An overview of Hasidic entertainment #4: Hasidic internet

January 22, 2021 An overview of Hasidic entertainment #4: Hasidic internet

• Part 1: Books for grownups
• Part 2: Children’s books
• Part 3: News, leaflets and mags
• Part 4: Hasidic internet
• Part 5: Audio/Visual
• Part 6: Games

Hasidic Internet

My working theory right now is that the future of the Yiddish internet is huge. Hasidim have this unique ability to co-exist side-by-side with the most intense elements of western culture and to still self-segregate. This self-segregation happens online through the power of Yiddish. Because Yiddish uses Hebrew and is online much less often than Hebrew, it makes their writing fairly ungoogle-able to the public. They have a lot of online conversations in Yiddish fairly unbothered by the English-speaking public. There’s also been a tremendous uptick in English language Hasidic activity on social media and chat apps, but even those will lapse into Yiddish when insider stuff, wink-winks, are to be shared.

These are two very important Yiddish forums which are ostensibly only male forums. Women usually write in English, and their most important forum (besides Instagram et al) is imamother.com

“Vosiznaias?” means “what’s new?” And this site is one of many that now cover the news online. There are also many online dailies. I get Der Yid’s daily on Telegram.

And of course, businesses have websites, many, many of them. Even the internet-restriction companies have websites.

Here’s one company that sells Jewish children’s entertainment. You can browse and see that the collections are huge.