Dan Mendelsohn Aviv the Director of the Centre for Jewish Living and Learning at Temple Emanu-El in Toronto, Ontario as well as an Adjunct Professor in Jewish Education at Gratz College.

How is the Internet changing Jewish identity? How is it changing our perception of Jewish identity?

Introduction

Worrying about change is as old a pastime as change itself – and the Jewish educational landscape seems to be awash in both. Jewish educators have always pondered and bemoaned the vicissitudes of Jewish identity formation, but now with the pervasiveness and speed of connectivity technologies, the anxiety is almost palpable. Five years in, one cannot help but ask: Is Web 2.0 good for the Jews? Can one construct a meaningful Jewish identity when a substantial part of one’s identity plays out through social networking sites (SNS) and computer-mediated communication (CMC) – which are (arguably) ephemeral, optional and artificial? When someone says “I am on my cell”, “I am online”, or “You have 1 friends”, is this, as Sherry Turkle (2007, p. 176) wonders, “a new placement of the subject”? And how does this subject relate to others in community in the fullest sense of the word? This paper will examine some of the challenges confronting aspects of Jewish identity and traditional notions of commitment to the Jewish community. Though some of the trends to be discussed are barely a decade old, for many young Jews who came of age with them, SNS and CMC are not perceived as fads but as a fait accompli. This paper will conclude with an attempt to recontextualize our understandings of identity, community and commitment in light of emergent technological realities – and propose that we embrace what I call protean tribalism as the newest form of Jewish identity expression.

Postmodern Judaism

It is fairly axiomatic among sociologists, researchers and scholars in Jewish education that today’s open, post-modern globalized society is challenging traditional notions of identity and community all across the world (Albrow & King, 1990; Appadurai, 1990; Buell, 1994; Davies & Guppy, 1997; Deitcher, 2004; Featherstone & Lash, 1995; Featherstone, Lash, & Robertson, 1995; Friedman, 1990; Gordis, 2004; Hall, 1991; King, 1991; Lingard & Rizvi, 1998; Robertson, 1994; Waters, 1995). However, Jews, in a sense, have been early-adopters of this development. Ever since Napoleon asked if his Jewish subjects were Jewish-Frenchmen or French-Jews in 1806, many Jews have been energized by the high-voltage tension that crackled along that hyphen. However, with the passage of more than two centuries, many American Jews still struggle with the post-Emancipation reality that has been further compounded by the complexity and speed of globalization and the Internet. Even traditional notions of diaspora (which clearly demarcated “here” and “there”) have all but collapsed (Aviv & Shneer, 2005; Helmreich, 1992; Mankekar, 1994; Rouse, 1991; Safran, 1991; Tölölyan, 1996 et al.). Traditional markers of Jewish identity (e.g., frequency of synagogue attendance, Shabbat observance, levels of Jewish education, synagogue memberships) have also been heavily supplemented by more permeable and more problematic categories (e.g, self-identification, self-definition). For example, Cohen and Eisen (2000) posit three elements that constitute a new form of Jewish tribalism: Jews can gauge their level of Jewishness and commitment to community through (1) familiarity with one another, (2) responsibility for one another, and (3) possessing a higher opinion of Jews and a lesser opinion of non-Jews. These elements were not handed down at Sinai nor, they quickly point out in their conclusion, are they by any means prescriptive. They emerged directly from their interaction with informants – a new synthesis.

In contrast to (or, perhaps, in concert with) this “Jew within”, Cohen and Eisen’s (2001) Jew as “sovereign self” posits an individual engaged in a radically personalized and idiosyncratically constructed Judaism. The sovereign self chooses their own level of engagement and defies any standards of engagement, as no Jew should be able to determine for others what a “good Jew” is. These two views of Judaism seem irreconcilable – a tribe of radical individuals? Could this work? From the Jewish presence and practice in CMC and SMS, it seems that the answer is yes.

One possible explanation for how such a tribe-of-individuals could function online is that CMC and SNS creates similar paradoxes and dissonances around identity and commitment to community. For example, there is a stark divergence between the user’s physical reality and emotional experience. Though users of SNS, chat-rooms, text-messaging and players of Linden Labs’ Second Life are physically isolated from each other, they profess a sense of connectedness and, in some cases, see themselves as part of a transnational community (Ito, Okabe, & Matsuda, 2005; Odets, 2007 et al.).

