebook and 450 other sites suspected of anti-Muslim agitation, many cheered the decision as an effective counter-strike against nefarious Jewish designs. One Pakistani blogger captured the zeitgeist well when he claimed that the initiative to draw Muhammad was “a secret conspiracy of the Jewish lobbies to manipulate the world phenomena of terrorism,” and others took pleasure in pointing out the abundance of Jewish-sounding last names on the executive suites of companies like Google, Oracle, Wikipedia, and eBay. Put bluntly, it seems that many in Pakistan and elsewhere in the Muslim world believe the Internet to be a global Jewish conspiracy.

And here’s the beautiful thing: In some ways, they are right.

There is, of course, no Jewish cabal scheming behind the scenes to entice Muslims and others to join Facebook, use Google, or consult Wikipedia. But a case could be made that the Internet, in its current iteration, commonly referred to as Web 2.0—focused on applications that facilitate user interaction and collaboration—is governed by a logic that is inherently Jewish, a logic that has sustained the Jews as a community for millennia and that propelled a disproportionate number of them—Sergey Brin, Larry Ellison, Jimmy Wales, Mark Zuckerberg—to the helm of Web 2.0’s most important companies.

To understand this logic, we must take into consideration Judaism’s peculiar history. Having scurried off to exile after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E., Jews gradually realized that their old forms of religious life no longer applied. The Sanhedrin, the supreme court in all matters Jewish, was dissolved in 358 C.E., following Constantine’s convening of the Council of Nicaea three decades earlier, which consolidated the Holy Roman Church. The Sanhedrin carried on clandestinely for another half-century, but with the beheading of its last president by the emperor Theodosius II in 425 C.E. came the death of Judaism’s religious hierarchy. The completion of the Quran in 650 C.E. and the rise of the Umayyad Caliphate—which introduced Islam to North Africa, Spain, and Asia—further complicated the situation. Scattered in small communities across the world, and careful not to upset the religious majorities in whose midst they lived, the Jews had no choice but to invent a new way of organizing their world. That way was the Gemara.

Compiled between roughly 350 and 500 C.E., the Gemara contains rabbinic commentaries on the Mishnah, the oral law compiled in the second century C.E. by Rabbi Yehuda Ha’Nasi, one of the Sanhedrin’s most celebrated leaders. While Christianity gravitated towards pithy, concise statements of faith—the Nicene Creed is a masterful example of compact theology—Judaism took the opposite route, opening up the conversation to numerous participants and favoring discussion over dogma. It was, in many ways, a perfect method of keeping a dispersed nation connected. It was a system designed for the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

That last sentence isn’t mine. It was written by the novelist Lev Grossman to describe Time magazine’s Person of the Year issue for 2006. The person the magazine singled out for praise was You, by which they meant the millions of users who update their Facebook profiles, upload videos to YouTube, review books on Amazon, and partake in the myriad platforms that have come to comprise the web as we know it today.

That web, Grossman wrote, wasn’t “the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It’s not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It’s a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter.”

Judaism, of course, has been doing just that for millennia, seeing the creation of commentary and content as the highest—sometimes only—form of religious and communal life. Jimmy Wales, the Jewish creator of Wikipedia, started out by trying to create a top-down, tightly controlled, online encyclopedia; it failed. As soon as he opened his creation to individual content contributions, it became, virtually overnight, one of the Internet’s top 10 most popular websites. Jonathan Rosen deftly made this comparison between the logics of Judaism and the web in his exceptional book-length essay The Talmud and the Internet. “The Internet,” Rosen writes, “which we are continually told binds us all together, nevertheless engenders in me a similar sense of Diaspora, a feeling of being everywhere and nowhere. Where else but in the middle of the Diaspora do you need a home page?”

The same logic still applies. Sergey Brin, Google’s Moscow-born co-founder, told a Jewish magazine recently that as a young boy, “I’ve known for a long time that my father wasn’t able to pursue the career he wanted.” Forced to flee Russia, the Brins lived a nomadic life in Vienna and Paris before settling down in Maryland, where young Sergey felt foreign and misunderstood. By some acquaintances’ accounts, he was still feeling this way two decades later when he quit his Stanford doctoral program to start his company with fellow graduate student Larry Page, another nice Jewish boy.

