(blog post also written for Jewlicious.com).

For David Saranga, Twitter and Facebook remain the best weapons in an ongoing battle to maintain a positive image of Israel and make the Jewish State easily accessible and approachable to everyone.

Saranga, the former consul for Media and Public Affairs at the Consulate General of Israel in New York, brought this mission to full speed just over a year ago, when he held live Twitter debates on behalf of the Israeli government during the Gaza war, opened Israel’s YouTube channel and revamped Isrealli.org, the State of Israel’s official blog. His latest task, now serving as a faculty member of the Asper Institute at IDC-Herzliya’s Sammy Ofer School of Communications, is to launch this year’s 10th Annual Herzliya Conference on social networks for the first time and reach out to a broader, ideally younger audience.

“If we want to approach young people as well we have to bring it to the language that they use,” Saranga said.

In the past decade, the Herzliya Conference has become an increasingly vital stage for Israel’s leaders to gather and discuss government policies and national security issues.  This year’s conference begins tomorrow (Jan. 31) and ends on Feb. 3, hosting a wide range of leaders such as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Foreign Minister and MK Tzipi Livni, Deputy Foreign Minister and MK Daniel Ayalon and World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder. One of the newest speakers to confirm attendance is Dr. Salam Fayyad, prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, who will join Tuesday evening’s panel: “Prospects of Peace: The Israeli-Palestinian Track.”

In addition to streaming the various panels in real-time throughout the week, Saranga and his team will also be editing and uploading shorter, more user-friendly versions of each panel, which will remain available online after the fact. Conference enthusiasts can meanwhile receive play-by-play updates about the various speakers, panels and issues addressed via Twitter and Facebook.

“People can see the essence of the conference,” added Saranga, who said he’ll be working with a team of 10 people, predominantly students, to accomplish this mission. He has also been working closely with Dr. Noam Lemelstrich-Latar, director of the Asper Institute and dean of the Sammy Ofer School of Communications.

Saranga’s hope is that viewers and readers all over the world will repost and “ReTweet” conference updates to their friends, giving Israel a bigger voice all over the world, and a continued chance to make a positive impact.

“One of the goals of the project is to enlist organizations and private bodies in Israel and abroad, for whom Israel is both relevant and important,” Saranga said. “This is one of the first projects ever undertaken, whose purpose is to enhance the message emerging from the Herzliya Conference, by allowing organizers to tap into the potential of the social network.”

_ _

For live updates, follow @HerzliyaConf and @DavidSaranga on Twitter, or become a fan of the Herzliya Conference on Facebook. To see the preliminary PDF version of the conference program, click here to download. Further details about the new media launch are available here.

Sharon Udasin is a staff writer at The Jewish Week. E-mail her at sharon@sharonudasin.com, or follow her on Twitter.

This is too amazing not to watch. From Eretz Nehederet, Israel’s television show that somewhat resembles Saturday Night Live. Thanks to my buddies at Jewlicious for making me aware of this!

Young Iranian Jews Now Pushing Beyond Old Boundaries

New Persian blood: New York board members of the group 30 Years After, including Shannon and Lauren Hedvat, third and fourth from left, at their launch event in September 2008.

by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer

Arranged meticulously across a wooden dining table was a Shabbat meal that could have served 30 — fluffy gondhi, “Persian Meatballs,” still steaming from their broth, Middle Eastern salads and ghormeh sabzi, a green vegetable stew. A Shabbat candle hovered between a spread of tahdig, a crispy rice dish, and shirini polo, a sweet rice blended with almond slivers, orange peels and pistachios.

For the Hedvat siblings — Lauren, Shannon and Brandon — this was just another routine Shabbat meal in Lauren’s Manhattan apartment. It was winter break from Penn Law School for Shannon and Penn Engineering for Brandon, and they decided to cook up a traditional Persian Shabbat dinner for their friends, both Persian and not, many of whom have become frequent guests at the trio’s events.

“Growing up we became accustomed to our parents’ way of entertaining even though they have assimilated too much into the American culture. The warm hospitality of the culture is ingrained in us,” said Shannon Hedvat, 24, the middle of the three. “No matter who was coming over for whatever reason, my parents always had a huge bowl of fresh fruit, nuts and sweets on the table along with tea and coffee.”

