To celebrate Israel’s 60th Birthday, The American Jewish Committee has put out what may be the worst web advertising campaign ever.  Just now I clicked on a flash-ad on Slate.com that described different American cities and their characteristics.   Thinking it was an ad for a ranking of American cities (I love to critique their methodologies), I clicked through, only to come across this page from the AJC pointing out how Israel is Diverse, Innovative, Friendly, and Free.  In fact, that’s all it does.  The entire content of the website is a picture of a black couple at a strip-mall with the text:

Diverse. Innovative. Friendly. Free. These are just a few of the countless ways to describe Israel @ 60. A modern democracy with an enduring history, Israel’s unique mix of culture and ingenuity makes it a lot like home and yet like nowhere else on Earth.

I clicked through the ad to get what could very easily be a print ad hastily stuck at a URL.  There’s no content for me to explore, no call to action, no history of Israel, tourism info, testimonials or interviews with Israelis, anything.  Just a paragraph of text and a stock-photo.  I haven’t researched around yet to figure out the impetus behind this campaign, but to consider it a terrible waste of donor funds would be an understatement. If you’re going to advertise on the web, at least advertise something.

To break it down for the AJC, Indecipherable/Misleading Ad + Contentless Page = Worst Web Campaign Ever.

Categories: Israel, Marketing
3 Comments »

Edward Luttwak lays the smack down on the Middle East, Middle East Experts, and the rest of us for caring:

That brings us to the mistake that the rest of us make. We devote far too much attention to the middle east, a mostly stagnant region where almost nothing is created in science or the arts—excluding Israel, per capita patent production of countries in the middle east is one fifth that of sub-Saharan Africa. The people of the middle east (only about five per cent of the world’s population) are remarkably unproductive, with a high proportion not in the labour force at all. Not many of us would care to work if we were citizens of Abu Dhabi, with lots of oil money for very few citizens. But Saudi Arabia’s 27m inhabitants also live largely off the oil revenues that trickle down to them, leaving most of the work to foreign technicians and labourers: even with high oil prices, Saudi Arabia’s annual per capita income, at $14,000, is only about half that of oil-free Israel.

Categories: Israel, Politics
No Comments »

A team of computer scientists at Tel Aviv University have developed an algorithm that makes people in pictures more attractive:

This sketch presents a novel method for digital face beautification: given a frontal photograph of a face (a portrait), our method automatically increases the predicted attractiveness rating of the face. The main challenge is to achieve this goal while introducing only minute, subtle modifications to the original image, such that the resulting “beautified” face maintains a strong, unmistakable similarity to the original, as demonstrated by the pair of faces shown in Figure 1.

The algorithm makes minor adjustments so that the picture is more attractive, but still recognizable as the original subject.

Pseudo-scientifically, it works by taking the original picture and comparing it to optimal hotness (also called the Dave Dworin Point), and then makes minor adjustments to reconcile the two. Or something else involving math.

Categories: Israel, Photos, Science, Technology
No Comments »

But half the 247 pupils at the 40-year-old local authority-supported school are Muslim, and apparently the Muslim parents go through all sorts of hoops, including moving into the school’s catchment area, to get their children into King David to learn Hebrew, wave Israeli flags on independence day and hang out with the people some would have us believe that they hate more than anyone in the world.

The Muslim parents, mostly devout and many of the women wearing the hijab, say they love the ethos of the school, and even the kosher school lunches, which are suitable because halal and kosher dietary rules are virtually identical. The school is also respectful to Islam, setting aside a prayer room for the children and supplying Muslim teachers during Ramadan. At Eid, the Muslim children are wished Eid Mubarak in assembly, and all year round, if they wish, can wear a kufi (hat). Amazingly, dozens of the Muslim children choose instead to wear the Jewish kipah.

About a Jewish school in England with a majority Muslim student body.

Categories: Community, Education, Israel, Jewishness, Politics
No Comments »

Phoebe at Jewlicious bemoans that all Jewish events are Jewish singles events, taking her recent Birthright trip as the example:

The problem with Birthright (or at least the version I experienced) as it currently exists is the level of desperation. One can’t help but wonder, if Israel’s such a great country, then why do people have to pay us to go visit it? If Jewish women are so beautiful, as Momo keeps insisting, then why do Jewish men have to be told to notice this?

At some point, the leadership of the Jewish community has to wake up and end the forced mating program before Jews become like pandas, unwilling to breed in captivity to save the species. Instead, they need to go back to stating the value proposition of Judaism, the reasons that it’s worth saving.
Also, her post is one of the best I’ve ever read in the JBlogosphere.

Categories: Community, Dating, Israel, Jewishness, Matching Mechanisms, Strategy
No Comments »

Israeli Knesset Member Yossi Beilin makes the case that Jimmy Carter said nothing Israelis themselves don’t say:

It is not that Israelis are indifferent to what is said about them, but the threshold of what passes as acceptable here is apparently much higher than it is with Israel’s friends in the United States. In the case of this particular book, the harsh words that Carter reserves for Israel are simply not as jarring to Israeli ears, which have grown used to such language, especially with respect to the occupation.

