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Bar Mitzvah Technology

Bar Mitzvah Prep in the 21st Century’s Tech Age

In the Coen Brother’s movie “A Serious Man,” we see young Danny practicing his haftorah for his bar mitzvah by listening to the cantor’s rendition of it on his record player. That scene was undoubtedly sentimental for Jewish men of a certain age who prepared for their bar mitzvah by keying up the phonograph in their parents’ living room.

Ben Stiller Bar Mitzvah

Bar Mitzvah preparation has come a long way since the days of the record album. In the 1980s and early 1990s cantors and bar/bat mitzvah tutors recorded their voices onto audio cassette tapes so their twelve-year-old students could walk around the house listening to the chanting on a Sony Walkman. In fact, I remember many nights falling asleep with my black foamy headphones on while I listened to the late Cantor Larry Vieder of Adat Shalom Synagogue repeating the Torah trope (cantilation notes) and the long haftorah for my bar mitzvah. The mid-1990s saw the transition from the audio tapes to music CDs when bar mitzvah tutors began hooking up microphones to the computer and recording the bar mitzvah portion onto blank CD-Roms.

In recent years we’ve seen bar and bat mitzvah students receiving the audio version of the haftorah and blessings they need to learn via email, a concept that anyone over the age of thirty would find amazing.

The way Jewish teens prepare for their bar or bat mitzvah has changed dramatically thanks to technological innovation. Not only has the audio format changed over the years, but so too has the way in which these young men and women are being tutored.

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CES Israel Start Up Nation Technology

Silentium: Israeli Tech Startup Wants Silence

It’s no secret that Israel is the Silicon Valley of the Middle East. With thousands of tech companies and start-ups, Israel has become just as well-known as a center for technology innovation as it is for hummus.

Between two visits to Israel earlier this year, I made my annual pilgrimage to the Holy Land for techies – International CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas. Before heading out to the annual convention for “everything technology” I spent some time looking at the Israeli startups that would be exhibiting at the show. One particular company caught my eye, or rather my ear.

Like me, you have probably never heard of Israeli tech company Silentium before. But that will soon change. This company aims to fix something that many people didn’t even realize was a problem. Background noise. We often find ourselves talking loudly to someone standing right in front of us because we have become so used to the background noises of machines and electronics. We live in a very noisy world with a lot of noise pollution, but we’ve become accustomed to these hums and hisses.

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Education EduTech Google Jewish Education Technology

Looking Through Google Glass at Jewish Education

How will Google Glass affect Jewish education? This is the blog post I recently published on The Jewish Week’s “Jewish Techs” blog on that subject:

In 1982 when I was in first grade at Hillel Day School, a Jewish day school in Metropolitan Detroit, my father brought in our family’s Apple II computer for show-and-tell. There were no computers in the school at that time so it was a seminal technological moment for the school. I’m sure my father figured he would blow my classmates minds by showing them how to type a few lines of the LOGO programming language and get the turtle cursor to turn and move across the screen. However, my peers didn’t have any mind-blowing experiences that day — it was only the beginning of what our generation would come to expect from computers and technology.

Fast forward to 2013 when, earlier this week, I was a guest speaker in my son’s third grade classroom at the same Jewish day school. Speaking on the subject of technology and Jewish education, I became nostalgic and told the students how when I was their age we would save one word processing document on a floppy disc. I then took a USB flash drive out of my pocket to explain Moore’s Law — the observation that, over the history of computing hardware, the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years. They weren’t impressed. These young people have become accustomed to better, smaller, faster technology being rolled out every few months. They see their parents turning in their smartphones for better ones and downloading new versions of operating systems. They know that the graphics on the next generation of video game consoles in their basements will be more realistic than the ones before.

Rabbi Jason Miller wearing Google Glass at the Macklemore Concert during the AT&T Developers Summit
Rabbi Jason Miller wearing Google Glass at the Macklemore Concert during the AT&T Developers Summit
Categories
Humor Jewish

The LED Kippah

I just saw that there is now an LED Kippah (yarmulke) that you can buy on the Web. (Update: the website is no longer operational so perhaps it wasn’t a successful idea)

Light Up Kippah - LED Kippah Yarmulke

You can program your own scrolling message. Perhaps donors will contribute money to the congregation for their name to scroll down the rabbi’s kippah?

Think of all the messages I could display on my kippah during services:

  1. Today’s Kiddush sponsored by the Goldberg family
  2. Please keep side conversations to a minimum
  3. Turn off cellphones please
  4. In memory of [yahrzeit name here]
  5. Please don’t be offended by anything said in my sermon
  6. How’s my preaching? Call 800-2-KVETCH
  7. My other head covering’s a Detroit Tigers hat
  8. CNBC Stock Ticker
  9. This LED message was not programmed on Shabbat or Yom Tov
  10. News Headlines crawler from JTA.org
Light Up Kippah - LED Kippah Yarmulke
Screenshot from the L.E.D. Kippah Website
Categories
Uncategorized

LED Kippah

I just saw that there is now an LED Kippah (yarmulke) that you can buy on the Web. (Update: the website is no longer operational so perhaps it wasn’t a successful idea)

Light Up Kippah - LED Kippah Yarmulke

You can program your own scrolling message. Perhaps donors will contribute money to the congregation for their name to scroll down the rabbi’s kippah?

Think of all the messages I could display on my kippah during services:

  1. Today’s Kiddush sponsored by the Goldberg family
  2. Please keep side conversations to a minimum
  3. Turn off cellphones please
  4. In memory of [yahrzeit name here]
  5. Please don’t be offended by anything said in my sermon
  6. How’s my preaching? Call 800-2-KVETCH
  7. My other head covering’s a Detroit Tigers hat
  8. CNBC Stock Ticker
  9. This LED message was not programmed on Shabbat or Yom Tov
  10. News Headlines crawler from JTA.org
Light Up Kippah - LED Kippah Yarmulke
Screenshot from the L.E.D. Kippah Website