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ari y. kelman 6 The Reality of the Virtual Looking for Jewish Leadership Online I n September 2009, MASA, a partnership between the Jewish Agency and American communal organizations that provides a “gateway to long term Israel programs,” launched a public relations campaign on Israeli television and the Internet. A central feature of the $800,000 effort was a commercial, shot with a vague MTV aesthetic, that featured mockedup missing persons posters of American Jews. The advertisement’s female narrator urged her Israeli audience to connect their American acquaintances with MASA in order to encourage them to travel to Israel in order to save the “more than 50% of diaspora youth [who] assimilate and are lost to us.”1 Though intended for an Israeli audience, the advertisement quickly caught the attention of Jewish bloggers and journalists in the United States, many of whom objected vociferously to the commercial and its implicit message . Most expressed outrage at the use of the term “lost” and questioned an outreach strategy that insulted its target population.2 Some bloggers questioned the cost of such an effort, and a handful of print publications, including the Jerusalem Post, published their own critical responses online.3 In response to the broad and loud chorus of blog-based objections, MASA removed the commercial and issued a public apology, explaining the event as a “misunderstanding.”4 The MASA incident highlights three critical ways in which the Internet is changing the landscape of Jewish life. First, the Internet made the objections possible by bringing the commercial to American viewers. Were it not for the Internet and its ability to facilitate the rapid sharing of information, the commercial likely would have run its course on Israeli television without comment from American Jews. However, the “viral” nature of media on the The sociograms discussed in this chapter are too large-scale to reproduce effectively on the book page. They are described in the text, and figures are available for download on the New Jewish Leaders book detail page at UPNE.com. The Reality of the Virtual 215 Internet, and the ability of people to share information quickly, cheaply, and transnationally meant that an Israeli cultural product quickly became part of a global Jewish conversation. Second, the incident highlights the power of the Internet as a new forum for debate and conversation about contemporary Jewish issues.The chorus of voices raised in objection to the MASA commercial resulted in a short-term change in the organization’s media strategy, but more important, the event showed that established, mainstream Jewish organizations no longer have sole proprietorship over the content of communal Jewish debate, nor do they control the venues in which those debates take place. Before the Internet opened up these new spaces for communal debate, it would have been unimaginable that a collection of relatively independent writers could force the Jewish Agency to change its policies and shelve a costly advertising campaign. Third, the MASA incident revealed the diversity of Jewish voices eager to participate in communal discussion. From the left and the right, the religious and the secular, from established newspapers and solo-authored blogs, the MASA commercial generated responses from almost every corner of the Jewish world. One could read the variety of responses as indicative of the fragmentation of the Jewish people, or one could understand it as a reflection of diverse opinions within a single, unifying conversation. Either way, it is clear that the Internet enabled participants from a variety of Jewish communities to join the debate without having to channel their participation through established communal organizations, news sources, or congregations. Episodes like this one are as mythical as they are myriad in the literature about the Internet. Both journalists and scholars have argued that the Internet will radically reshape the commercial marketplace, alter how we regard knowledge and education, challenge our understandings of marketing, shift our conceptions of power, and even change our relationship to democracy.5 One need only look to the role of Twitter in the social upheaval in Iran during the summer of 2009 for one small example of how these changes are playing out globally, or the significance of Facebook in the uprisings in Egypt, Yemen, and Tunisia in early 2011.6 What these changes mean, however, remains the subject of active and ongoing debate. Why Study the Internet? Of course, the changes initiated and enabled by the Internet are affecting Jews as they are everyone else.Abundant anecdotal examples aside, we know almost...

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