Another example, which is particularly significant in today’s SNS reality, is the notion of a public “friendship” when friendship, by most definitions, is private. Real-world friendship, like its online equivalent, involves shared mutual interests. However, traditional friendships are different than online “friending” in that offline friends share trust and reciprocity and most critically, intimacy over time and within specific contexts. As Rosen (2007), McPherson et al. (2006) and countless others have pointed out, friendship also depends on mutual revelations to which only the friends are privy. So, how true a friend can we be to our Facebook friends? However, despite the obvious exceptions, some researchers suggest that most SNS primarily support pre-existing social relations. Ellison, Steinfield, and Lampe (2007) and boyd (2007) observe that SNS, like Facebook and MySpace, are used to maintain existing offline relationships or to solidify offline connections as opposed to meeting new people. In other words, online friendships are literally avatars of our offline relationships. They may be weak, but, typically, the individuals who friend each other have a preexisting, common offline connection.

A third example of online dissonance is the profile that serves as the foundation for online friendships. For many years, Internet use (like big-city living) afforded individual users a veil of anonymity. As the New Yorker cartoon proclaimed: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” (Steiner, 1993). However, subsequent research since that legendary cartoon came out, has found the opposite to be true. Herring (1994) reports that users tend to represent themselves accurately with respect to gender identity. Researchers have also pointed out that despite early predictions and reasoned contentions that users would often shed their offline identities in online interactions (Turkle, 1995 et al.), offline identities very much bleed into online behavior (d. boyd, 2001; Smith & Kollock, 1999).

The last example I will evoke here is arguably a synthesis of the previous three: the notion of a vibrant online community when its members are physically remote, tenuously connected, and, as the circle grows to include more and more “friends,” essentially unknown and truly unknowable to each other. And yet, there are thousands of vibrant online communities with countless millions of subset online friendships. Jews have been Jewishly active online for almost as long as there has been an “online”. Because of the sheer volume of Judaism-related postings in the USENET religion newsgroup, Jewish users pushed for, and subsequently gained permission to set up the first religion-specific newsgroup – net.religion.jewish – in February of 1984. As Helland (2007) observed, by advocating for their own online environment, Jewish users were establishing and defining their own online identity as individuals who are part of a distinct community.

Protean Tribalism and the Jews

In embracing all the paradoxes and dissonances inherent to the postmodern Jewish community and its active presence in a medium rife with similar paradoxes and dissonances, what has emerged is what I call protean tribalism – of which Jewish users are the exemplars. Lifton (1999) first introduced the term protean self to describe what he deemed a positive trend in developed societies: the “fluid and many-sided” personality. This protean self, like the Greek sea god after which s/he is named, also embraces “mockery and self-mockery, irony, absurdity, and humor” (p. 5). Lifton also entertains the possibility that communities, too, could be as free-floating, “removed geographically and embraced temporarily and selectively, with no promise of permanence” (p. 6). Where my protean tribe differs from Lipton’s posited protean community is the nature of the embrace. Its members are as removed from each other geographically as any other collection of users of Facebook or MySpace although, generally, Jewish users concentrate within specific postal codes. And though their embrace is equally selective, it is more effusive and definitely more fraught with issues. And most importantly, it persists and flirts with a permanence rarely seen online.

In the following representation, I have identified six distinct tendencies of the Jewish-protean tribe. What follows is a first draft and, like an online profile or Wikipedia entry, begs further tweaking and revisions.

(1) Navel Gazing

One of the driving forces that animates Jewish-protean tribalism is a relentless grappling with Jewish tribal meta-issues. Excessive introspection, or “navel-gazing”, takes many forms online beyond the general “Is [insert trend here] good for the Jews?” Jewish bloggers will ask tough, occasionally irreverent questions about the nature of the Jewish tribe and their own place and participation in tribal affairs. The answers they generate are often unconventional and contentious – but equally illuminating. For example, to the question: What will be our generation’s Jewish Catalog? BZ (mahrabu.blogspot.com/2008/07/21st-century-jewish-catalog-alpha.html) opines that, perhaps, the answer “isn’t necessarily a book, and isn’t necessarily a static document”. Today’s People of the Book are definitely open-source – and to begin the process, BZ presents a series of links to other Jewish blogs on pluralism, potlucks, prayer engineering, prayer melodies and texts and “starting a community”. Other users have already contributed to this list in the “comments” section of the original post.