Even as they hew to their Iranian heritage and their parents’ culture of hospitality, the Hedvats and other 20- and 30-something Persians, the first to be born in America, are transforming the famously insular Iranian community here in unexpected ways. Thirty years after the Iranian Revolution brought tens of thousands of Persian Jews to Great Neck, the gilded ghetto on Long Island’s Gold Coast, and to Los Angeles, a new generation is pushing beyond its parents’ tight-knit world.

Influenced by the cultural pluralism and openness of America, its  members are entering into mixed marriages with Ashkenazim, something that would have been unheard of a generation ago. They have taken up leadership positions in large Ashkenazi shuls in Great Neck. And they are thrusting themselves into philanthropic and political causes in America, in Israel and worldwide.

“In general, Persians have an attitude of doing their own thing and feeling like other outside factors don’t affect them,” said Bobby Shamsian, 28, a vice president at renewable energy hedge fund TerraVerde Capital Management.  Continue reading…

(blog post also written for Jewlicious.com).

Boarding the E-train en route to my most recent international reporting endeavor, I wasn’t sure what exactly to expect. I was about to tag along with 40-some-odd American peers who were visiting Israel for the first time, not through the auspices of Taglit-Birthright Israel, but under the newly independent wing of Oranim Educational Initiatives. I was placed with the 25- to 30-year-old age group, the eldest of three different groups that Oranim founder, Shlomo “Momo” Lifshitz, was taking to Israel at his own expense.

Initially the largest Birthright trip provider, Oranim split with the huge umbrella organization this past June, following continued disagreements over registration numbers and Lifshitz’s commitment to vocalizing the message, “raise your children Jewish.” Eager to continue supporting the

message he deemed crucial to Israel’s future, Lifshitz decided to launch his own trips, with a particular focus on an older age group of young adults, many of whom no longer even qualified for the Birthright age maximum (no older than 26).

Waiting on line for security that Dec. 27 afternoon, I winced, as my ears picked up on some joking among participants as to whether or not they should be purchasing bottles of Duty Free alcohol before boarding the plane. Oh no, I thought — this is going to be the same alcohol-obsessed, sex-crazed frenzy that swept through the 18-year-old scene on my own trip 2.5 years before (I was 22 at the time). I loved my own Oranim Birthright trip back in June 2007 — in fact, it triggered an obsession with Israel that brought me back there five times since and will likely lead me to spend extended time there at some point soon. But as a reporter, I cringed at the thought of spending 10 days among cliquey girls and guys who were more interested in clubbing than seeing Israel.

Boy, was I wrong.

Sure, group members enjoyed lounging under the Tel Aviv night sky with a beer or two in hand and a hookah nearby, or dancing the occasional evening at a kibbutz pub or Eilat club. And don’t worry, there were enough matches made among these same participants that would render Momo proud. But their ultimate goal — to learn about Israel and take advantage of their free 10-day journey to the utmost. Why risk a hangover when there’s a rocky mountain climb the next morning?

“This whole experience — I love it,” Shira Prigat, one of eight Israeli university students who accompanied the American travelers, told me for my Jewish Week article about the trip. “Everyone has been really excited about hiking. I’ve heard more enthusiastic comments about hiking than about clubbing, which really made me happy.”

What I saw those 10 days was a mature group of mid to late 20-somethings, who were riveted by their tour guide Yariv Ofer, 38, a criminologist and IDF commander turned Oranim staffer, whose knowledge about Israel seemed endless and whose physical prowess could’ve propelled him up the Aggro Crag with a blink of an eye. At every stop — be it a muddy corner of the Mount Carmel forest or the wind-chilled outskirts of a Yom Kippur War bunker — the participants listened to Ofer intently, absorbing his discussions on Israeli history, culture and modern society, and asking questions that sparked countless debates to follow.

“I feel like this room is a melting pot of a wealth of intelligence and knowledge,” said Brandon Cohen, 26, on the last night of the trip. “It left me hungry for more.”

I’m in favor of sending Jews of all ages to Israel, which would be optimal if today’s Jewish community had unlimited financial resources. But after witnessing both my typically younger Birthright trip’s age group as well as the 25-30 group from Oranim, the difference in maturity between the two was astounding to me. Rather than coming to Israel on winter breaks from school, many participants had to take precious vacation days — some even unpaid vacation days — to come on this trip. Their time was precious, and they wanted to get the most out of their 10 days in Israel, willingly waking up as early as possible to maximize their cultural intake.

