Tales From The `Blogosphere'
How Jewish Web diarists are helping to change public discourse.
AMY KELLER
Jewish Renaissance Media
I is shortly before noon on a
Wednesday and liberal blogger
Eric Alterman — now off dead-
line, if there is such a thing in the
blogging business — is feasting on
sable and lox at his beach house
while chatting via cell phone with a
reporter.
"You caught me at my most
Jewish," the author-teacher-journal-
ist jokes just minutes after filing his
latest daily online dispatch for
"Altercation," the often witty and
occasionally sharp-tongued blog —
that's short for Web log — that he
words ignited a firestorm of contro-
versy on the Internet, where bloggers
such as Alterman, Daniel Drezner,
Mark Kleiman and Eugene Volokh
debated Blankley's remarks.
There's little sugarcoating
in the Blogosphere — that
never-ending electronic cof-
feehouse of chatter that's
redefining journalism and
transforming the political arena. But
not everything on the Blogosphere is
deep or serious — and that seems
to be part of its allure.
For example, if you go to the
bloglines.com Web site and type in
"Jewish," you can find blogs on
everything from adjusting to college
Then the unexpected happened —
people actually began to take it seri-
ously.
"What shocked me is people actu-
ally read it," Drezner, a
University of Chicago pro-
fessor, said of the success-
ful blog he created in
September 2002.
"I shouldn't be doing
this," Drezner wrote in his first post-
ing. "I'll be going up for tenure
soon; I occasionally daydream of
occupying a high position in govern-
ment; and I like semicolons way too
much to be pithy ... So why do
this?"
Drezner says he found his answer
Co VER
ST oaT
section.
David Adesnik and Josh Chafetz
— two Jewish guys who help operate
the popular site
oxblog.blogspot.com along with
friend and fellow Oxford student
Patrick Belton — have attracted sim-
ilar attention with their colorful
"off-the-cuff political commentary,"
though they don't attribute their
success to OxBlog alone.
"I think the fact that I work with
Josh Chafetz is at least as important
as the fact that I write for OxBlog,"
said Adesnik, who started blogging
during his second year at Oxford
and has since published pieces in
everything from the Weekly Standard
he raw irrelevant nature of blogs is
attracting a devoted following of
readers who say they are tired of the
large media corporations' cookie-cutter
approach to news and information.
churns out for MSNBC.com at
msnbc.msn.com/id/3449870/
In addition to being the media
columnist for the Nation magazine,
Alterman is one of the most promi-
nent and influential Jewish bloggers
in cyberspace.
An example has been his rampage
against conservative pundit Tony
Blankley, editorial page editor of the
Washington Times, for his attacks on
billionaire George Soros.
At issue were comments Blankley
made about Soros during an appear-
ance on Fox News Channel's
3N
9/ 3
2004
28
Hannity Colmes.
"He's a robber baron, a pirate capi-
talist and he's . . . he is a reckless
man," Blankley said. He also con-
demned Soros for being a "self-
admitted atheist" and a "Jew who
figured out a way to survive the
Holocaust."
The flap over Blankley's vitriolic
as an Orthodox Jew to what kind of
music to play at Jewish weddings to
news for Jewish computer geeks and
beyond. In fact, one Jewish blogger
from Ferndale has specialized in
nanotechnology (see sidebar).
The raw irrelevant nature of blogs
is attracting a devoted following of
readers who say they are tired of the
large media corporations' cookie-cut-
ter approach to news and informa-
tion. In fact, several bloggers
received credentials to cover the
Democratic and Republic national
conventions.
I Shouldn't Be Doing This
In its early years — think circa 1999
— the Blogosphere was often casual-
ly dismissed by many media elites as
a cyberspace playground where
wannabe journalists could pretend to
be scribes.
in Jonathan Rauch's book Kindly
Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free
Thoughts, in which Rauch wrote:
"We can all have three new ideas
every day before breakfast; the trou-
ble is, they will almost always be bad
ideas. The hard part is figuring out
who has a good idea."
"Rauch argued that the liberal sci-
entific enterprise was the way to sep-
arate good ideas from bad," Drezner
wrote in his inaugural posting. "For
what interests me — foreign policy,
economic policy, public intellectuals,
pop culture — the Blogosphere is
now a vital part of that enterprise."
Drezner has been venting his own
ideas on www.danieldrezner.com
ever since — and getting noticed.
Not too long after his launch, in
fact, the New Republic came calling
and asking for a monthly column
and the New York Times drafted
Drezner to write for its Book Review
to the Wall Street Journal.
"Josh was an intern at the New
Republic before he founded
OxBlog," Adesnik said. "He has
always had his finger on the main-
stream pulse. As a result, there are a
lot of editors out there who read
OxBlog."
Who Reads Blogs?
In fact, millions are flocking to the
Blogosphere for their news and
entertainment and the intellectual
cyber-stomping grounds have proved
a boon not only to the writers host-
ing their own real-time commentary,
but also to advertisers seeking to
reach the blogs' motivated readers.
According to Blogads, a company
that connects paying advertisers to
the appropriate blogging audiences
— making some blogs self-support-
ing if not profitable — blog readers