One might dismiss or minimize this tendency to navel-gaze, relegating it to users who are affiliated with more liberal streams of Judaism who tend to ponder these issues more publicly anyway. However, similar challenges to social norms have come from bloggers in the Orthodox world such as Am Kshe Oref (amksheoref.blogspot.com) and orthomom (orthomom.blogspot.com). 1000 Frum Blogs (1000frumblogs.blogspot.com) provides an exhaustive annotated guide to his and 999 other “frummy” blogs, many of which also focus on tribal meta-issues such as discussions about self-definition, belief and practice.

This form of engagement with Jewish tradition is not only valid but also a valued expression of Jewish identity. The questioners challenge, embrace and engage with what Rosenak (1995) calls the language of Jewish tradition – its basic assumptions, problems, aspirations and understandings. Their language, however, is spiked with Internet slang acronyms.

(2) Volume

In the blogging world, besides the aforementioned 1,000 observant blogs, Jewishblogging.com points to at least 700 additional Jewish blogs. JBLOG Central (israelforum.com/blog_home.php) lists another 700 blogs, while JRants.com has over 300 more. Both HaAretz and The Jerusalem Post websites have a hefty blogroll in both English and Hebrew. Jewish users also have a lively presence in SNS such as Facebook and MySpace, where they form groups and reconnect with friends. In other words, Jewish users are plentiful online and loud.

(3) Time-Committed

Though some might equivocate about how meaningful it is as an indicator, the amount of time a Jewish protean tribe member spends online is an expression of commitment to the tribe. For the sake of argument, let us assume that the average Jewish user spends about two hours online a day. This, by all measures, is an extremely conservative estimate. Most surveys (e.g., Lenhart, Madden, & Hitlin, 2005; “The Mouse or the Remote?,”; Withers & Sheldon, 2008) clock average Internet / CMC usage at around four hours a day, with teens generally averaging more hours than adults. Let us also assume that a quarter of the time spent online could be considered “Jewish activity” – that is, reading news about Israel or the Jewish community, writing or reading Jewish-oriented blogs, connecting with Jewish friends, etc. (In thinking of my own Internet usage, for example, I would invert the proportion.) Thus, the average Jewish user dedicates about three and a half hours to online “Jewish activity” each week. And yet, this time-commitment does not factor into traditional measures of “Jewishness”, identity or affiliation. For example, a recent online survey conducted by Bunin Benor and Cohen (tinyurl.com/5ll9vr) sought to correlate use of Hebrew and Yiddish words with Jewish identity and affiliation. 28 of the 68 questions dealt explicitly with Jewish identity and commitment through traditional (i.e., Are your parents Jewish? Do you handle money on Shabbat?) and more innovative lines of inquiry (e.g., , How do you self-identify? How do you connect to the community?). Yet, of those 28, not one inquired about online Jewish activity – which is curious, as responding to the survey, in itself, is a meaningful expression of tribal commitment.

Imagine how committed one would regard this same user if one translated their measure of online activity into an equivalent offline time-commitment such as weekly excursions to the synagogue on Friday night, Shabbat morning and evening or daily participation in morning minyan. Synagogue educators and rabbis the Western world over would be thrilled with such a level of commitment from individuals. Then, consider how absurd it would be to distribute a survey about Jewish identity and affiliation amongst those same prayer participants at the conclusion of the service without asking even one question about synagogue participation. This curious lack of recognition, despite attempts to embrace postmodern identity challenges, demonstrates a lingering, pre-modern understanding of how identity plays out in the wired world of the 21st century.

(4) The Tribe Must Survive

Though traditional notions of community are seemingly undermined by the working assumptions of the protean tribe, Jewish tribe members’ use of the Internet to connect with other Jews for the purpose of meeting (i.e, Facebook, MySpace et al.) and marrying (i.e., JDate, frumster.com, jlove.com et al.) confirms that, at the most basic level, they are very committed to the tribe’s future existence.

