Here it comes, my twice-yearly analysis of the New Jews that have surfaced in our modern era. Remember kids, this is all in good fun. So if you see a little bit of yourself in this, just laugh, because I certainly have.

Bro-thodox

Exactly as it sounds: an epic combo of "Bro" and "Orthodox."

Seen wandering around Circle K gas stations on Sunday nights with his "boys", the Bro-thodox smells like Axe Body Spray, wears a white baseball cap backwards,  and has been seen hitting on Hot Chanis at kosher pizza shops, but making sure not to accidently touch them for fear of awkward Shomer Negiah moments. He jerks off to Jewish porn star Joanna Angel but will call his sister a "whore" for wearing a skirt that is above her ankle. He calls his next door neighbor "shvartze" but listens to hip hop, has a picture of the Rebbe on his mini-fridge but skips davening and after failing vet school will wind up working for his dad, the only person kind (and stupid) enough to put up with his oafish, lazy attitude. He's the kind of guy who winds up making teshuvah in his mid-twenties and turning his asshole attitude into a fundamentalist, halachic requirement.

JCC Sluts

For some, spiritual enlightenment comes from being "as Jewishly connected as possible." This person is the JCC Slut. Their Blackberry reads like Shindler's List: a collection of "steins," "bergs" and "mans" that they don't really know on a personal level, but would have no problem calling up for a job recommendation, a deal on a car, or a chance to fundraise for their local Federation. A condo dweller by nature, this person is a "committee chairperson" for more Jewish organizations than probably exist. Their inner peace comes from IDF banquets at the local hotel, Limmud brainstorming sessions and Saturday night "Young Professional Singles" Parties sponsored by the local Reform synagogue. The Banana Republic skirt and too small jacket with not-too-slutty heels and gold "chai" necklace are a dead giveaway.

Jew Ager

This person takes Jewish Renewal to its logical extreme. With Tibetan prayer flags hanging from their sukkah and a picture of Krishna draped by blue and white "Hanukkah" lights, the Jew Ager (Jew/New Ager), is really a Universalist who was born into the Jewish tradition and just can't give it up, despite really having no interest in Judaism, per se. They drink Yerba Mate from their Jewish National Fund mug and nearly shit themselves when they heard about the Abayudaya music from the Jewish people of Uganda. 

The Palestinian Jew

It's really en vogue for college students to hate Israel. And the best are the Jewish kids who hate it. Coming home for a Passover seder, they proudly proclaim to their parents that they are hosting an anti-Birthright Israel party in the student center on the next Shabbos. With an "End the Occupation" button on their messenger bag and a "Free Palestine" bumper sticker on the Toyota Corolla their parents bought them, the Palestinian Jew is the epitome of American youth--totally clueless about anything and more than willing to shoot their mouth off, as long as their isn't an actual Palestinian around who might correct them on their theories about Middle Eastern Politics. They don't want a Two-State Solution, because then it would make them lose a soapbox to stand on. The Palestinian Jew has never befriended a Muslim (the hijab just looks too scary) but has certainly seen lots of them on Al-Jazeera. This person will later grow up to be a Jew Ager.

That Annoying Convert Guy

The name is John Smith, but he likes to be called "Adam Ben Avraham v' Sarah." This person knows everything about the Holocaust and like to point it out to everyone, feeling a certain glee that he's smarter than guys with names like Saul Bromowitz and Kyle Bergman. That Annoying Convert Guy only eats Cholov Yisroel dairy and goes into a rage when anyone suggests that OU is "just as good". For the Annoying Convert Woman, it's all about getting into uncomfortable conversations with women about periods and mikvah and complaining about how unobservant the men on JDate are. The best way to piss off this person: point out that they are a convert, then watch them fly into a storm about how the Gemarrah says that pointing out a convert is a sin and that, since they do not wish to be called a convert, the person is giving up Olam Haba because calling someone a name "by which they do not wish to be called" leads to the destruction of the soul.

A full five news cycles have passed since Barack Obama either unforgivably or inartfully (take your pick) made the point that exurban people in economically depressed states respond to cultural wedge issues and fear social and economic change. Yet Survey USA, which has had the best record of any polling outfit throughout the primaries, registers no statistically significant movement in the Democratic primary race in Pennsylvania. Gallup's tracking poll shows Obama's large national lead over Hillary Clinton and small national lead over John McCain undiminished.

