JSwipe Wants Your Help to Fight Off JDate Lawsuit

By Lior Zaltzman August 11, 2015

The David and Goliath story has just been updated for the Tinder generation.

A reminder: , making the vicious world of online dating just a bit more vicious.

It’s turning out to be a very expensive battle of Jew vs Jew for JSwipe founder David Yarus, who has launched an IndieGogo campaign to help fund the company’s legal expenses. Through the biblically named David vs. Goliath campaign, Yarus wants to raise 180,000 dollars for legal fees. So far he has 18,000 and 20 days to go.

“Consultants tell us it could be another $300,000 to $500,000 in legal fees to see the case through, ON TOP of the hundreds of thousands already been billed,” Yarus wrote on the page’s message board.

Donation prizes range from a laptop decal and love letter ($18), to J-Swipe’s Matzo-baller badge of honor ($180). For a cool $1,800, you get a #RightSwipe t-shirt, a laptop decal, a love letter AND a Matzo-baller badge. Oh, and a Mazel Tov screen that says “G(immel) Status.”

JSwipe, for those of you who aren’t Jewish and single, is a free app — and Yarus intends to keep it that way. JDate, on the other hand charges for membership. Its parent company, Spark Network (which also owns ChristianMingle and BlackSingles) reportedly rakes in approximately 50 million in membership fees every year.

So yes, it seems we do have a bit of a David vs. Goliath situation. Though Spark Network CEO Michael Egan has a very different take on the lawsuit.

Egan claims that in addition to the letter J similarity — which Yarus declared “belongs to the Jewish community” — “Swipe is synonymous with ‘dating’ in the dating community”.

Really?

Let’s face it, finding a match in the online dating world is hard enough. And finding a Jewish match is even harder. Do we really have to fight about it?

Lior Zaltzman was the Forward’s Digital Fellow. Follow her on twitter @liorca.

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