Judaism and the Internet: Information and Authority in the Digital Age Wexner Summer Institute 2017

The internet has has radically changed the way information is disseminated and controlled. It has democratized access to knowledge and shifted the nature and loci of authority. This has major implications for the way Judaism is taught, transmitted, and created today. In this seminar, we’ll explore ways the internet is shaping 21century life and Judaism, empowering individuals, and changing the role of rabbis, scholars, and communal leaders

Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky

Human beings are social creatures-not occasionally or by accident but always….The centrality of group effort to human life means that anything that changes the way groups function will have profound ramifications for everything from commerce and government to media and religion...When we change the way we communicate, we change society. The tools that a society uses to create and maintain itself are as central to human life as a hive is to bee life...

By making it easier for groups to self-assemble and for individuals to contribute to group effort without requiring formal management (and its attendant overhead), these tools have radically altered the old limits on the size, sophistication, and scope of unsupervised effort (the limits that created the institutional dilemma in the first place).

It’s official: Mormon founder had up to 40 wives

The Charlotte Observer (November 11, 2014)

Mormon leaders have acknowledged for the first time that the church’s founder and prophet, Joseph Smith, portrayed in church materials as a loyal partner to his loving spouse Emma, took as many as 40 wives, some already married and one only 14 years old. The church’s disclosures, in a series of essays online, are part of an effort to be transparent about its history at a time when church members are increasingly encountering disturbing claims about the faith on the Internet.

The Genius by Eliyahu Stern

[T]he differentiation between public and private spheres, the weakening of religious governing structures, and the democratization of knowledge in Jewish society--all processes that emerged in tandem with principles such as civil rights, equality, functional differentiation, and skepticism--produced a host of unforseen ideologies and movements, including Hasidism, Mitnagdism, the Haskalah, Zionism, and Jewish anti-statism. Many writers divide these movement into modern anti-modern, and pre-modern tendencies. Such divisions generate imprecise terminology, concealing more than they illuminate. Most importantly, they fail to grasp that modernity was not just a movement based on a certain set of liberal philosophical principles that only certain elite sectors of society experienced. Rather, it was condition that restructured all aspects of European life and thought, in diverse and often contradictory ways. Exclusivist ideologies such as Hasidism, institutions such as the yeshiva, and self-assertive Jewish political expressions all emerged from the same democratization of knowledge and privatization of religion that gave rise to the Haskalah. English

Online and Unabashed ​in Tablet

In November 2006, the Agudath Israel of America, the leading advocacy group for Haredi Jews in the United States, held a special session at its annual convention to focus on the dangers of Orthodox blogs. “Have bloggers declared open season on Torah Authority?” an advertising insert in the Haredi newspaper Hamodia asked in the weeks preceding the convention.

Rabbi Chaim Dovid Zweibel, executive vice president of the Agudah, was quoted in the Haredi newspaper Yated Ne’eman as calling the proliferation of Orthodox blogs “troubling” and saying that their efforts had the “intended effect of undermining any semblance of Torah authority in our community.” According to a report in Yated Ne’eman, one of the speakers, Rabbi Efraim Wachsman, declared bloggers to be “actors in the tradition of Korach, the Tziddukim, and the Maskilim,” traditional archetypes for rebellion against Torah authority. Rabbi Matisyahu Solomon, a leading rabbi at Lakewood’s Beth Medrash Govoha yeshiva, reportedly called blogs “a plague” and an “insidious … poison.”

Unchosen: the Hidden Lives of Hasidic Rebels by Hella Winston

For people living in a community where speaking out publicly about abuse can be socially, emotionally and even physically perilous, the Internet played a critical role not only in exposing the problem of abuse but allowing survivors to connect safely with one another and with others—both within and outside their communities...Blogs like UOJ and Failed Messiah, along with the Awareness Center, were instrumental in fostering the anti-abuse movement in the Orthodox community, publicizing stories of abuse and exposing those (often powerful and until then, untouchable) people, who enabled it and connecting survivors and advocates who went on to effect real change in the world.