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Twitter Hashtag on a Wedding Kippah

Reform Jewish wedding, Conservative Jewish wedding or Orthodox Jewish wedding… they all have one thing in common — the personalized yarmulke. It’s impossible to go to a Jewish wedding and not receive a keepsake kippah with the bride and groom’s names imprinted on the inside along with the wedding date.Well, these personalized kippot have been fairly standard for a very long time. Some Jewish wedding couples choose to include the Hebrew date of the wedding along with the secular date and some couples have their names printed in Hebrew as well.

For the first time I saw a couple include a hashtag on the inside of their wedding kippahs. Hashtags are used on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Hashtags are a word or phrase preceded by a hash or pound sign (#) that are used to identify messages on a specific topic making it easy to search. Oftentimes at conventions, conferences, events and sports games a hashtag is recommended so users can follow the related posts.

 

Hashtag Wedding Kippah (Yarmulke)
Brian Stelter and Jamie Shupak’s wedding kippah with the #thestelters hashtag
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Hasidic Dancing in Traffic on the Highway

A group of Hasidic students (bachurim) from Michigan were caught simcha dancing on Interstate I-80 during a four-hour traffic standstill over three years ago. However, the news report with a short video clip is once again making the rounds on the Web.Most likely this fun video has found new life following the many snow-related traffic issues around the country, most notably the traffic standstill in Atlanta which Jon Stewart dubbed “South Parked” on The Daily Show.

 

Hasidic Jewish dancing during traffic jam on interstate I-80

Watching this video reminded me of R.E.M.’s great video for “Everybody Hurts,” in which the band is stuck in a traffic jam along the double deck portions of I-10 near the I-35 Interchange in Downtown San Antonio, Texas. The music video shows the people in other cars while subtitles of their thoughts appear on screen. At the end of the video directed by Jake Scott, all the people leave their cars and walk instead; then they vanish. The video was heavily inspired by the traffic jam in the opening dream sequence of Fellini’s 8½. Instead of getting out and just walking around, these five young guys turned up the music and started dancing like they were at a freilich (fun) wedding.

I was also reminded of the time as a pre-teen when my family was driving back from Toronto and a two-hour standstill ensued on the highway. My brother and I took our baseball mitts and a baseball out of the car and started playing catch on the side of the highway. The moral of the story is that highway standstills are horrible, but you have to make the best out of the situation.

Here’s the video of the I-80 dancing.


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Dating Intermarriage Jewish

Pew Study and JDate’s Effect on Intermarriage

While many Jewish leaders have been bemoaning the results of the 200-plus page report from the Pew Research Center about the current state of Jewish Americans, I have been trying to extract some positive from the numbers. Of course, like any study, the numbers don’t tell the whole story. Anecdotal information is a much better guide to measure the health of the Jewish community.Just looking at the numbers and the graphs of the recently released Pew Research study as it relates to intermarriage is alarming. However, the statistics really aren’t too surprising when put in the context of the ever-changing community in which we live. What is noteworthy, however, is that on the intermarriage grid within the study from 1999 going forward, the intermarriage rate actually tapered off. Iit’s interesting how that’s right around the time when JDate.com really caught on among Jewish singles.

Jdate and Pew Study