Month: April 2010

Uses for Leftover Matzah?

Post author By Rabbi Jason Miller
Post date April 11, 2010

James Besser, Washington Correspondent and New Media Editor of The New York Jewish Week, asked me to come up with a Top Ten list of uses for leftover Passover matzah. But being busy trying to catch up with post-Passover work, I was only able to come up with five. (Who am I kidding? Even if I had a lot more free time I couldn’t have come up with ten.)

Here’s James Besser’s post, but if you really want to laugh out loud check out last year’s hilarious YouTube video “20 Things To Do with Matzah” by Michelle Citrin and William Levin.

Five uses for leftover matzah

Okay, you miscalculated, and you have a few extra boxes of Passover matzah cluttering your cupboard. Maybe a few dozen.

And let’s face it: if you have to choke down another bite of matzah, you’re going to hurl. So what to do with the leftovers?

We asked Jewish Week blogger Rabbi Jason Miller, and he offered these “helpful” suggestions – tongue firmly in cheek, maybe stuck there by all the matzah goo:

– Give it to a blind person to read

– Crumble, add water and fill in the cracks in the sidewalk

– Use it as packing material

– How about playing catch with a square Frisbee?

– Crumble up for Shavuot Blintz topping

Holidays Jewish Judaism and Technology Passover

Video Haggadahs

Post author By Rabbi Jason Miller
Post date April 9, 2010

Cross-Posted at Jewish Techs

There are thousands of Passover Haggadahs that have been published throughout the world. And with the increasing popularity of the Internet, new forms of haggadot are being created each year.

This year’s Passover, which concluded a few short days ago, saw the return of the Facebook Haggadah as well as some attempts at using Twitter to create a Passover Tweder.

Two innovative thinkers had similar ideas before the holiday to integrate YouTube videos into a Haggadah. Rabbi Irwin Kula, president of Clal, created a “bloggadah” featuring seven YouTube videos including footage of a Bob Marley concert (singing “Exodus” of course!) and a video presentation on the psychology of consumer behavior. Rabbi Leon Morris, director of the Skirball Center for Adult Jewish Learning, worked with various artists who created fourteen short artistic YouTube videos for each section of the Passover seder.

Kula’s “bloggadah” is a great example of integrating pop culture with a Jewish message. Following a video of Richie Havens performing his song “Freedom” at Woodstock in 1969, Rabbi Kula (pictured) poses three questions:

What does freedom mean to you?
When have you ever felt you were not free?
How have you ever fought for freedom?

Morris explained his project to Sharon Udasin of The Jewish Week: ““People who have seen the videos — and this includes myself — are bringing to the seder new perspective that they didn’t have before. It will be impossible for me to be eating at a seder this year and eating maror without thinking of Hanan [Harchol]’s film and even voicing a line.” Other artists and filmmakers included in the YouTube Haggadah are Ilana Trachtman (producer of “Praying with Lior”) and Zelda Greenstein.

These Web-based haggadot have already been spread around the globe. I love the use of Web technology to create modern versions of the ancient Haggadah text.

How might YouTube videos be used to educate and stimulate discussion for other Jewish holidays?

Israel Judaism and Technology Social Media Technology

Facebook in Israel

Post author By Rabbi Jason Miller
Post date April 8, 2010

Something unusual happened last month. For the week ending March 13, 2010, Google wasn’t the most visited website in the U.S. That week, Facebook reached the coveted #1 ranking. The market share of visits to Facebook.com increased 185% that week as compared to the same week in 2009, while visits to Google.com increased 9% during the same time frame. Together Facebook.com and Google.com accounted for 14% of all U.S. Internet visits during that week.

But Facebook.com receiving more visitors than Google.com wouldn’t be news in Israel. As Ayala Tzoref reports in the Haaretz newspaper, Israelis spend more time on the Facebook site than on any other website.

“Facebook’s head of strategy for Europe, the Middle East and Africa says that Israelis spend over one billion minutes in total on Facebook every month, making Israel’s most popular site by a significant margin. Trevor Johnson is currently visiting Israel as guest of Channel 10 telelvision, which is joining forces with Facebook to promote and expand the social networking site in Israel. Johnson, in an interview with TheMarker, claims that the total time Israelis spend on Facebook is more than the time they spend on Google, Walla, and YouTube combined.”

In the world today, Facebook is the third biggest site following Google and Microsoft.

As a rabbi serving at a Jewish camp that employs dozens of visiting Israelis each summer, I was not surprised to learn of Facebook’s overwhelming popularity in the Jewish state. In fact, in the camp’s Multimedia Center I’ve noticed the Israeli counselors using Facebook to keep in touch with their friends and family back home in Israel rather than using the more traditional email messaging or even Skype, the Internet voice calling application. The social networking site’s instant messaging/chat capabilities combined with the ability to create photo albums make Facebook the perfect tool for Israelis to keep in touch while they’re out of the country.