This week it was announced that "Protocols," the controversially named, American-based Jewish "blog" - short for "weblog" - was being closed down by its founder, Steven I. Weiss, the latest dramatic event within a mushrooming phenomenon of the Internet age.
Part on-line diaries, part stream-of-consc-iousness musings, blogs have achieved an extra-ordinary popularity world-wide - and have found particular resonance among Jews. Blogs have allowed anyone with access to a computer to express his or her own specific take on Jewish life. And in Protocols - tagged "A group of Jews endeavours towards total domination of the blogosphere" - hot Jewish issues of the day have been freely and fiercely debated.
Where Jewish blogs are not single-issue pro-Israel sites, they are, as in the cases of New York-based JewSchool, JewLicious, or Jews-Week, simply on-line magazines which draw attention to ventures of Jewish interest.
Protocols, however, was different - an opinion site which drew comments from around the world. Steven I. Weiss began it while a freelance journalist with good Jewish community connections. He parlayed these into a staff job at the New York Jewish weekly, the Forward, where he also ran a blog in the on-line edition of the paper. Now freelance again, he says he's "figuring out my next move in the blogging world. I'm trying out a religion blog at Canonist, a food blog at Kosher Bachelor, and a New York blog at The Metro Section." He also has a "home blog" called Iatribe. (As a measure of the impact blogging has had, some American groups have begun to award blog "Oscars," or Bloggies, for best foreign news blog, best sports blog etc.)
When Weiss went to the Forward, he passed the reins of his blog to one of Protocols' most frequent guest bloggers, Luke Ford. Ford, author of an analysis of American Jewish journalism, "Yesterday's News Tomorrow," is one of the most controversial figures in the blogging world. Once a writer about pornography, he is a 38-year-old, California-based convert to Judaism. Protocols' posted items, under Weiss, were short and snappy: Ford began writing much longer pieces, often documenting the progress of his latest book. More recently, the site appears to have become a campaigning blog for attacking rabbis, specifically those in America, who are suspected of sexual impropriety. Indeed, the Protocols seems increasingly to have brought any and all rabbis within its gunsights - including at least one British-born minister whom the blogsite has accused of falsifying academic credentials. The tone and content, particularly in the comments section, became more and more salacious.
Weiss has said he will announce the reasons for closing the blog on December 8 - in, literally, the last post. Ford, for his part, says: "We remain friends. This is not the result of a falling out between Steven and I. He's never told me what stories to write or not to write."
Miriam Shaviv writes:
Shmarya was correct in the Protocols comments section: my late father in law, Chaim Bermant, was a columnist for the JC for almost 40 years. Indeed, he was their star columnist and a virtual British Jewish institution, whose name was perhaps better known than almost any other British Jew (as my husband once said, the most miserable looking people at his funeral were the JC publishers, who realized that their sales were about to drop). It would have been interesting for you to write about him in your journalism book as he was, imho, the rare embodiment of all the qualities you find so lacking in Jewish journalism today. He was witty, engaging, and always amusing, attacked hypocrisy wherever he saw it in the Jewish community and always pursued justice, qualities which made him very controversial in some circles. The bain of his life, I believe he once said, were the JC's lawyers who censored him because of British libel laws. As a result, he was alternately loved and loathed by British Jewry (who all enjoyed reading his articles nonetheless). You may find it
interesting to read some of the obituaries written about him (links below): how many writers in Jewish newspapers today would get obits in the national press?
The Guardian
Daily Telegraph
The London Times
The Economist
