Last week, I attended the first NewCAJE conference for Jewish educators and the young professionals retreat that followed. I met a lot of good people who chose an often under-appreciated profession; all of them dedicated to what they do: teaching the next generation of young Jews what it means to be Jewish. In recent days, [...]
Welcome Radio 613 listeners. It was my joy to be interviewed by co-hosts Avi & Malcah on CFRC Kingston 101.9FM last Thursday afternoon. In case you missed it, Avi just posted audio of the show to the radio613 webpage. Go ahead and listen. I have some follow up thoughts on the interview below. The opinions [...]
This post links to both the audio and slides from my talk at the 2010 NewCAJE, a conference for Jewish educators currently taking place at Gann Academy in Waltham, MA. My talk was in the first session and the crowd was small, but, thanks to the powers of the Internet and my small digital audio [...]
The following is the unedited text of the speech I read at the Future of Jewish Non Profit Summit. There’s a for-fee video of the speech at Fora.tv. You can also listen to this audio recording. Efraim and I have made many of these points before, so if you’re so inclined check out more of [...]
Recently, Efraim and I tried our best to convert two documents (1, 2) based on the work in Jewish liturgy by Dr. Avigdor Shinan and contributed to the Public Domain by the Avi Chai Foundation. They were unfortunately encoded with old (pre-Unicode) and proprietary Hebrew fonts made by Elsner+Flake. While we made some progress, ultimately, [...]
Is spirituality important to a meaningful Jewish identity? If spirituality describes an intimate and evolving experience within and between individuals, then what might a meaningful resource look like that is both rooted in tradition and respects the integrity of personal and communal growth? Most Jews would say such a resource does not yet exist. The [...]
Working on the Open Siddur Project has afforded me the opportunity to meet some amazing people, communities, and institutions. On Rosh Chodesh Nissan, 5770, (March 16th) this year, I was honored to speak before the good folk at the Academy for Jewish Religion (AJR). AJR is a non-denominational Rabbinical College in Riverdale, New York committed [...]
Think of a favorite book, or siddur, and think of the style of the letters in it. Fonts are used to forms the words and portray the liturgy, poetry, and other texts. More often than not, these fonts are not free. They are licensed from typographic designers for a fee or used with permission. Sometimes [...]
Over at Darim Online‘s blog, Phillip Brodsky reflects on Apple’s release of the iPad and asks some leading questions concerning the future of the book with the “People of the Book”, similar to J.T. Waldman’s posts on JPS’ blog last June and July last year. Considering e-readers and e-book formats, Brodsky asks, How might the [...]
There are two principles on which the success of data on the contemporary web rests: the web makes content available, and it adds value to that content by linking it to other related information. When considering bringing old content online, both of these aspects are important. A first level of digitization involves simply making data [...]
