Happy 7th birthday, Twitter!
If the social media network were a student in a Yeshiva day school, right about now would be the moment its mother brought in a tray of donuts for the rest of its social media classmates to share.
And so, in honor of Twitter’s 7th birthday (only 5 years till its Bat Mitzvah!), here is a list of seven Jewish women you should be following on Twitter. Of course, the list could go on and on, but these women will bring a full array of different topics into your Twitter feed and keep you informed on current events, Jewish themes and women’s issues.
With the advent of the conflict in Gaza, known by the hashtags #gazaunderattack or #pillarofdefense, it’s a surreal moment to be a citizen of this earth.
For perhaps the first time on this scale, a war is being waged both in real life and on Twitter simultaneously.
As rockets and bombs fall, as children lie wounded or dead, and as people rush into bomb shelters, the IDF Spokesman account and the military wing of Hamas have been duking it out on the interwebs, even garnering the IDF a suspension from Twitter for issuing “threats of violence.”
Buzzfeed writes that the IDF is winning the Twitter war, but in my mind, the callousness of these tweets and actions on both sides precludes any winners.
Meanwhile, the IDF has posted YouTube videos of the assassination of a Hamas leader (who had been possibly negotiating a ceasefire) and created its own ready-to-go-viral Facebook memes.
The high-profile internet blowup du jour began with an ill-considered tweet from new T Magazine editor Deborah Needleman, advertising an appearance by known professional thorn-in-the-side of feminists Katie Roiphe.
“Sorry Feminists,” Needleman tweeted in parentheticals, “this woman is sexy”. The implication of her statement being that feminists can’t abide a sexy woman, or a sexy woman who disagrees with them, because feminists apparently hate sexiness.
New Yorker television critic Emily Nussbaum fired back with a concise dressing-down: “Did you wrote that tweet from 1963? Impressive.”
@debbieneedles Did you wrote that tweet from 1963? Impressive.
emilynussbaum (@emilynussbaum) October 8, 2012
“Big Hats and bigger opinions, she knew ‘This woman’s place is in the House—the House of Representatives,’” Rabbi Ruth Abusch-Magder tweeted on May 2, the launch day for Jewish Women’s Archive’s “#jwapedia: Tweeting the Encyclopedia” project. By doing so, she sent a link to the article about Bella Abzug in the online “Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia” hurtling out into cyberspace to be clicked on, opened and read by her many Twitter followers.
The rabbi (and occasional Sisterhood contributor), together with 25 other prolific tweeters in the Jewish community, will be tweeting a significant portion of the encyclopedia’s 1,700 biographies, 300 thematic essays, and 1,400 photographs as an experiment throughout May in honor of Jewish American Heritage Month.
Although they were asked to commit to tweeting just one article a week, many of the partners have immediately embraced the project and have been tweeting multiple articles a day. Three days into the effort, 58 articles had already been tweeted — and retweeted many times over.
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