But persecution needn’t be a part of the equation for the Jewish logic to take hold. Zuckerberg’s childhood home in Westchester, New York, is a long way away from Brin’s repressive Moscow, but, growing up, Facebook’s founder displayed much of the same unease with rigid social hierarchies. Despite often veering away from the facts, the new Zuckerberg biopic, written by Aaron Sorkin, captures the emotional core of Zuckerberg neatly when it pits the lanky geek against two chiseled twins with the unimprovable name of Winklevoss. They were the wealthy, easy-going socialites, he the frustrated outsider, and he took his revenge by upsetting the existing order.

In and of itself, this is not much of an innovation. Bill Gates, after all, did the same thing when he founded Microsoft and reshaped the way we do everything from work to play. But Gates, like so many of the computer industry’s earliest titans, isn’t Jewish, and neither are his ideas—like many of Silicon Valley’s founding fathers, he was interested in structured power and intent simply on replacing one hierarchy with another. Zuckerberg, Brin, and others in the Web 2.0 space are far more radical, doing away with the center altogether and replacing it with countless, smaller nodes of community and influence (Microsoft’s CEO, the longtime Bill Gates lieutenant Steve Ballmer, is also Jewish).

“I never wanted to have information that other people didn’t have,” Zuckerberg told Wired magazine recently. “I just thought it should all be more available.” Of course, Facebook, Google, and other leviathans of technology are far from altruistic enterprises; they seek profit and market share and often act in monopolistic ways to obtain it. And of course, the largest media oligopolies still produce by far the most popular content on the Internet. But consider this tidbit: According to most available data, each one of the millions of songs on Apple’s iTunes music store is downloaded at least once per quarter. Combined, these minor artists overshadow the sales of the Top 40 acts. This is a tremendous economic and cultural shift: Once we are all able to create, upload, and comment on content online, once the popularity of a website is determined by the number of people who seek it out, once we can choose the stuff we like and ignore the rest—once all that happens, we are living in a profoundly Jewish world.

A good way to understand just how radical this shift is would be to look at Forbes magazine’s recently released list of America’s 400 wealthiest individuals: Zuckerberg, who invented a piece of code that allows us all to stay connected and share our thoughts with our friends, is worth nearly a billion dollars more than Steve Jobs, the man who revolutionized the personal computer, the digital media player, and the telephone. Valuated at $15 billion each, Brin and Page are worth twice as much as Zuckerberg. In 10 years, these three young Jewish men have generated a fortune akin, according to some estimates, to the gross domestic product of Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria combined.

Which brings us to Israel. While the Jewish state is home to a robust high-tech industry—at $30 billion a year, the industry accounts for 15 percent of Israel’s GDP but more than 40 percent of the country’s exports—the nation itself has been painfully slow to adapt to the logic of Web 2.0. While Sergey Brin, Larry Ellison, and Mark Zuckerberg all flew to Jerusalem to take part in Israel’s 60th anniversary jubilee in 2008, the Israeli government seems to have learned little from either distinguished guests or its own homegrown talents. Nothing illustrates this fact better than the Israeli foreign ministry’s decision, reached last summer, to spend about $170,000 and hire professional bloggers to post pro-Israeli messages on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms. Such a top-down, centralized approach is anathema to the very logic of Web 2.0, as well as the very logic of Judaism; like the Israeli chief rabbinate’s attempt to consolidate power and become the singular adjudicator of all matters spiritual, Israel’s failure to understand the mechanics of new media suggests that the Jewish state is slouching away from inherent Jewish values, enamored, like so many of its neighbors in the region, with more streamlined, more rigid hierarchical structures.

