Jewish life on campus has a changing face because of
Facebook.com.
Students and organizations are taking
advantage of the social networking site launched in 2004 that
allows users to make a profile, create and join numerous
groups, and post messages to other members and
groups.
“It’s already had a direct effect on the
expectations that Hillel is putting into its resources,” said
Hillel’s Simon Amiel, who is charged with overseeing the
Jewish campus organization’s outreach fellows.
“Ten
years ago, 15 years ago, the goal was to get students in the
building,” he explained, adding “that’s still a nice goal for
us ... but it’s far more of an important goal to say there are
500 students having a Jewish experience every week, inside the
building or out.”
Facebook’s ability to create ad-hoc
communities is seen as its greatest strength.
When an
Iranian-American student was Tasered by campus police at the
University of California Los Angeles, thousands of students
registered their protest within days by joining groups created
to complain about the incident.
Jewish students and
groups on Facebook are taking similar advantage of the site’s
possibilities. A Jewish group was launched recently to gather
right-wing Israel advocates to protest a book signing by
former President Carter on the same day in New York City.
Another group is called “American Jews Against
Israel.”
Along the way, Jewish students are finding new
ways to associate with each other and new aspects of their
identities.
Janice Hussain is a junior at Brandeis
University, and the daughter of Indian and Jewish parents, and
until she started using Facebook, she didn’t know there were
many other Jews of a similar ethnicity.
“At Brandeis,
if I wanted to meet someone who was Asian and Jewish, or
Indian or half-Indian, I couldn’t,” she said in an
interview.
So Hussain this semester launched a group
called “Asian and Jewish,” inviting a handful of people at
Brandeis who were of Asian and Jewish descent. Before she knew
it the group reached 90 members from various
campuses.
Now that she’s had success online, Hussain is
considering new endeavors for Jewish life on her campus, with
which she’s had little involvement thus far.
“I was
actually thinking of maybe starting a club at Brandeis for
Jews that are not fully Ashkenazi, or Jews of color, and to
have an event or maybe have a lecture,” she
said.
Hussain’s experience in finding common heritage
is far from unique on Facebook for Jews of mixed
descent.
“What seems to be coming up over and over
again is a place for students that are from a mixed-parentage
family,” Amiel said, noting that Facebook’s self-starting
nature allows Jewish students to “make connections that are
more organic.”
On Facebook, most of the traditional
categories for Judaism and religious activity in general are
far less popular than alternative expressions of
identity.
Jews on Facebook are using nontraditional
identifiers far more than any standard declaration. Several
groups are titled “I don’t roll on Shabbos,” after a line in
the cult movie “The Big Lebowski.”
Hundreds of students
belong to these groups, and most of them belong to hundreds of
other groups that express their Jewish
identities.
While statistics are not available for the
site, an informal survey of multiple campuses has shown
consistently that most Jewish students will call themselves
“Jewish” or some manifestation thereof in the “Religious
Views” box only about 10 percent of the time.
At
Indiana University, even the Hillel president, Joanna Blotner,
doesn’t call herself “Jewish” on her profile.
“It’s
because you don’t want to actively make yourself part of the
minority,” she explained. “It’s probably the same reason a lot
of gays and lesbians don’t identify themselves.”
It’s a
trend that Jewish officials can’t explain.
“Of any
place, being on Facebook is one of the most safe places to
identify as Jewish,” Amiel said.
At the same time,
traditional Jewish institutions have employed the site as
well, finding Facebook to be far more effective than e-mail in
getting students to attend their events.
“People, in my
experience, are more likely to attend an event if they are
personally invited,” said Alex Freedman, president of the
Jewish Student Union at Washington University. “The group and
event invitation serves that function on a grand scale — it
allows the word to be spread better among a target audience
quicker than any other medium.”
Meanwhile, Facebook’s
implementation of a new feature called “News Feeds” allows
students to see the groups or events their friends are
joining.
“All of a sudden, people no longer had to be
individually invited to a group or to an event, they could see
what their friends were doing,” said Andy Ratto, Washington
University Hillel’s JCSC fellow. “This has been extremely
useful because people might be rather unlikely to go to an
event where they didn’t know anyone who would be there, but
all of a sudden people would find out about an event because
their friends were going to it, and then they would want to
come, too.”
While those results aren’t the expectation
for Hillel events at a given campus, the function still makes
a difference, Freedman said.
It “saves us a lot of
phone calls, a lot of fliers and a lot of time,” he said.
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(CampusJ.com is a Web site that covers Jewish life on
college campuses. Reporting by Sam Guzik, Ben Greenberg,
Jordan Magaziner, Valerie Saturen, Daniel Smajovits and Steven
I. Weiss.) |
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