“I think I took in 50 percent more information than I would have if I had come when I was younger,” said participant Evan Ryan during the group’s closing session. “It’s not a question of if I want to come back to Israel – it’s a question of when I want to come back to Israel.”

His peer, 26-year-old Brad Goldstein, agreed, adding more recently, “Being older, and more mature, and having a better sense of world news, you can appreciate the everday struggle of being in Israel and seeing Israelis.” On the last day of the trip, Goldstein — who himself had come to Israel expecting little — organized a fundraising effort among his fellow trip members, collecting a grand total of 2,000 shekels ($500) from them for Oranim’s future free trip, an idea he said came to him in a hotel shower.

“The amazing leadership of Yariv made me want to share this experience with more people and do anything I could to help that happen,” Goldstein said, noting that he and his fellow group members wanted to do everything they could to make sure that these trips continue.

While $500 will hardly send an entire bus of future participants to Israel (a bus, Lifshitz says, requires $80,000, in comparison to Birthright’s price of $130,000), the money raised by these trip members is certainly a start, and a group of them are already planning fundraising events in the future, entirely independent of the Oranim staff. Oranim already has a host of successful long-term programs in Israel, but if the company wants its 10-day trips to survive independently of Birthright, it is certainly a wise business strategy for Lifshitz to focus his efforts on this older age group. In terms of attracting investors and philanthropists, they will not be competing with Birthright because they are offering an entirely different product — a different, but equally valuable product. If the funds are available, the two can exist simultaneously.

“For the first time in my life, I’m really proud to be a Jew,” said participant Adam Nolan, on the last full night of the trip, as the circle of participants shared their opinions in a small conference room at their Neve Ilan Hotel.

A few seats away, his cousin — David Pinsky — began tearing.

“I just broke out in tears when my cousin said that for the first time he’s proud to be a Jew,” Pinsky said about 15 minutes later, still sniffing. “I feel like with the relationship I’ve built here, I don’t want to leave you guys.”

“I’m going to go home tomorrow night with the feeling that I didn’t go to work,” Ofer said. “I went on a trip with a bunch of my friends.”

I will now be blogging for Jewlicious.com, in addition to writing posts for my own Web site. I’ll cross-post everything I blog for them here on my site as well.

There’s me on their “Who the hell are you guys?” page:

Sharon
Sharon Udasin is a lovably neurotic 25-year-old journalist, who is currently working as a staff writer at The Jewish Week in New York. After being ridiculously afraid to set foot in Israel for over 22 years, Sharon finally went on a Birthright trip in June 2007 and found such a deep connection to the country that she’s been back five times since. Sharon graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2007 and then received her M.S. in journalism from Columbia the following year. She has seen Les Misérables seven times and could probably host a one-woman performance of the show if it wasn’t for her horrible singing voice and inability to dance. Some of her other guilty pleasures include the Harry Potter series, the television show Gossip Girl and an inordinate addiction to Tasti D-Lite. See all of her work here, follow her on Twitter or write to her at sharon@sharonudasin.com.

JTA picked up my Jewish Week article from last week, which looked at the relative happiness of Orthodox marriages in comparison to secular unions. And it’s currently on their homepage!

Orthodox marriages are happier but still have stresses, study reports

By Sharon Udasin · January 25, 2010

NEW YORK (New York Jewish Week) — Orthodox marriages may be happier than their secular counterparts, but religious unions are rocky enough to concern a team of researchers and rabbis who presented the results of their recent study on marital satisfaction at the Orthodox Union.

“Traditional family values and religious values tend to overlap,” Eliezer Schnall, an assistant professor of psychology at Yeshiva University who was responsible for analyzing the data, said here last week. “But there are also those in this community who are not as happy with their marriages.”  Continue reading…

Birthright’s First Book

The new Birthright-Nextbook book: Tourist info and then some.

by Sharon Udasin

This winter, Taglit-Birthright trip participants left Israel with a little something extra.

In a joint venture between Birthright and Nextbook, these Israel first-timers are receiving a new book, “Traveling Companion,” a colorful hardback filled with history lessons, personal essays and travel guides — written and edited by Wayne Hoffman, the managing director of special projects at Tablet Magazine. For Hoffman, who worked closely with Barry Chazan from Birthright and Len Small at Nextbook, the goal was to include a sampling of places typically visited on Birthright trips as well as supplemental sites that might pique interests on future visits, and of essays and short literary pieces from Israeli authors.

