Nominees announced for Jewish and Israeli Blog Awards
Posted on April 24 2007 by Cecilie Surasky under Educational Institutions.Like pressing little buttons on your computer screen? Go over and vote for Muzzlewatch in Best Jewish Left Wing Political Blog and/or Best Jewish Anti-Establishment Blog categories, or vote for any of the other terrific blogs also nominated like JVoices, Jewschool, JSpot, Tikun Olam, Semitism.net and more. They all deserve a big, gold tiara as far as we’re concerned.
Like everything else we cover, there does seem to be a backstory about the JBloggies and progressive Jews.
A quick glance at last year’s list of categories and nominees makes clear why Richard Silverstein at Tikun Olam started a “crusade” against former incarnations of the awards. He said sponsorship by the Jerusalem Post, “skewed the competition toward a heavily partisan political agenda represented by that Likud-oriented publication.” Dr. Schamess over at Semitism agreed, saying “Last year they were organized by right-wing bloggers without even the pretense of including progressive voices.”
Mobius over at the nominated-for-almost-every-category Jewschool, says the real issue is that the Jewish right is over-represented in the blogosphere:
‘I get riled up because I have a hard time accepting that the Jewish community - which is primarily liberal and progressive - should appear to be so overrepresented by the religious right… The domination of the blogosphere by the Jewish right is a stain on our community and reflects poorly on us internally and externally.’
From what I’ve seen, they’re all right. The new organizers of the awards deserve kudos for working to make it a more even-handed contest, and folks like Mobius and Richard deserve thanks for their role in making that happen.
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April 25th, 2007 at 1:39 pm
I want to ’second that emotion’ from Cecilie. I’m trying to get the folks who are running this year’s JIBs to recognize in future they could & should be even more representative & diverse politically & culturally.
So do pls. go to the site & review the blogs & vote for ones you like most. There are very few votes for many of the progressive blogs except the most popular ones like Jspot & Jewschool.
The way they’ve set up voting it’s quite cumbersome & complicated to navigate through the categories but persevere if you can.
April 25th, 2007 at 2:30 pm
Like the pro- and anti-Finkelstein petitions circulating around the Internet, I suspect that winners and losers in these type of blog beauty contests are determined solely by who can mobilize a base of people whose opinions on most subjects are already made up. As the proud author of a Web site read by virtually no one, I have very few votes to “throw” to one side or another. But if I did have a readership beyond my immediate family (well, some of them anyway), I would probably tell them to avoid any voting, ranking, cross-linking and other activities designed to increase the popularity of one site or another, and to simply continue to read the sites they like, communicate encouragement to their creators, and let the war of ideas be won by the best ideas, not by the best campaign strategy.
April 29th, 2007 at 11:08 am
“Last year they were organized by right-wing bloggers without even the pretense of including progressive voices.”
Hogwash. This is patently false. Every year that the JIBs have been around the nominations and voting have been available to everyone.
It might make some people feel good to say otherwise, but the reality is that this blog, Silversteins, and any other so called progressive, conservative what have you could have been nominated.
May 10th, 2007 at 5:57 pm
[…] As we’ve reported before, bloggers offer different reasons for the traditional dearth of progressive blogs among the awards finalists. Whatever reason makes sense to you, it’s clear that the current group of independent bloggers that has taken over the awards process is doing a tremendous job, and under difficult circumstances. Many suggest that more can and should be done to make it a fair playing field, and I think we all can agree. […]