Digital Shtetl

Horny haredim provide endless fodder for secular Jews playing the “See, you’re not so holy!” game. After all, if the pious can’t live up to their own rules, then maybe those of us who prefer Henry Miller and absinthe to the Talmud and Manischewitz aren’t so debased. Rumors abound: A former girlfriend of mine who worked the phones at a brothel in Manhattan’s Diamond District claimed that half the customers donning rubbers had been wearing tefillin earlier that day. Certain street corners in Brooklyn are said to host encounters between hookers and the local Satmar Hasids. And Serena Noir, a Manhattan dominatrix, will tell you that Orthodox Jews make up a significant portion of her clientele. Of course, Jewish misbehavior is as old as Judaism. What’s new is that the Internet has made getting a

Wikipedia has long been bashed by its critics as a free-for-all where the trashiest visitor ruins the facilities for all. Britannica editor-in-chief Robert McHenry famously described it as a public restroom. Wikipedia’s process may be vulgar and its output occasionally putrid—kind of like The New York Times—but the online encyclopedia is producing the world’s least biased accounts of the world’s most polarizing conflict. If the sign of a good negotiation is the arrival of a resolution where both parties remain dissatisfied, then time and again this anarchic online community successfully resolves the world’s most seemingly intractable debates. In this sense, Wikipedia is a geopolitical laboratory, offering lessons on how we might approach such ...

As an Irish Catholic with a German surname from Billings, Montana, I should be red meat for anti-Semitic recruitment drives. Truth be told, I’ve never had strong feelings one way or another about the Jewish people (Elliot Gould and Larry Brown excepted). I did have an awesome time at Adam Weissman’s bar mitzvah party. We got to ride on a green double-decker bus to the Sheraton where we ransacked a make-your-own-sundae bar. And, well, I work in the media. But there is a whole mess of anti-Semitic Web sites out there, all beckoning the dirty-blond, green-eyed Montanan like varieties of grape at the wine shop. Choosing a white whine is really no different from a white wine—it’s all in parsing the $2,000 Chateau Lafite ...