Which brings us back to Pakistan. Under the influence of Wahabism, the new zealots find in Web 2.0 a terrifying threat to an intolerant and hierarchical stream of Islam that spends as much energy crushing intrafaith competition as it does opposing foreign influence. Unlike China, which objects to social media platforms and search engines only when they are used to disseminate anti-government messages (and which has developed home-grown alternative sites and services), men like Pakistan’s Sidiqque have neatly internalized Marshall McLuhan’s famous quip that the medium is the message. They know that the most radical thing about Brin, Zuckerberg, and the technologies they created is that they encourage constant commentary, ongoing debate, endless involvement. It’s a way of thinking that is very bad for oppressive corporations, zealous theocracies, and anyone else wishing to exert complete control over information. But it is very good for the Jews.

But we actually ended up with Facebook. It is perhaps the dominant Website for the most people on the globe; it boasts 500 million users; the company is probably worth $33 billion. The barricades of privilege that its creator overcame were not run-of-the-mill, but the ultimate: Facebook was not created at a Harvard manqué; it was literally created at Harvard. And the outsider? He is not a random, one-type-out-of-many outsider, but the ultimate type of outsider: He is not a Jew manqué; he is literally a Jew. So is his co-founder (Eduardo Saverin), and one of his two first employees. I can’t prove this isn’t coincidental, but the circumstantial evidence is on my side. Chiefly: We were going to end up with something very like Facebook, but we actually ended up with Facebook, where everyone is the president of their own elite club of one—the Platonic embodiment of the indelibly Jewish alloy of self-hatred and striving.

The Social Network does not need to prove this coincidence: An independent work of creative art, merely based on reality, it is free to impose the Jewish-outsider-takes-on-Harvard narrative, and it does so thrillingly. Zuckerberg, played curly-haired and runt-ish in a hooded sweatshirt by Jesse Eisenberg, is driven by many things—the girlfriend who breaks up with him in the first scene, the excitement of his own genius—but top among them is the slight he feels at having never gained entrée to Harvard’s elite final clubs. (Crucially, Facebook was intially open only to Harvard students, and pretty soon solely to students at elite schools; its present democratic phase is comparatively recent. In the film, Zuckerberg gets off at this exclusivity.)

Zuckerberg can’t stand that Saverin, his best friend, was “punched” by one of the clubs. He can’t stand the Winklevoss twins—the hunky specimens of entrenched WASP masculinity who first approach him with the idea of a Facebook-like site—who, as per house rules, will not admit him past the “bike room” of their club’s house. On the night that he came up with the idea, he and Saverin were attending a supremely tacky Caribbean-themed party at—as he tells the others seated around the table at one of his depositions (both the Winklevosses and Saverin are suing him)—“Alpha Epsilon Pi.” “What’s that?” a lawyer asks. Zuckerberg is almost too mortified to say the words: “A E Pi. It’s the Jewish fraternity.” (Zuckerberg was a member in real life.)

Yet I have to wonder whether The Social Network’s narrative of Jew-against-all is not a bit dated. After all, long gone are the days when Jews were true outsiders at Harvard and (nearly) everywhere else. In 1969, Philip Roth’s Alexander Portnoy could have parents who marveled at their son’s invitation to Gracie Mansion; today, we live in Gracie Mansion (or, rather, we host parties there, and live in a $30 million townhouse in a better neighborhood). One of my favorite lines from my favorite movie, 1978’s Animal House (set in 1962), is: “Bad news: I just checked with the guys at the Jewish house, and they say all our answers to the Psych test were wrong.” Today, you’d make that joke about the Asian house, or the Indian house—the Jewish house is just another house. At Harvard, I can personally attest, there are Jews in even the most elite final clubs. (Myself, I’ve been inside one of them, The Fox, because my oldest friend was a member. I obviously was not allowed upstairs, but I didn’t particularly care.)

One of the best and most telling moments in a movie stuffed with great and telling moments is a line from one of the few characters in the movie older than 22. Saverin notes that, when Facebook launched, Zuckerberg became the Big Man on Campus at a place filled with Nobel Prize winners, Pulitzer Prize winners, a president who had been the Secretary of the Treasury (by the way, the Larry Summers scene is hilarious), and countless other celebrities, including “a movie star.” “Which movie star?” Zuckerberg’s middle-aged lawyer asks with gossip-y curiosity. Zuckerberg and Savarin, by now mortal enemies, nonetheless share the same grimace.

