Looking up Jewish topics online
Jul. 15th, 2018 04:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livA friend recently asked me where's a good place to learn about Tisha b'Av, the fast day of the 9th Av which is coming up next week. He was following the conventional etiquette that you don't pester people from minority groups to tell you about their customs, you're supposed to educate yourself. For me personally, I am absolutely happy for people I know to ask me about Judaism. I enjoy explaining things, and I've been enthusiastically explaining Judaism to non-Jewish acquaintances about since I was verbal. So I don't consider asking an imposition at all. However I do appreciate the general advice, and indeed a person might actively prefer to look things up rather than asking.
The problem with just relying on a search engine is that dodgy and fringe and outright cult groups have much better SEO than mainstream Jewish groups. Assuming you can get round the problem that most Jewish terms are inconsistently transliterated Hebrew, the best case scenario is that most of your top hits will be Chabad. A mixture of their domains with their obvious branding, but also apparently neutral webpages which mention that the information comes from them somewhere in tiny letters multiple links deep. Chabad are a very prominent Chassidic group who will tell you a mixture of stuff that's really quite far to the right of the Orthodox spectrum, and stuff that's completely far out and only Chabad believe in it.
A lot of times, (and I know, filter bubbles, what I see might not be what you see), you'll get hits from various American Evangelical Christian groups who are trying to deceive Jews into becoming Christian, most notably Jews for Jesus. Those people almost never openly state where they're coming from because they're actively trying to deceive their audience. I don't recommend you learn about Judaism from Christians who are either lying or trying to use Judaism as a justification for American militarism and political conservativism. All too often you'll get anti-semitic hate groups that publish stuff that's superficially plausible in order to bait people. (For a long time the most easily findable English language Talmud was published by the Ku Klux Klan, yes literally. Thankfully this is no longer the case and you can find R' Steinsaltz' masterwork translation at Sefaria.)
So basically I strongly advise that you search in known good places. Wikipedia is... reasonably good on obscure topics and reasonably good on absolutely basic topics, but the range in between often gets manipulated by some of the same variously dodgy groups that have very prominent, superficially informative but heavily slanted websites.
I usually recommend Judaism 101 as a good starting place. It's a lovely little repository of entry-level information, curated by a single individual, Tracey Rich, who is herself mainstream Orthodox and makes a real effort to include other perspectives. For a bit more detail, My Jewish Learning is broadly sensible, they're American and aiming for a fairly neutral perspective in as far as such a thing exists. I'd say left of centre but still recognizable to most Jews I know.
If you want UK-specific information, the two biggest denominational groupings have websites, United Synagogue which is Orthodox and Reform Judaism which is Reform. They don't necessarily have a logically organized library of introductory articles, but if you search for the topic you're interested in you'll probably get enough of a sense to get your head round it, especially if you start with Wikipedia or Judaism 101 to orient yourself.
Or else, go ahead and ask me. Really, I mean it!
The problem with just relying on a search engine is that dodgy and fringe and outright cult groups have much better SEO than mainstream Jewish groups. Assuming you can get round the problem that most Jewish terms are inconsistently transliterated Hebrew, the best case scenario is that most of your top hits will be Chabad. A mixture of their domains with their obvious branding, but also apparently neutral webpages which mention that the information comes from them somewhere in tiny letters multiple links deep. Chabad are a very prominent Chassidic group who will tell you a mixture of stuff that's really quite far to the right of the Orthodox spectrum, and stuff that's completely far out and only Chabad believe in it.
A lot of times, (and I know, filter bubbles, what I see might not be what you see), you'll get hits from various American Evangelical Christian groups who are trying to deceive Jews into becoming Christian, most notably Jews for Jesus. Those people almost never openly state where they're coming from because they're actively trying to deceive their audience. I don't recommend you learn about Judaism from Christians who are either lying or trying to use Judaism as a justification for American militarism and political conservativism. All too often you'll get anti-semitic hate groups that publish stuff that's superficially plausible in order to bait people. (For a long time the most easily findable English language Talmud was published by the Ku Klux Klan, yes literally. Thankfully this is no longer the case and you can find R' Steinsaltz' masterwork translation at Sefaria.)
So basically I strongly advise that you search in known good places. Wikipedia is... reasonably good on obscure topics and reasonably good on absolutely basic topics, but the range in between often gets manipulated by some of the same variously dodgy groups that have very prominent, superficially informative but heavily slanted websites.
I usually recommend Judaism 101 as a good starting place. It's a lovely little repository of entry-level information, curated by a single individual, Tracey Rich, who is herself mainstream Orthodox and makes a real effort to include other perspectives. For a bit more detail, My Jewish Learning is broadly sensible, they're American and aiming for a fairly neutral perspective in as far as such a thing exists. I'd say left of centre but still recognizable to most Jews I know.
If you want UK-specific information, the two biggest denominational groupings have websites, United Synagogue which is Orthodox and Reform Judaism which is Reform. They don't necessarily have a logically organized library of introductory articles, but if you search for the topic you're interested in you'll probably get enough of a sense to get your head round it, especially if you start with Wikipedia or Judaism 101 to orient yourself.
Or else, go ahead and ask me. Really, I mean it!
(no subject)
Date: 2018-07-15 07:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-07-16 07:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-07-16 12:04 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-07-16 02:11 am (UTC)(That said, I'd certainly be interested in whether
(no subject)
Date: 2018-07-16 08:22 pm (UTC)Is it a good source? It's not great if you're an actual observant Jewish person who wants to know what you should do, because if you're trying to live a halachic life you're supposed to follow the traditions of your community and ask questions of your rabbi, not seek advice from internet randoms.
If you're looking to learn about Jewish culture, it will give you a pretty good picture of a particular slice of the Jewish spectrum. I think it's not much frequented by cultists, and it's better than many online forums for avoiding devolving into yelling matches between people who think halachic observance is meaningless superstition, and people who think that everybody who doesn't practise exactly the way they do is an enemy of Judaism. That's partly because of the general Stack Exchange culture of valuing useful information over yelling matches, but also there's a rough consensus around the attitude and orientation towards observance expected. That consensus is still considerably to the right of where I am and well to the right of the Jewish median, if such a position could be defined, and it's to some extent a tacit consensus.
In short, it's a pretty good source if you want to find out what sorts of things might be considerations for reasonably mainstream Orthodox Jews trying to decide how to apply halacha. But it's more use for finding out what the questions are than for telling you the definitive answer.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-07-16 08:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-07-16 01:52 pm (UTC)This is certainly true of the in-person experience of interacting with Chabad, but my general experience of interacting with Chabad's online resources is that they represent a fairly straightforward right-wing Orthodox Judaism. Is your sense different?
(no subject)
Date: 2018-07-16 04:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-07-16 04:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-07-16 08:41 pm (UTC)The sort of thing I mean is, if I go and look up Tisha b'Av via the Chabad site, I find stuff about eating eggs dipped in ashes before the fast and making Kiddush Levanah after the fast, presented on an equal footing with absolutely solid halacha d'rabbanan about fasting. And it's not that I have a problem with those minhagim, but they're not necessarily the first thing that a curious non-Jew should learn about how Tisha b'Av is observed.
I used to rely on their Shabbat times website until I discovered that it's significantly off for anywhere north of the US-Canada border. And more seriously, I have taught conversion classes, so people who are pretty committed to learning about Judaism seriously, not just searching to satisfy a moment's curiosity, and had my students come to me reporting that they'd found horrible stuff about בני חם on Chabad sites. That was a few years back, so maybe they're better now.