Our Jewish Answer to Facebook’s New Icons

Image by Jewish Emoticons

By Lior Zaltzman February 24, 2016

For years, me and my fellow kvetchers have been asking Facebook for that dislike button, you know, to respond to our borderline anti-Semitic highschool classmates or to those xenophobic pro-Trump videos. Now, Facebook has answered our prayers. Well. Sort of.

This Wednesday, Facebook unveiled 6 new reaction buttons to accompany their iconic thumbs-up like. And honestly, our initial reaction was “oy.” We then wanted to react with an oy icon, but you know, there wasn’t one.

Why did we need 6 new reaction buttons? Feh, we don’t know. And why so happy all of the time? I mean, now there’s love, there’s yay, wow, there’s even haha incase you were too lazy to type the three letters of “LOL…” Sure, there’s a sad and an angry button, they are very clearly outnumbered by shiny, happy, and frankly, not very Jewish icons.

So instead of kvetching we decided to create our own 6 new icons:

1) Shvitz

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Because, let’s face it, just thinking about all the intense political arguments on Facebook is enough to make us shvitz.

2) Good For the Jews?

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We decided to channel our Jewish existential angst and our most frequently asked question into one icon. Of course, we couldn’t help but channel Woody Allen’s iconic “Annie Hall” hasid scene. Now, the real question is, is using Woody Allen for anything still good for the Jews?!

3) Meh

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Eh, you know, we guess your post is fine.

4) Kvetch

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You know it’s what we do on Facebook 99% of the time. And you know we had to channel our bubbes for this one.

5) Kvell

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When someone is being a mensch, you need the right reactions icon.

6) Oy

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Riffing off the “wow” icon, we felt like this one was more our style.

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

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