In my personal experience, elite institutions like Harvard have been democratized such that our parents are much more fascinated by the fact that we are friends with a senator’s son or classmates with a movie star than we ourselves are. At Harvard, the final clubs’ upstairs/downstairs dynamic is a relic, and everyone knows it, and so almost nobody cares. (At Columbia, where I matriculated, the closest thing to a final club is St. A’s, which is known mainly for cocaine and the cover of Vampire Weekend’s first album.) So I am tempted to lend greater credence to psychological portraits of Zuckerberg that downplay his Jewish aspect (incidentally, he identifies as an atheist), and the larger “The final club didn’t let me in” story-line (which Zuckerberg explicitly rejects). As I say, I don’t believe Facebook’s overwhelmingly Jewish origins are pure coincidence: There is surely something left over from our ancestors that, like a line of computer code, commands a greater proportion of us to be more boldly innovative than any other people. But I think this explanation can only take us so far.

The lawyer’s question about the Harvard movie star is also, I’m pretty sure, meant as an in-joke: A young attorney taking notes in the deposition room is played by Rashida Jones, a famous actress who graduated in 1997 from, yup, Harvard. In fact, the inaugural cover of 02138, a magazine for Harvard alums, famously declared, over a picture of Jones, “She’s Harvard. So Are You. (Discuss.)” In fact, even as a student Jones was a celebrity, of a sort: Her father is the legendary music producer Quincy Jones.

Of course, her mother is a Jewish woman. She’s Harvard. So’s Zuckerberg. So are many, many other Jews. There is not much else to discuss.

***

Hi, Liel, a person whose views are diametrically opposed to mine on everything and who has no child and therefore no moral authority but is an authority on new media so I bow to that (hereinafter, PVDOMENCNMAANMBT). How are you?

I got a little obsessed about cyberbullying this week, thanks to that recent New York Times story on how schools are dealing with the problem. I was struck by the parent who sued his daughter’s Beverly Hills school district for punishing her after she cyberbullied another kid. Her crime: She videotaped her friends, egging them on as they trash talked another girl, then threw the video up on YouTube. In the video, her friends mock the other girl’s looks (“she’s the ugliest piece of shit I’ve seen in my whole life”), her mother’s boobs, the fact that she’s a “slut,” the fact that she’s “a spoiled brat who isn’t worth a shit.” Charming. The school gave the girl who made and posted the video a 2-day suspension, and her father took the school district to court on behalf of his daughter, known as J.C. in court documents. A judge ruled that because the video didn’t cause “substantial” disruption in school, the girl shouldn’t have been punished. And the school district had to pay J.C.’s legal costs: $107,150.80.

The law on cyberbullying isn’t always clear. The Anti-Defamation League says that many states have anti-bullying statutes, but very few states specify whether schools can intervene in electronic bullying.

Regardless, I read the New York Times story as a parent, and as a parent, I wanted to beat J.C.’s dad, a recording-industry lawyer named Evan S. Cohen, with my laptop, then put the video on YouTube. After Cohen won the case, he insisted that his daughter keep the YouTube video online, even though she offered to take it down. He said he wanted to perform a “public service” and show people “what kids get suspended for in Beverly Hills.”

Um, dude. There’s legal culpability, and there’s moral culpability. What ethical lessons are you teaching your kid? That if she acts like a cretin and gets in trouble, daddy will bail her out? That it’s OK to humiliate another kid? (The victim’s name is repeated many times in the video, which I’m not linking to, because I’m not going to do Evan S. Cohen any favors.) Look, I’m a First Amendment absolutist; I agree that the girl has the right to free speech. Just as her father has the right to be a schmuck and a crappy parent. But I don’t have to celebrate that.

***

Dear Righteous Mama,

While I shall never defend the predilections of the litigious class, I’m afraid that the crux of our problem lies elsewhere. What we have here pertains neither to legal nor to moral culpability; what we have here is a question of platform.

You began your elegantly argued dispatch by stating that the conversation shall focus on cyberbullying, that is to say, bullying by means of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and the other blunt instruments of the World Wide Web. Unlike more traditional forms of bullying, the cyberbully is enabled not by virtue of his or her strength or size but by his or her access to widely available objects like a computer, a video camera, or a cellular phone.

