It was a tall order, but an Israeli couple has come up with a baby name even weirder than Mariah Carey’s. Lior and Vardit Adler have named their third child “Like,” as in the Facebook term for something you approve of. “I didn’t want to call my daughter by the name of someone I know,…
Being religious doesn’t prevent Israeli teens from looking at pornography, a new survey has revealed. According to numbers released by Olam Katan, a Shabbat publication devoted to the country’s religious youth, just under 30 percent of of religious teens look at “religiously inappropriate” Web sites, while an even higher number – 37 percent – admit…
It’s been well documented that social networking sites have been key in spreading pro-democracy messages and bringing people to the streets in the Arab world. Now, people are even being told they can choose their government on Facebook. Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has asked his Facebook friends to help decide who should serve in…
When I saw this blog post, about attempts by some ultra-Orthodox authorities in Israel to ban Facebook from Haredi homes because the ubiquitous social media site “greatly damages families,” I thought it just another example of the community’s ongoing effort to build the shtetl walls high enough to control people’s behavior. Then I read this…
Playing “Farmville” on Shabbat isn’t a great idea if you’ve told the Israeli army you’re too frum to serve. That’s one of the lessons about a thousand Israeli women have learned after the Israel Defense Forces used Facebook to check out claims of religious observance. By using the hugely popular social-networking site, the military managed…
In a surprise decision, Time magazine today disregarded the people’s choice of WikiLeaks’s Julian Assange for Person of the Year and opted for Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The accolade, awarded to the individual who has “for better or for worse…done the most to influence the events of the year,” according to the magazine, would have…
Kate Middleton, fiancée of Prince William, is old news. The British public is fixated on another celebrity Kate — a 24-year-old Jewish woman named Katie Waissel. Rarely in the history of television talent shows has so much attention been focused on a single contestant. Waissel is a singer on the television show “ X-Factor,” the…
Sarah Seltzer came away from watching “The Social Network,” the movie about the founding of Facebook, peeved about its (non)portrayal of women. In her post, “The (Male-Only) Social Network,” she quoted Maya Dusenbery about “the wall of giggle and boobs that composes the film’s background.” I, too, came away miffed about this, but also thinking…
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