How could this be? I mean, Obama used the terms "bitter" and "cling" alongsideThe American People: How dare they not think what disingenuously posing elites expect them to? "guns" and "religion." Smug prejudiced know-it-all that he is, Obama even suggested that economic and cultural insecurities have something to do with opposition to immigration in places where there are few immigrants, and with opposition to free trade given that something like four fifths of wage earners are under no pressure from international labor markets. (They are under real pressure from the ongoing shift to a post-industrial information-based economy in which increasingly higher premia are placed on acquiring and practicing abstract intellectual skills, as well as the advanced degrees that come along with them. But long-term secular economic trends don't make for convenient scapegoats.)

Could it be that those rubes and hicks out in Pennsyltucky are so dumb that they haven't noticed that Obama is a bigoted rich prep-schooled snob? Or that he's a dangerous fifth columnist Marxist radical? Or both at once, as Bill Kristol and Joe Lieberman have it --- a neat trick for Obama to pull off, incidentally, working towards radical economic levelling and the abolition of traditional values at the same time he reinforces static class divides based on wealth, education, and cultural tastes. That Obama's opponents --- one a Wellesley valedictorian and Yale Law graduate with tens of millions of dollars in the bank, the other a descendant of Anglo-Scottish colonials and several generations of navy admiralty with tens of millions of dollars in the bank --- are superlatively qualified tribuni plebis who get ordinary plain-talking folks down to their bones?

Or could it instead be that the pundits who predicted a bitter demise for Obama are elites and elitists themselves who --- in registering prescriptive judgments about what the fine upstanding salt of the earth red-blooded Americans of Bird in Hand, PA and the nearby environs along US Route 30 are bound to conclude from one stray sentence --- are engaging in precisely the same sort of armchair sociology of which they accuse Obama? How impertinent of Pennsylvanians and indeed of all Americans to fail to conform to the unempirical generalizations of Mickey Kaus (LA-based lifelong journalist representing Newsweek, Slate, and TNR), Hugh Hewitt (AB Harvard, JD Michigan), Daniel Larison (Ph.D candidate, UChicago), Glenn Reynolds (JD Yale), Ann Coulter (BA Cornell, JD Michigan), John Podhoretz (AB UChicago) Bill Kristol (AB Harvard, Ph.D Harvard), and Joe Lieberman (BA Yale, JD Yale), to name just a few names.

It's almost as if some Bible-toting gun-thumpers are capable of thinking without being told by their betters what to think, believe in interpretive charity, and don't automatically write people off on the basis of one bad moment. Conversely, it sure looks like those who predicted that Jeremiah Wright would sink Obama --- and before that that Louis Farrakhan would sink Obama, earlier still William Ayers, and before him the echoes of Mein Kampf in Dreams from My Father (as Coulter argued, and more than a few concern trolls concurred in a different argot) --- aren't really giving a dazzling performance as fortune-tellers. It's enough to make you doubt the wisdom of valuing hunches over quantitative data.

But no, doubt not. Who needs numbers when you've got intuitions? Who knows the exceptionless motives and emotional touchstones of the working class residents of flyover country better than overeducated coastal pseudo-populists who (fairly obviously) agree with Obama's diagnosis in whole or in part? Their righteous decision to develop kidney stones in solidarity with the culture and people Obama so terribly wronged must not be allowed to come to naught. If Obama does eventually lose, that proves they were right all along and can claim vindication. In the meantime, perhaps we can cancel the Pennsylvania primary and apportion delegates based on whom Mickey Kaus would vote for if he were what he thinks the median voter is.

UPDATE: Daniel Drezner makes the same point a bit more succinctly. 

Being an online media professional is very much like being a sociologist or a psychiatrist. None of us really have any clue how anything in our field works or how it ought to work, so we spend much of our time making shit up and hoping that it sounds awesome. This is what we call "theory." And for every Lacanian psychoanalyst or critical theorist, there is some digital swami blathering about "increased layers of meaning" or "intertwingled longtails" or some such ginned-up piffle.

The paradigm-smashing theoretical framework of the moment is "Web 3.0." Theorists of Web 3.0 manage to use the language and tone of Viktor Frankl while describing what is, so far as I can tell, a plan to steal shit from other websites while keeping your ass covered legally.

My question: instead of "scraping" from other websites—"scraping" being trade talk for taking their stuff while ensuring they get nothing out of it—why can't we just revert to the old method of "transcluding" their content. Transcluding means that everyone on Jewcy gets to read their stuff, but they still get their pageviews and advertising revenue.

Transcluding seems to have gone of out fashion sometime in internet pre-history (the 90s? Is that possible?), but it seems like a more effective, less labor-intensive, and vastly fairer way to poach proprietary content.

You can't transclude a New York Times page, because they have some sort of fancy technical barrier set up. So in the spirit of ethnic fraternity I'll just sample the content of someone closer to home.

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