Herein, I believe, lies not only the problem but also the solution. Mr. Cohen’s daughter, let’s call her Kid A, posted disparaging remarks about Kid B on YouTube. Kid B, arguably, could have easily logged on to her computer, fired up her webcam, and produced a video twice as scathing, twice as funny, and twice as popular. This, no doubt, would have taught Kid A a fierce lesson and would have saved the school district a pretty penny in legal costs.

And then some other things are sort of … implicitly Jewish. Suggestively so. These things contain few if any direct allusions to the religion, the culture, or the people, and you can understand them without reference to their Jewishness. But the Jewishness—or, at least, certain characteristics that are typically associated and correlated with Jewishness—is there all the same. Seinfeld was implicitly Jewish. Certain New England summer camps with wacky Native American names are. Marxism! Many other musicals that aren’t Fiddler on the Roof!

To the latter list, add Diaspora*. The new social network site profiled today in the New York Times is being built to be the anti-Facebook: It will be free, its software will be open source (meaning anyone will have access to the code, and can alter it as they please), and, most important, it “will let users set up their own personal servers, called seeds, create their own hubs and fully control the information they share.” In other words, the byword of Diaspora* is “privacy.”

Except the real byword of Diaspora* is, well, diaspora. Its impetus is the widespread disappointment with the juggernaut that is Facebook—which, when it debuted six (only six!) years ago on select college campuses, was a model of discretion and user-control, but which has quickly warped into something more suited to marketers than to users. There is something special about the fact that when talented young people want to imagine themselves as standing up for themselves, on underdog terms, and trying to establish a better world outside of the corrupted mainstream, they immediately reach for the metaphor of the Jews, expelled from the Promised Land and forced to make do. Moreover, I would submit, it’s not entirely coincidental that—sorry to play the name game—three of the four founders are pretty obviously young Jewish men (and the law professor who inspired them is named Eben Moglen, and has done time at Tel Aviv U.).

Of course, few things are as implicitly and explicitly Jewish as picking fights with other Jews. Like, say, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Four Nerds and a Cry to Arms Against Facebook [NYT]

In addition to its annual conference, AJOP is hosting a special kiruv conference for women in the movement this week in Ohio. Miriam Lowenbraun, the wife of AJOP’s director, Rabbi Yitzchok Lowenbraun, has been working in kiruv since she was a child—her father was a rabbi—and her home now is ground zero for her husband’s recruitment efforts.

Ever mindful of the need for outreach, as I interviewed Lowenbraun, she suggested that I listen to rabbinic lectures on tape, recommended a fashionable rebbetzin with whom I might connect, and invited me to spend a Shabbat in Baltimore with her family.

Why have a separate convention for women? Do they have unique issues in their kiruv work?

Women face different challenges. Men are outwardly focused in the community, and women focus on their homes and bringing people into them. In most communities, the homes are the center of operation; you invite people for Shabbos, and people make connections there. Your home becomes the example of what a Jewish, Torah observant, home should be like.

A woman has to balance what’s going on in terms of the people coming to her home and her family’s needs. How do you balance the Shabbos table where you have guests who may need one thing and your own children who need attention?

Women also have to figure out how to present themselves as Orthodox and within the confines of Torah, but still be relatable, with it, and modern. In terms of physical appearance, how do you look good, but maintain the traditional Torah guidelines as far as how one dresses? Also, women have to know what’s going on in the world if people are coming into their homes and having discussions, and for women who are involved with children and daily issues, it’s more of challenge than it is for the men who tend to be more academically oriented.

What are the current issues generally that people working in kiruv face?

Assimilation is tremendous. And in our time it is very hard to find Jews; at one time you could identify Jews even if they weren’t religious because they were involved in a synagogue to some extent. Now there are people who don’t even know they are Jewish, people for whom Yom Kippur doesn’t even enter their life space. And there are many people who think they are Jewish who are not, people who may not be Jewish because their mother may not be Jewish. There are many people in America for whom it’s not an issue—they are so distant already from Judaism. And we are losing kids from Orthodox homes; this is a growing issue that needs to be addressed.

