In an alternate universe of computers and modems, Jews all over the world are chatting, debating and fighting. The fast-growing Internet computer network has made geographical distance irrelevant, linking Jews in a high-tech global shtetl.
Los Angeles "Israel thinks Oregon is somewhere near Tibet," says Sarah M. Mendlovitz. "Oregon thinks Israel is near India."
There are 20,000 Jews in the entire state of Oregon, and only about 30 Orthodox families in Portland, where Mendlovitz, a clinical psychologist and former New Yorker, lives. The city, far from any major Jewish center, is also 2,500 miles from New York and 8,000 miles from Jerusalem.
But for Mendlovitz, these distances shrank last year, when she hooked into the Internet, the world's largest computer network which links as many as 20 million users across the globe. "To say that we felt cut off from the Jewish world is a vast understatement." No longer.
Now, the Jewish connections inside the Internet have brought major slices of the Jewish world as close as the screen of her PC. To get instant access to vast stores of information, as well as real-time communication with Jews everywhere, all she needed was a modem.
"It has been almost miraculous," Mendlovitz told The Jerusalem Report in an interview conducted, naturally, through electronic mail (E-mail) on the Internet. "I can't begin to describe how much this connectedness means to me, having felt so isolated from the daily hurly-burly of Jewish life. It is a lifeline."
Since moving on-line, Mendlovitz has become a conduit about Israel to her community. "Even the regional Israeli emissary, located in Vancouver," she says, "called to ask how people can hook upto the Net, to get information directly from the World Zionist Organization. I am making a file for our own aliyah, and it will make things much easier when we begin the countdown." The Jewish and Israeli action on the Internet takes place in sub-networks, with names like "Jerusalem One," "Jewishnet" and "JOIN" (Jewish Ozzies International). Nobody knows how many Jews are on-line worldwide, but it certainly runs into hundreds of thousands. In Israel, 50,000 are hooked up to the Internet and its component sub-networks, such as Jerusalem One, which bills itself as the world's largest Jewish computer linkup, with about 120,000 users.
"Netters" interested in Jewish culture, Middle Eastern politics and even Jewish genealogy tap into a range of "USENET newsgroups" electronic discussion forums that resemble communal bulletin boards, in which people post their messages to a central computer address, which others can access.
Computer "mailing lists" distribute information on everything from being newly Orthodox (Internet address: BALTUVA) to Middle Eastern water (MEH2O-L), Hebrew language and etymology (HEBLANG) to 1st-century BCE Jewish studies (IOUDAIOS, Greek for "Jew," which assumes an ability to read Greek) and scores of others.
By tapping into information databases, a Jew in Kentucky can browse through the card catalog at a Hebrew University library, or peruse translations of the day's editorials from the Hebrew press. When Rabin and Arafat signed the "Gaza and Jericho First" agreements in Cairo last month, Netters didn't need to await the next day's New York Times or Ha'aretz for a copy the text hit the Net, courtesy of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, in minutes.
Also available: press releases from the Israel army spokesman, settler movement newsletters and publications of Peace Now. From Brooklyn, Chabad hackers keep the world apprised of the Lubavitcher Rebbe's health through the MOSHIACH mailing list. Jewish singles connect through lists like SHIDUCH.
The Internet can also be a soapbox for firebrands. Jews and Jews, and Jews and Arabs "flame" (abuse) each other in public forums; Jews and Holocaust deniers and other anti-Semites generate their own heated discussions. The non-profit Jerusalem One was launched only last year. Its co- founder Zvi Lando, 36, who came to Israel in the early 1970s from Kalamazoo, Michigan, calls it the first "professionally maintained Jewish network in the world." Established with seed money from a follower of charismatic Rabbi Yehuda Grossman of Migdal Ha'emek, near Haifa, J1 has been running on a shoestring ever since. That's partly because as is common in the Internet there's no charge to join one of the sub-networks. Lando hopes he'll see revenues some time in the future, when computerized shopping (the tele-mall) or advertising is permitted by the Israeli Communications Ministry.
Lando says his first project was to put a request out to those parts of the Net frequented by Jews, to send holiday greetings to then-mayor Teddy Kollek in honor of Jerusalem Day. "We got more than 3,000 messages," he says, "including some asking Teddy how to find a nice Jerusalem girl and how to get a cheap hotel room in the city."
