I have not noticed a change. When you write something that affects people, you will get feedback and pressure in direct relationship to the importance of what you write. I started getting death threats in 1997.
I found that over the years, people got smarter in how they reacted to me. It became more and more rare for people to call me up to yell at me. People probed for my weaknesses and when they found them, they used them to get back at me.
It’s been many years since people bothered me about my blog. I find that few people are willing to confront me directly. They either reason with me very nicely or they leave me alone.
I’m not married. I don’t have kids. I don’t have one shul that I hold sacred. I don’t have one source of income. I’ve created a life where I can pretty much say what I want on my blog.
Here’s an amusing excerpt from my Jewish Journal profile in 2007: “Multiple rabbis contacted by The Journal declined to comment; not only that, they didn’t even want to be named as having declined comment.”
Heshy Fried of FrumSatire.net talked about this stuff in our recent interview.
John emails: “People don’t mess with you because you fight back hard. Remember that rabbi who is a convert from a few months ago? He kept sending you threatening e-mails and you kept posting them to your blog, making him look increasingly foolish the more he threatened you. That only works if you are willing to alienate the people who are complaining. If you aren’t, you have to balance their concerns with your own prerogative to blog honestly.”