Why is kiruv important—if we all follow our own path, why must it be one of observance?

It depends on what your values are. If I believe that Torah is the core of all existence, and surely of all Jewish existence, and it’s the best life for Jews, and there are Jews who don’t even know the Torah exists, it’s incumbent upon me to reach out and expose them to it. What if someone told you you had a diamond in your family and you never saw it, why would you believe it? It might be hearsay. But if you saw it, you might have different attitude. If I know I have such a special treasure and I love my fellow Jew why would I not want to at least show them the diamond and if they choose to examine it they can? You don’t have free choice if you’ve never seen it.

Is kiruv something that has always been a part of Jewish life or is it a modern phenomenon?

As long as there have been Jews there have been Jews who have strayed, and the community has tried to reach out for them. In the 1700s and 1800s, the Haskalah, an anti-religious movement, tried to emancipate Jews intellectually, and it created a lot of problems, although I don’t think they were on the scale they are today. The phenomenon of losing Jews is not a new one, but the way we try to be more organized in how we reach out to people is a more modern thing. Technology has a lot to do with it. The world has become so small, and the recognition of the problem is better. During the Haskalah there were a lot of Jews who left Orthodoxy too, but they didn’t know about it everywhere. Now you know everything going on the minute it happens.

People are more aware of what the problems are, and there’s a concerted effort to address those problems in a more organized manner. Places like Etz Chaim in Baltimore are exclusively kiruv centers geared to reaching out and making classes available to people who are not affiliated. I don’t know that there were places like that before. The yeshiva movement began in Lithuania as a way to try to stem assimilation and help Orthodox Jews remain attached to Torah. But the biggest yeshiva in Europe had maybe 400 students, and now we have yeshivas with thousands.

I guess Facebook falls into that ‘more organized’ category. At the Women in Kiruv conference, there are two sessions about it.

They’re about how to use the technology for reaching out. It’s not about the halacha or hashgacha of using Facebook, but just practical.

But there are some people who don’t want to go on Facebook and don’t want to be open to just anyone, so AJOP also has their own internal Facebook-style program on our website for people to create their own groups without having to be exposed to the world.

Is kiruv different from the proselytizing other religions undertake?

We don’t missionarize [sic], we reach out to people. A missionary wants someone to be just like they are and do what they do. Outreach opens a door to Torah for people, but everyone has to find their own way in. No two people’s contribution is alike; everyone is unique, and missionaries want everyone to be the same and want everyone to believe in their thing. Other outreach groups reach out to all different religions and want everyone to become their religion; we believe that everyone in the world over can reach G-d in their own way. We only reach out to Jews.

You say that people involved in kiruv don’t necessarily want everyone to be like them, but there are some limits. Professionals in kiruv never encourage women to become rabbis for instance.

Many times people will come from an unaffiliated background, and their first step is towards Conservative Judaism. When people are trying to explore what Torah is, they go through different stages. Personally, as an outreach person, I would like people I reach to connect in their own way, at their own time, and to connect in an authentic way. Everyone has his or her own process of growth and timetable. Everyone has to find their own way and develop their own relationship to G-d. Torah is a process—it’s the work and the process that’s important. Some people think you are trying to make people frum and make people over, but that’s not the goal of authentic outreach; the goal is to be a resource on everyone’s individual journey.

Samantha M. Shapiro is a writer based in New York City.

The most interesting tidbit today in the continuing story of the assassination, likely by Mossad, of Hamas weapons procurer Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, was that one Hamas official told an Arabic-language paper that his group believes an Arab government was behind the killing. (This is less surprising than it may sound: Hamas’s initial investigation concluded the same thing.) Specifically, the Hamas official told the paper that al-Mabhouh had been tracked by Jordanian and Egyptian agents. Let’s also not forget about the two ex-members of Fatah who were arrested: two men who now work for a construction company owned by Muhammad Dahlan, a powerful Palestinian Authority official who in the past has been linked to efforts to take down Hamas’s Gaza leadership. And let’s also not forget that the wide consensus remains that the Mossad was, at least, the prime mover behind the killing.

