'Only at #Limmud: Visting Hindu temple w/ Jews from UK, Denmark, Lithuania, Israel, US.' (from @ellenflax)
The sentiment looks familiar, but if some of the grammar looks strange that because the medium is a new one. Twitter arrived in force at Limmud Conference on Monday night.
Social media has formed an important part of Limmud's make-up, creating virtual communities to go with the more established, core event based ones. As well as blogging here on the JC, going into Conference Limmud had groups on Facebook, a music based presence on MySpace, over 500 followers across the UK and International micro-blogs on Twitter in addition to the more traditional, but phenomenally popular digital presence via it's weekly Taste of Limmud emails on that week's sedra. This year marketing efforts included Google search ads for the first time as well as Facebook social ads that allow you to target by interest and affiliation.
But social media exploded last night after the @limmuduk twitter stream was broadcast across big screens in the bar and lounge areas.
Unsurprisingly one of the main contributors was Daniel Needlestone from the Jewish Teachers' Association who ran a session on 'e-Tools, e-Learning, and e-Communication for e-veryone' this morning. Needlestone, a teacher and e-learning technologist working in a Hertfordshire secondary school, tweeted links to his sessions and asked for comments on a digital survey he sent out.
Two of our visiting US presenters led the tweeting charge. Award-winning journalist Lisa Alcalay Klug, who has written for the New York Times, Forward, Jerusalem Post, presented extracts from her book, Cool Jew: The Ultimate Guide for Every Member of the Tribe, in a session yesterday. Jay Michaelson is a columnist for Forward, Huffington Post, Tikkun, Zeek, Reality Sandwich and author of Everything is God: The Radical Path of Nondual Judaism and has been presenting several workshops on spirituality in the modern world. Yesterday, though, the pair of them pared their considerable literary talents down to brief 140 character tweets as they engaged in a battle of text.
In a typical exchange, they kept up all night Jay tweeted 'I have gained 16 Twitter followers since #limmud began. Watch out, Ashton!'
Lisa finally admitted 'This tweeting is like eating garinim in Israel. You're starting to go numb but you can't stop. #Limmud'
Another US presenter team who were tweeting last night were Darshan who were sharing their thoughts about performing at Limmud. A snapshot of that performance can be found on the JC blog: http://thejc.com/video/darshan-live-limmud-conference-2009.
To get more from opinion, click here to sign up for our free Editor's Picks newsletter.