“I don’t think any other book offers such a broad introduction to Israeli iterature in such a compact space — all the while tying it directly to things that the readers have seen with their own eyes,” Hoffman said. (Not surprisingly, a number of the authors represented have Nextbook connections.)

The project was funded entirely by Birthright, and over 10,000 copies have been printed thus far, according to Ada Spitzer, Taglit-Birthright Israel’s vice president for marketing.

“The idea is that it will become part of our permanent educational material,” she said. Spitzer would not provide a figure about how much money Birthright has invested in this project.

Hoffman went along on a Birthright trip last winter to get a taste of the participants’ experiences. Rather than providing logistical data like hotel names or restaurants, Hoffman focused on making the book an interactive tool for use during the trip.

“The traveling companion is intended to give people a bit of context to understand what they’re seeing, and to help them remember what they saw,” Hoffman said. “I figure that people are ready to learn a bit about Masada when they’re actually at Masada.”  Continue reading…

The State Of The Union

by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer

Orthodox marriages may be happier than their secular counterparts. But religious unions are rocky enough to concern a team of researchers and rabbis who presented the results of their recent study on marital satisfaction at the Orthodox Union here last week.

“Traditional family values and religious values tend to overlap,” said Eliezer Schnall, an assistant professor of psychology at Yeshiva University, who was responsible for analyzing the data. “But there are also those in this community who are not as happy with their marriages.”

Results showed that 72 percent of men surveyed and 74 percent of women rated their marriages as “very good” or “excellent,” whereas, the overall U.S. population has a much lower satisfaction rate of 63 and 60 percent respectively, according to a 2009 General Social Survey conducted by the National Opinion. Only 13 percent of Orthodox couples rated their marriages as “fair” or “poor.”

Aside from a few subjects from the United Kingdom and Israel, the 3,670 respondents were predominantly North Americans, who had been recruited through Internet promotions and outreach efforts in New York and Los Angeles synagogues.

Among the most divisive issues for unhappy respondents were infertility, at-risk youth, children with disabilities and use of birth control, according to Deborah Fox, the study’s pioneer and program director of the Aleinu Family Resource Center at Jewish Family Services of Los Angeles.  Continue reading…

Working The Land Of Israel

Participants in the joint Yeshiva University-JNF Alternative Winter Break program working in Chalutza, the new community for Gaza evacuees being built in the Negev. Courtesy of YU, JNF

by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer

For Yeshiva University sophomore Josh Zimmerman, one of the highlights of his winter break was a day of harvesting peppers, plucking up tangled vegetable roots, picking up garbage from the sand and repairing a decrepit greenhouse for a community of Jewish refugees — all with 11 of his peers in Israel’s Negev Desert.

“We literally worked the land ourselves,” said Zimmerman, a 20-year-old psychology major. “We wer e making a difference from all aspects — hands-on, literally working the land itself, and verbally, by promoting the cause and fundraising for the community.”

Zimmerman and his peers were visiting the region of Chalutza that day, helping to develop a community for Jews who were evacuated from their homes in Gaza’s Gush Katif in 2005. The students headed to Israel with Marc Spear, who is leadership-training director for Yeshiva University’s Center for the Jewish Future, which sponsors the Quest Leadership Training Fellowship. Quest is a two-semester, non-credit program offered to both male and female undergraduates.

After a year of intense leadership training and raising $20,000 for an Israeli cause of their choice — in their case, the Chalutza communities for Gaza evacuees in the western Negev — the students traveled to Israel through a first-ever collaboration between YU and the Jewish National Fund, to visit these very communities they had worked so hard to support.
“The trip is the culmination of the semester,” Spear said. “They see the power of volunteering; they see the fact that they can make a bigger difference in the world.”
Though the Quest Program meets weekly like an ordinary course, students do not receive credit for participation and must be willing to commit to the work-intensive syllabus despite their intense dual curriculum at YU.

“We can’t just be another club,” Spear said. “We are going to invest in their future, but they need to invest in us.”  Continue reading…

In today’s JTA daily digest e-mail, my story on the new Oranim trips was featured as the top story in “Editors’ Picks.” It also appeared in the same position on their Web site’s homepage. See image below, courtesy of Todd Edelman. I will blog about the rest of my experiences from that trip shortly.