Other than that, the big news is Dubai’s first sanction: Israeli dual nationals, even those who carry non-Israeli passports, are now barred from entering. According to the Dubai police chief, Israelis not carrying Israeli passports will be detected by “physical features and the way they speak.” By “the way they speak,” I assume he means those talking in Hebrew. As for “physical features”? Up yours too, buddy.

Finally, the intrigue of the case has officially hit the Internet. Google searches of “Mossad” have increased fourfold in the past month. And, if you like, you can join the Facebook group I Was Also Part of the Dubai Assassination Squad. Though don’t be surprised if the Dubai police chief proceeds to bar you from his city, too.

Hamas: Jordan or Egypt Likely Behind Dubai Hit [Reuters/Vos Iz Neias?]
Dubai Restricts Israeli Entry After Killing [WSJ]

10 North Naples Middle Students Suspended for ‘Kick a Jew Day’ E-Mail [Naples News]

A recent entry reads: “Grandpa says that the war will soon be over. He says that soldiers also have families. How is that possible? They have a family, but they kill families.” Zytomirski’s 1,700-plus friends, most of whom are Polish, use the site to respond with a touching sincerity to a tragedy most of them were not alive to see: “I can’t imagine such beastliness,” wrote one. “They have no heart,” wrote another. Explains Buzek: “People write things on Henio’s page that we don’t speak about every day.”

While many young Holocaust victims have been declared “the next Anne Frank,” and young adult Holocaust literature remains a flourishing genre, Buzek’s use of Web 2.0 to illuminate Zytomirski’s story has touched a new chord. “Maybe I’m naïve, but I have a good feeling that Henio’s entries can make the world a slightly better place. They are making a contribution to ensure that something like the Holocaust never happens again.”

Young Holocaust Victim Has Over 1,700 Friends on Facebook [Deutsche Welle]

Right now accessing the page is proving impossible (and for those us who want to see it, incredibly frustrating); though it’s gained more than 1,300 fans since launching, the page has been temporarily disabled. But if you’re hellbent on finding out what kind of presence that particular concentration camp has on Facebook, know that the search term “Auschwitz” currently yields 699 unofficial pages.

Auschwitz Launches Facebook Site [BBC]
Auschwitz Lauches Facebook Page [Guardian]

“We deal with the listings for disputed territories on a case-by-case basis, and with Golan Heights we decided a dual listing made sense,” a Facebook spokesperson told Tablet Magazine yesterday. “It’s fair to say that we listen to our users and to feedback they give us, but we approach these decisions carefully, and only make changes where it makes sense to do so, as it did in this instance.” We’re sure that the 39,000 folks—according to Wikipedia—who live in Israel-controlled Golan appreciate that.

Facebook Changes Golan Policy [JTA]

Last week, Minnesota Republican Rep. Michelle Bachmann attacked Ezekiel Emanuel in a floor speech, citing a New YorkPost columnist’s interpretation of his writings about rationalizing the distribution of health care to argue that under the Democrats’ healthcare plan, elderly or disabled patients like her senile father-in-law would be stiffed medical care. On Friday, Sarah Palin—making the most of her unemployment—posted an item on Facebook inflating Bachmann’s critique into an attack on Emanuel’s “Orwellian thinking” and accusing Obama of planning to convene “death panels” of bureaucrats who will decide, essentially, who shall live and who shall die. It’s not really clear how far the Nazi trope will go—Mengele references are already circulating in the outer reaches of the Free Republican universe, after surfacing, perhaps predictably, on the blog of perennial presidential candidate (and anti-Semitic crank) Lyndon LaRouche—but if Zeke is anything like his brothers, it’s not likely to keep him up at night. After all, even actual torture doesn’t scare him: “I’ve had various episodes where people have not liked what I said and tried to put the thumb screws to me to shut me up,” he told The New York Times last spring.