(5) Biting Humor

Many of the Jewish blogs and SNS are filled with humor. This humor is often directed inward, poking fun at the foibles of the tribe. One of the edgier examples of the protean self’s penchant for irony and absurdity is Eli Valley’s EV Comics, dishing “Ethnocentric Parochialism for the Whole Family!” The most recent installment (evcomics.com) references a recent Hollywood remake of “The Incredible Hulk” to savage liberal North American Jews who swing left domestically but veer sharply right on Israel-related matters. He does this not out of a desire to reject or disaffiliate, but to highlight the inconsistencies, hypocrisies and outright parochialism of a community that, because of its history, generally sees itself as open-minded, tolerant and cosmopolitan. His online voice is not alone in this chorus of accountability. And yet, despite the hip packaging, slangy discourse and irreverence, these texts and narratives describe a process of “god-wrestling”, of trying to understand what it means to be Jewish in the postmodern era when all of the “grand-narratives of our Fathers” have frayed. It is a complex and often heartbreaking exercise, but one only undertaken by those who cherish their identity in the first place.

(6) Action

In a sense, the Jewish-protean tribe is as it does. Despite its tremendous diversity, it has coalesced around specific issues – such as combating anti-Semitism. In this instance, the Jewish-protean tribe resembles an offline social movement. Melluci (1996, p. 30), in writing about social movements in the digital age, defines a social movement as “the mobilization of a collective actor … defined by specific solidarity, [and] engaged in a conflict with an adversary for the appropriation and control of resources valued by both of them”. When users discovered in March of 2004 that querying “Jew” in Google listed an anti-Semitic website “Jew Watch” first, they mobilized into action. Jewish-protean tribal members unleashed the “Jew” Google bomb or “Jooglebomb”. Initiated by Daniel Sieradski, then editor of the JewSchool blog (jewschool.com), a call went out for users to link the word “Jew” to the wikipedia.org entry for “Jew” at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew. A mass-linking in this fashion would push the Wikipedia page higher in Google’s search results (Bar-Ilan, 2006). Word of this effort was spread primarily through blogs and Jewish bloggers created 87% of the links to the Wikipedia entry for “Jew” (Tatum, 2005). After approximately four weeks, jewwatch.com was displaced as the number one Page Rank in a Google search for “Jew”.

Like tikkun olam work offline, users were able to express their commitment to Judaism and their community through collective social action. However, as a result of the speed at which technology advances, they were able to measure concrete results and remedy the issue confronting the tribe within weeks. One could only imagine how different our offline world would look if other vexing problems could be isolated and dispatched as quickly!

Conclusion

In light of the vitality and persistence of the Jewish protean tribe in an ever-evolving internet-driven reality, for educators to ask “Is Web 2.0 good for the Jews?” is, perhaps, besides the point. One must, perhaps, consider: How good a Jew can I be in Web 2.0? Herein lies the educational challenge. Prensky (2001) would have us educators believe that (to mash up Alan Kay’s definition of “technology”) we, having been born before the advent of the computer are “digital immigrants” – whereas our students are all “digital natives”. No matter how hard we immigrants try, to the native ear, we still speak with an accent and, as such, are subject to the natives’ knowing smiles or, at worst, scorn and derision. Though I reject Prensky’s convenient metaphor – after all, who is responsible for all that code and content being consumed by natives? It is his call for us to think differently about education has relevance for Jewish education. As Jewish educators, we are not just responsible for transmitting what Rosenak (1995) calls the literature of Jewish tradition – though, traditionally, that has been our task. As Rosenak (1995:22) declares:

[E]ducation, as a cultural activity, is the teaching of a language and helping learners to see it as their home. It is, at the same time, cultivating an appreciation of its literature and enabling the next generation to make literature in the language.

We must also be prepared to embrace and exploit alternative notions of identity and “identity-play” that SNS and CMC afford us. We must encourage and recognize membership in the Jewish-protean tribe. We must value participation in it as much as we value other traditional markers of affiliation like denominational Judaism, camp or day school attendance. We must enable our students to add yet another layer of Jewish language into their online activity, to give depth and breadth to what others might dismiss as sihah beteilah. Our students already perceive the language of online as their home. Can we encourage this home to be makhnis orhim?

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