Some of the offerings on J1's menu: a Jewish events calendar; JUNK the Jewish student university network; information on student programs in Israel; a 45-page monthly listing of computer jobs available in Israel; aliyah information from the Jewish Agency, and press releases and other data from Yad Vashem, the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Foreign Min- istry.
Although Lando himself is Orthodox, he says J1 tries not to take a religious position. "On our listing of rabbis," he says, "we have call names like Rabbi Barbara from the United States right next to Rabbi Boteach, the Chabad rabbi at Oxford. No one objects."
J1 monitors all traffic, and has found that volume on Shabbat is one-third of the rest of the week. "We've thought of shutting down on Shabbat," he says, "but that would be difficult because of the time differences all over the world. We'd have to be closed for two days."
Users come from unexpected places. Recently, J1 noted that a lot of information on settlement in the territories had been downloaded by a user whose computer address included the country code "KW" for Kuwait. One of the key networks linking the global Jewish village is NYSERNet, which according to managing dir- ector David Fishman, carries more lists of Judaic content and more extensive Jewish archives than any other in the world. NYSERNet is one of a number of special-interest networks created under the auspices of the National Research Council (NRC), a non-profit U.S. government-affiliated organization whose mission is to advance science, technology and edu- cation.
The involvement of groups like the NRC in helping foster electronic Jewish life is not that surprising or, at least, no more surprising than the way the Internet itself evolved. The American military started building the Net in the 1960s as an emergency means of sustaining communications during a nuclear confrontation. But since it had its roots in research labs and universities throughout the U.S., the Net became a way in the 1970s for scientists, academics and computer pros to communicate, collaborate and transfer documents with a speed that would shame the fastest fax machine. Only in the late 1980s did the Net open up to the growing number of personal computer users worldwide.
The new realm of cyberspace remains a rough-and-tumble wide-open frontier. To function on it you need to be quick with your keyboard, and even quicker with your wits, says Hank Nussbacher, an ex-New Yorker now living in Israel, who acts as a consultant to the Israeli Interuniversity Computer Consortium. The uninitiated, he says, "are in for quite a shock."
"Lurkers" tapping in to the IL-Talk mailing list, where Israelis and Diaspora Jews debate the exigencies of Jewish survival in an age of ostensible Arab-Israeli rap- prochement, must be ready to gird themselves for sharp-tongued battle as the political ball rockets from right to left and back.
One of the most acrid debaters is Seth Corey, who has a penchant for attacking dovish, non-observant Jews as self-hating idolators, and advocating the forcible removal from power and trial for treason of the current Israeli government. Corey and other Netters like him have driven some of the more staid members of IL-Talk to desperation.
"YOU WILL NOT POST HERE ANY LONGER!" declared one of the forum's more irate members, in response to a recent attack from Corey; the resort to capital letters is the Internet equivalent of shouting. This in turn generated even greater "flames" from Netters who found the prospect of censorship by anyone more distressing than the vitriol.
In April, Corey messaged that "Rabin has done nothing to penalize those who have murdered innocent Jewish men, women and children." Netter Michael Shimshoni replied with sarcastic vehemence: "Nothing at all, as opposed to the deeds of the proud fighter of spittle, Dr. Seth Corey!" This last outburst referred back to an earlier claim by Corey that although he hadn't served in the army, he'd been spat upon in public for defending Israel.
"Many of the purely Jewish-cultural postings," observes Keith Bierman, a computer engineer who has grown tired of the tirades and tantrums that break out so easily on the Net, "are a parade of the same old polemics. This failure stems from the Net's most powerful appealing feature the lack of control."
The Net community relies on good manners and voluntary adherence to rules. But often, etiquette is undone by the easy anonymity afforded by the Net, and the sheer numbers of disparate individuals gathering on it. Still, list "moderators," who have complete control over what goes on the list, can bump members who don't comply with the ground rules. This happened recently on a settler-oriented mailing list called Eretz Israel. Stormier than IL-Talk is Palestine Net, based in Canada, a discus- sion forum for Palestinians. Here, PLO and Hamas supporters duke it out daily, taking respite only long enough to dump on Israel. P- Net, as subscribers refer to it, permits Jewish and Israeli involvement. But Jews who speak up in defense of Israel are subjected to a barrage of electronic abuse.
Not all the Israel-bashers are Palestinians. One of the most active is P-Netter Yigal Arens of La Jolla, California the fortysomething son of Moshe Arens, the former Likud defense minister and foreign minister.
Animus toward Israel sometimes shows up elsewhere too. In a recent article in the Cyprus-based Middle East Times, writer Steve Negus commented on the antipathy he found on the EgyptNet discussion group when he spotted an Israeli bearing greetings.