Sarah Palin: Statement on the Current Health Care Debate [Facebook]
Previously: Limbaugh Sees Swastikas Everywhere

New Tool Uses Facebook To Improve Israel’s Image [Haaretz]
Tablet Magazine’s Facebook page

On Facebook, a Spy Revealed (Pale Legs, Too) [NYT]
MI6 Chief Blows His Cover [Mail]

Roya Hakakian is unhappy with American news coverage of Iran. Instead of treating Iranian civil society as a subject worthy of regular attention, the Iranian Jewish writer argues, U.S. media outlets focus obsessively on the smokescreen of Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Ignoring the complex relationship between the country’s citizens and rulers, journalists are left ill-prepared to interpret news like the last two weeks’. Hakakian’s own writing may prove an antidote—a journalist for CBS, a memoirist, and a poet, she has written searingly but lovingly about her homeland since she left Tehran for the United States in 1985. Hakakian spoke with Tablet from her home in California about the future of the Ahmadinejad regime, the reaction of Iran’s 30,000-strong Jewish community, and how the whole thing reminds her of 1979.

Are you in close contact with friends in Iran these days?

I am, primarily through Facebook. It’s much faster, many more people can weigh in. It’s a lot less intrusive, no one has to wake up anyone in the middle of the night, no one has to worry about a bad connection. And it lends itself to the kind of visuals that letters or phone or even emails wouldn’t.

And are you hearing anything that hasn’t been reported?

There’s certainly a lag between what I hear and what airs. For instance, protesters were going up to the rooftops to chant “Alu Akbar.” For the first few days, I heard the host of a CNN program say, “Because Facebook is down, people have to go up to the rooftops to communicate.” Well, that’s not it at all. It’s because people are trying to go back to the roots of the revolution in ’79, to say that this is the same face-off. What the opposition is really doing is appropriating all the revolutionary 1979 slogans and images that Ahmadinejad feels are his legacy. But it took four or five days before they brought people on the air who said that.

An article on the Israeli news site Ynet said last week that the Jewish community of Iran had “denounced the riots” and expressed its “aversion to any kind of undignified behavior.” What do you make of that?

That’s the stuff they have to say. No member of a religious minority, if he is good at what he does and is responsibly representing his community, would talk to you at this moment. It would jeopardize the security of people in his community. People in religious minorities in Iran have historically not taken a stance. They wait to see who wins and then they issue a statement of support.

How deeply rooted is Iran’s animosity toward Israel?

There are two lines of rhetoric going on. One is the Ahmadinejad, Holocaust-denying, pro-Hamas, pro-Hezbollah line. That will be gone completely. One of the things coming out of these protests is people saying, “We don’t want the bomb.” There’s also this historical anti-Semitism that’s existed as long as there have been Jews on earth, although the excuse that people in Iran have is limited access to correct information. But whoever comes to power has to break with the past.

This is where a healthy relationship between the Muslim Middle East and Israel can begin. Israel has never intervened or meddled in the lives of Iranians themselves. If anything, because Iran and Iraq had such a lasting and damaging war, Iranians were very happy to see Israel bomb Iraq in the early ’90s. Israel has never conducted a coup in Iran; the only legitimate grievance is the Palestinian issue. And now people are saying, “Whenever we see Palestinians bleed on the streets we are asked to take to the streets and protest for them. Now we are bleeding on the streets, where are they now?”

You sound optimistic.

Regardless of what happens, this regime has lost moral credibility among the public, including its own supporters. The fact that they were shooting bullets at protesters chanting “God is Great”—it’s all extremely reminiscent of the revolution in ’79. People were waiting for something else to happen all these years, they were thinking there might be a military invasion by the U.S., or that Israel might strike, and none of those things happened, so they’ve taken to the streets. In some sense the regime change has already happened. It’s a question of how long it will actually take for the infrastructure to change, for the leaders to step down.

And the protests you’re going to here in the States—what’s the religious makeup?

Everybody’s in. I heard of a protest in front of the U.N. yesterday, and there were a few women who had the Islamic dress code, and a couple characters among the protesters said they shouldn’t be there. Immediately the crowd began to chant, “We are all together, we are all together.” What’s really inspiring about this moment is it’s not about Jew vs. Muslim, black vs. white, man vs. woman, it’s about a movement of national unity.