In other words, what Carter says in his book about the Israeli occupation and our treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories — and perhaps no less important, how he says it — is entirely harmonious with the kind of criticism that Israelis themselves voice about their own country. There is nothing in the criticism that Carter has for Israel that has not been said by Israelis themselves.

I think that the American Jewish Community is grossly mishandling their reaction to Carter’s book, not that I’m surprised that the organized Jewish community is mishandling something. Despite nearly unanimous criticism of Carter’s book from nearly everyone I know, and countless more in the jBlogosphere, I’ve yet to find anyone (Beilin excepted) who has actually read the book.

Categories: America, Books, Israel, Jewishness, Politics
No Comments »

Aside from those who believe that there is no such thing as free speech, most intellectuals can be counted on to oppose efforts at censorship. In my own case, it was the Jewish environment in which I was raised that led me to value free speech and expression. Although I grew up a secular Jew — my bar mitzvah was as pro forma as they come, and after that, I have returned to synagogue only a handful of times — I was spoon-fed a version of Jewish liberalism in which we Jews were always expected to come to the defense of unpopular ideas. When American Nazis announced in 1977 their intention to march in Skokie, Ill. — a town in which one-sixth of the population was related to a Holocaust survivor — the American Civil Liberties Union defended their right to do so, and many of the leaders of and contributors to the ACLU were Jewish. I recall taking considerable pride in the ACLU’s actions, not out of Jewish self-hatred, but out of pride in Jewish liberalism.

From “Free Speech, Israel, and Jewish Illiberalism” by Alan Wolfe in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Wolfe discusses how Jewish organizations, but more often, large individual Jewish donors, will pressure institutions to drop anti-Israel speakers, exhibitions, and articles, in contrast to the traditional liberal Jewish principle which answered disagreeable speech with more speech. It’s spot on and something I’ve been thinking about for a while. It gets me thinking, though: why the shift? Here are some hypotheses I’ve come up with:

1. Gentiles are too afraid of offending Jews: There’s a tendency, especially in America, to over-estimate Jewish sensitivities (I’m reminded of a censored episode of Family Guy, which every Jew I know found hysterical). Most Jews might still support the right of anti-Israel speakers to be heard, but when a few make a stink, gentiles, who aren’t in touch with the Jewish community, assume that the they just offended the lot of us, and afraid of the Antisemite label, panic. This isn’t just a phenomenon with Jews, though - people often tread lightly around minorities, weather they’re talking about race, gender, ethnicity, or religion. We’re just sensitive as a society.
2. Gentiles are too afraid of losing Jewish money: I don’t mean this in a conspiratorial sense, I mean it in the sense that Jews are disproportionately philanthropic, and offending them en masse is a bad idea for any institution. This isn’t really a religious thing, it’s another instance where an organization is beholden to their donor stakeholders, and it often happens with much more mundane institutions (I’m thinking of bad purchases by art museums). In this case, I think the problem doesn’t lie with Jews having lost their liberal attitudes towards free speech, but with individual Jews exercising their donor muscle illiberally. I’m conflicted about this, because while they shouldn’t censor speech, I don’t think they have an obligation to sponsor speech they disagree with. Bottom line: when it all comes down to it, I highly doubt that Jewish contributions to universities and cultural institutions are nearly as sensitive as these institutions’ leaders seem to think.
3. Jews are more afraid of anti-Israel speakers than Nazis: I can really believe this one, especially among baby-boomer Jews, who have internalized a real fear for Israel’s survival that Gen-x and younger Jews just don’t relate to. Nazis in America aren’t seen as powerful, so we can let them march, but there are Jews who are genuinely afraid of what anti-Israel speakers have to say, whether because it has a grain of truth, because they fear so heavily for Israel, or because they feel it has more mainstream support. Regardless, what this says is that Jews who feel this way are liberal when it’s convenient, and that’s just a bad way to set up policy like this.
4. Most Jews Are Still Liberal: As of a few years ago, members of the ADL were still telling me that “more speech” is the counterweight to hate speech, and the leadership hasn’t changed significantly since. The position of the Israel on Campus Coalition and its constituents is that campus activists should focus on a positive message for Israel, talking about things other than conflict. The debate really isn’t that important, so it’s safe for Jewish activists to ignore controversial speakers. When I did PR and communications for the Michigan State Jewish community, my first successful press release was for a pro-Israel event with a moonwalk, my statements in response to anti-Israel events looked like this:

“The college campus should always embrace the free discourse of ideas,” Dworin said.

However, Dworin said the film only presents one side of the conflict.

“I think it is disingenuous to show these women, who have killed other human beings, as if they have a monopoly on victimhood,” Dworin said.

These are just a few hypotheses, and I think there’s an interplay between all of them, and other factors, at work when Israel elicits illiberalism. When it comes down to it, the real issue for me here isn’t about Isreal, it’s about the free speech and civil liberties implications, and how we deal with speech that we disagree with.

Categories: America, Israel, Jewishness, Politics
No Comments »