The Islamists revolted, Negus recounted. One user, Abdel Meguid Amgad, wrote: "I've had to put up with a lot on EgyptNet, but I really must draw the line on admitting Israeli members."
On the Net, it often seems that those who make the most noise set the tone for debate. Just like on talk radio, there is a lot of posturing: The more strident you are, the more attention you get.
Underneath the rhetoric and vitriol, though, another dynamic takes place. It is not unusual, for instance, for Jews and Arabs to flame each other in public, but then share the cyber-equivalent of Turkish coffee in private, via E-mail.
"You have to remember," observes P-Netter Ray Hanania, "that what you read on the various parts of the Internet is not representative of the mainstream Palestinian community. Most people who have access to the Internet are students and academic lifers' and while there are many very bright academics in both the Palestinian and Israeli community, by and large, the majority of those in colleges and universities go through the obligatory radical phase.' They haven't yet learned how to deal with hyperbole."
This kind of heated debate, adds another veteran P-Netter who lives in Canada and asks not to be named, "is (for Palestinians) a way of virtual community- forming. If you observe the behavior of any mailing list or newsgroup, there are opinion-leaders, followers, troublemakers, reasonable people, extremists, etc. But one cannot overlook the ability of E-mail to put one instantly in touch with new people and ideas. There is also the advantage of exposing one's cherished thoughts to a merciless audience."
David Heller, 24, a left-leaning graduate student from New York, has come to appreciate this aspect of Net activity. "I do not get a chance usually to communicate with others outside my circle," he told The Report, "and when I do, it is usually in confrontation. The Internet put me into contact with the invisible other,' be he Arab or right-wing Jew, in ways that I could not avoid. I had to come to terms with his/her existence."
Elliot Shimoff, a college professor in Bal- timore, who belongs to the small "soc.culture.jewish" discussion group, says he has received messages from people who were once virulently anti-Orthodox, but who appear to be moderating their views because of his "posts." "Messages like those make my day," he says. But more than anything, as with Sarah Mendlovitz, the Internet provides contact. Al Tepper, a 21-year-old Londoner, found his connection with other Jews seriously diminished when he moved to the remote Canadian Atlantic province of Nova Scotia to study. But the Internet account that came with his university tuition put that straight.
"Now that I am on the Net," he recounted to The Report, "it seems no different from the level of Jewish interaction that I experienced back home. The Internet has given me back my Judaism."
Michael Evven-Esh, of Safed, who works for a program promoting Judaism and Israel for English-speaking 21- to 30-year-olds, goes so far as to suggest that, had it existed half a century ago, the Internet could have changed history. "If this communication network of Jewish institutions was around at the time of the Holocaust, the whole world would have known what was happening much ear- lier."
But if the Internet is today helping Jews feel closer together, might it not also keep them geographically apart? Could the Jewish homeland be supplanted by its cyberspace doppelgnger?
The notion of a parallel Jewish universe somehow emerging on the Net is not as far-fetched as it might seem. Sociologists studying the Net have often observed that the communities of interest that take shape in cyberspace are every bit as real as those found in the physical world. Indeed, many of the inhabitants of cyberspace will tell you that the Internet communities they belong to better meet their social, intellectual and religious needs than the communities they inhabit physically.
Few could convincingly argue that a Jewish realm within the Net could ever substitute for a flesh and bone Jewish state. But such a place would not lack charms of its own. On the Internet, there is no physical danger, few limiting borders, no army reserve duty and no taxes. Cyberspace is vast, always changing, and open to anyone with a penchant to wander. For Israelis who feel hemmed in and for Jews indulging in their peripatetic proclivities, cyberspace is a handy adjunct to the real world.
Clearly, though, Herzl hardly had an electronic Jewish republic in mind when he conceived of a homeland at the turn of the last century not even in his science fiction utopia "Altneuland" (Old-New Land).
"The idea of a cyber-Herzl," E-mails Jerusalem One's Lando, "is disturbing to a Zionist like myself. The thought has crossed my mind that people could eventually say I have enough Jewishness through my computer, so why not just stay here in my Diaspora cubby-hole.'"
Still, Lando doesn't think this will ever happen. "The Internet is only a tool," he says. "Computers are just stupid little boxes. And just as there is no substitute for a human being, there is no substitute for Israel.
"In the end," says Lando, "humans are social beings, and they will want a physical connection."