Mapping Digital Jews

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

New digital media have created new issues of authority, community, and identity for contemporary Jewish communities and Jewish practices online. Interaction with digital technology expands the knowledge and reach of Jewish communities across territorial space, generates new symbols and affiliations, and creates new social networks. As the Internet enables the swift transformation and diversification of religious enthusiasms, affiliations and forms of practice across boundaries, it has also reshaped the mediation of information about Jewish religious experiences and their politics in the public sphere. The spectrum of reactions to such developments in the Jewish community ranges from skepticism to embrace. The papers in the panel will build on recent scholarship on religion and digital culture and attempt to demonstrate how digital media have allowed for new forms of transnational Jewish knowledge production, communication and circulation.
According to Heidi Campbell (2010), in order to predict what the encounter between a religious community and new media looks like, one must look at the religious community’s historical relationship to both religious authority and the interpretation of sacred text. The decentralized nature of Jewish religious and textual authority sets a precedent for the variety of Jewish responses to the translation of Judaism into the digital realm, and the papers on the panel reflect this diversity. Ruth Tsuria’s paper will explore how traditional Jewish religious authorities are now appropriating newer digital media to facilitate behavior changes in the orthodox community with respect to the consumption of pornography on the website guardyoureyes.com. Galeet Dardashti’s paper will discuss how the Jewish community is visualized through the medium of digital technology and what global impacts result from a virtual mapping of Mizrahi/Sephardi identity through 3-D Google mapping on the website, diarna.org. Brian Dolber’s paper will trace the concepts of social justice and a contemporary prophetic critique of technology based in Jewish tradition in connection with the case of Aaron Swartz, the late internet activist and a co-founder of Reddit.

Sub Unit

• Interdisciplinary, Theoretical, and New Approaches

Chair

• Ashley Passmore, Texas A&M

Individual Presentations

• Making Pornography (In)visible in the Religious Jewish Online Discourse - Ruth Tsuria, Texas A&M university

• Virtually Mapping "home" for Jews of the Middle East - Galeet Dardashti, Rutgers University

Respondent

• Ayala Fader, Fordham University