Focus

New Campus Face

Networking site changing face of Jewish campus life.

CampusJ.com
Jewish Telegraphic Agency

New York

ewish life on campus has
a changing face because of
Facebook.com .
Students and organizations are taking
advantage of the social networking site
launched in 2004 that allows users to
make a profile, create and join numerous
groups, and post messages to other mem-
bers and groups.
"It's already had a direct effect on the
expectations that Hillel is putting into
its resources:' said Hillel's Simon Amiel,
who is charged with overseeing the Jewish
campus organization's outreach fellows.
"Ten years ago, 15 years ago, the goal
was to get students in the building:' he
explained, adding, "That's still a nice goal
for us ... but it's far more of an important
goal to say there are 500 students having
a Jewish experience every week, inside the
building or out."
Facebook's ability to create ad-hoc
communities is seen as its greatest
strength.
When an Iranian-American student

j

was tasered by campus police at the
University of California Los Angeles,
thousands of students registered their
protest within days by joining groups cre-
ated to complain about the incident.
Jewish students and groups on
Facebook are taking similar advantage of
the site's possibilities. A Jewish group was
launched recently to gather right-wing
Israel advocates to protest a book-signing
by former President Jimmy Carter on the
same day in New York City. Another group
is called "American Jews Against Israel!'
Along the way, Jewish students are find-
ing new ways to associate with each other
and new aspects of their identities. Janice
Hussain is a junior at Brandeis University,
and the daughter of Indian and Jewish
parents. Until she started using Facebook,
she didn't know there were many other
Jews of a similar ethnicity.
"At Brandeis, if I wanted to meet some-
one who was Asian and Jewish, or Indian
or half-Indian, I couldn't;' she said. So
Hussain launched a group called "Asian
and Jewish," inviting a handful of people
at Brandeis who were of Asian and Jewish
descent. Before she knew it, the group
reached 90 members from various cam-
puses.

Barn, Crack!

Mah jongg cranking it up a notch,
complete with a holiday tournament

Sue Fishkoff
Jewish Telegraphic Agency

San Francisco

T

hree dozen women and two
young boys are sitting around
card tables in the Bureau of
Jewish Education's library getting ready
to learn how to play mah jongg. Each
table has a full set of 152 plastic tiles
spread out, face down, and the players are
listening to teacher Marc Wernick explain
the rules.
"East throws out first:' he instructs
each foursome. "Pick your lousiest tile,

66

December 21 . 2006

make a complaint about your kids, and
throw it downy'
The women laugh knowingly. Talking
about the family is a time-honored tradi-
tion in mah jongg, an ancient Chinese
game that came over from Shanghai in
the early 1920s. In 1937, the National
Mah Jongg League formed to standardize
the rules for American play.
There are more than 275,000 members
today, many of them Jewish women. You
join by paying $6.50 for a card mailed
out every January that specifies that
year's winning hands, combinations of
tiles that change from year to year.
"When those cards come, no one

Hussain's experience in finding corn-
mon heritage is far from unique on
Facebook for Jews of mixed descent.
"What seems to be coming up over and
over again is a place for students that are
from a mixed-parentage family," Amiel
said.
On Facebook, most of the traditional
categories for Judaism and religious activ-
ity in general are far less popular than
alternative expressions of identity. Jews on
Facebook are using nontraditional identi-
fiers far more than any standard declara-
tion. Several groups are titled "I don't roll
on Shabbos," after a line in the cult movie
The Big Lebowski.
Hundreds of students belong to these
groups, and most of them belong to hun-
dreds of other groups that express their
Jewish identities.
While statistics are not available for
the site, an informal survey of multiple
campuses has shown consistently that
most Jewish students will call themselves
"Jewish" or some manifestation thereof
in Facebook's "Religious Views" box only
about 10 percent of the time.
At Indiana University, even the Hillel
president, Joanna Blotner, doesn't call her-
self "Jewish" on her profile. "It's because

you don't want to actively make yourself
part of the minority:' she explained. "It's
probably the same reason a lot of gays
and lesbians don't identify themselves!'
It's a trend that Jewish officials can't
explain. "Of any place, being on Facebook
is one of the most safe places to identify
as Jewish;' Amiel said.
At the same time, traditional Jewish
institutions have employed the site as
well, finding Facebook to be far more
effective than e-mail in getting students
to attend their events.
"People, in my experience, are more
likely to attend an event if they are per-
sonally invited;' said Alex Freedman,
president of the Jewish Student Union at
Washington University.
Meanwhile, Facebook's implementa-
tion of a new feature called "News Feeds"
allows students to see the groups or
events their friends are joining.
"All of a sudden, people no longer had
to be individually invited to a group or
to an event; they could see what their
friends were doing," said Andy Ratto,
Washington University Hillel's JCSC fel-
low. 11

speaks to each other for weeks," Wernick
says. "They're all memorizing!'
Mah jongg caught on quickly in this
country among Jewish women, but suf-
fered a slump by the 1970s when women
entered the work force en masse and
few young Jewish women took up the
game. Mah jongg skipped a generation,
although it lingered on in Miami high-
rise buildings, Hadassah groups and
senior centers.
Now there's been a major resurgence
of interest among women in their 20s,
30s and 40s. And what is being called the
first online tournament was held during
Chanukah on Mahjongtime.com . The
tournament started Dec. 16 and runs
through sundown Dec. 23, with the four
players at the final table winning cash
prizes up to $2,000.
In the game's heyday, women would
meet, usually weekly, at one another's
homes to play the fast-moving game,
clicking and clacking their tiles, snacking

on refreshments and talking about their
lives.
Many of the younger women who are
part of the resurgence say they are moved
by nostalgia, looking to forge a connec-
tion with mothers and grandmothers
who played the game before them.
The group at San Francisco's Bureau of
Jewish Education includes several moth-
er-daughter pairs, one mother-son duo
and a multigenerational grouping.
Rochelle Green, 38, has come with her
66-year-old mother, Myra, and her 12-
year-old daughter, Ariana Miller.
Green says her mom dragged them
there. "She said she wanted to expose us
to Jewish games," Green recalled. "I said,
what, besides guilt?"
Both Green and Ariana liked the les-
son, although they found it confusing. "It
was fun:' Ariana says shyly.
"Eventually we'll buy a set and we can
play together," Myra Green declares. 7