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Dec132008

A New Media Refugee Steers His Search Engine Inward

Forward

Douglas Rushkoff, Journalist, Teacher and Internet Pioneer, Sets Sights on Judaism's Next Big Thing
By Lisa Keys

April 20, 2001

Just eight years ago, Douglas Rushkoff was the laughingstock of the New York party circuit, yabbering about some strange phenomenon called the Internet and extolling the wonders of a bizarre concept called e-mail.

"I'd tell people they may actually want to own a computer someday, and they would literally laugh me out," he told the Forward between mouthfuls of pierogies and coffee at the Veselka coffee shop in Manhattan's East Village.

Of course, Mr. Rushkoff, now 40, was onto something, and his career as a cyber-pundit and technology expert boomed along with the World Wide Web. As a writer and social critic he coined such terms as "cyberia" and "viral marketing." The author of seven books (including "Media Virus" and "Coercion: Why We Listen to What 'They' Say"), a columnist for the New York Times Syndicate, a National Public Radio commentator and a professor of media culture at New York University, he rapidly became known as a technology guru for the 20- to 30-something set.

Still, it wasn't long before Mr. Rushkoff's enchantment with new media wilted. "I was shocked and upset people were using a community tool for coercion," he told the Forward. "They turned a communications infrastructure into a direct-marketing platform."

Now Mr. Rushkoff has turned to a different medium, one with roots almost 6,000 years older than the new economy: Judaism.

Mr. Rushkoff's brand of Judaism isn't exactly from the world of our fathers, and neither is it tinged with trendy New Age or Eastern-esque philosophies. Rather, it borrows from the freewheeling promise of the Internet itself, where "the text and the stories and the rituals are interpreted and reinterpreted by everybody." He even borrows a piece of Internet jargon for his latest project and book in progress: "Open-Source Judaism."

"In computer land, there's open-source code and proprietary code," he said. "Proprietary code is locked and encoded so you can't see how it's put together. Open-source is documented so you can deconstruct it, so you can put it together yourself and add things to it, change it around."

"That's the way Judaism has always been and that's the way it should be," he added.

At the height of the dot-com craze, Mr. Rushkoff felt a growing sense of discontent with his seemingly competing desires to advance technology while maintaining a humanist philosophy. "I felt like I was between a rock and a hard place with this whole new-media commercialized world," he said. "I turned to Judaism for an answer to that, and I realized that Judaism is in as bad or worse shape in that same regard."

Mr. Rushkoff agrees with communal experts that Judaism today is in a state of crisis, but he argues that too much emphasis is placed, in the interest of "continuity," on ushering unaffiliated Jews into synagogues and Jewish community centers. Jewish organizations and foundations "don't understand that continuity isn't about maintaining the walls of the institution," he said. "I am a true continuity person because I want to kill the institution so that something lives."

"It feels to me that these people are looking at a flower that's dying," he said. "They're looking at it and saying, 'Oh no, what are we going to do? Should we add more water? Fertilizer?' They don't realize that inside the flower are these seeds that are only going to spread. And rather than thinking about the seeds, they're just mourning this flower and actually milking this flower so the seeds can't get out."

Instead of building more synagogues or encouraging participation in Jewish ritual, Mr. Rushkoff wants to take the shackles off of Jewish tradition; he wants everyone to be able to touch it, deconstruct it, tear it apart and put it back together again. "By breaking this notion that the sacred means the permanent, we can have a religion that continues to evolve, as it did evolve through every age except our own."

A recent darling of the Jewish lecture circuit, Mr. Rushkoff has spoken at venues ranging from the Silicon Alley Jewish Center to Makor to the Jewish Community Center on the Upper West Side. (On April 30 he will host the JCC's "Pisk: A Slam" event at CB's Gallery in Manhattan). He has been active with CLAL — the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership's Jewish Public Forum, a project that brings together Jewish intellectuals to talk about the Jewish future.

Growing up in Westchester County, N.Y. — first in Larchmont, then Scarsdale — Mr. Rushkoff saw Judaism as rigid even before he hit puberty. As a "precocious little kid," Mr. Rushkoff once asked the young rabbi at his temple, "What is God?"

"He gets all excited," Mr. Rushkoff said, recalling the rabbi incident. "He says God is this and this, then, basically, 'God is your conscience.' He goes around the rest of the day telling different classrooms, 'God is your conscience,' in the over-dramatic way a rabbi like that does. All the parents find out he's been going around the Sunday school telling kids that, and within a month he's fired."

Not surprisingly, Mr. Rushkoff felt personally responsible for what happened. "Basically, I didn't have anything close to a spiritual experience in Judaism after that," he said. "It felt to me that temple was this anti-revolutionary place, a place where they locked down reality, a place where Jewish ritual is basically your ability to demonstrate how well and how quickly you can read Hebrew in front of other people's parents."

Although in high school he dabbled in the Reform movement's youth group, North American Federation of Temple Youth, Mr. Rushkoff opted to seek spirituality in theater, turning to acting and avoiding organized Judaism for nearly 30 years.

Mr. Rushkoff studied English at Princeton University and went on to get a master's of fine art from the California Institute of Arts. For a while he considered a career in film and received a fellowship from the American Film Institute. He first began writing about computers and virtual reality for a Los Angeles magazine called Exposure in the late 1980s, when the Internet was barely known outside a small circle of techies.

Ten years later, however, as the Internet craze reached its apex, when the economy seemed like it was heading toward the moon and eager dot-commers were working around the clock, Mr. Rushkoff wrote a syndicated column urging others to take a cue from Judeo-Christian tradition and set aside a day of rest.

He soon decided to take his own advice, promised himself to observe a traditional Sabbath, synagogue services and all. Finding a synagogue was another matter. He still cringes when he remembers an evening with the Orthodox outreach group Aish HaTorah, which basically offered Mr. Rushkoff "to move to Monsey, become an Aish HaTorah person, get a house, pick from their finest collection of young Orthodox babes and have everything taken care of for the rest of my life," he said.

Mr. Rushkoff also rejected the famously spiritual slant of B'nai Jeshurun on Manhattan's Upper West Side, which he found to be "more style than substance," he said. "For me, Judaism has always been about waking up, staying conscious, not falling into the stupor that everyone else is in. In there, I saw these rabbis who were like rock stars or cult figures. People would be like, 'Oh, is so-and-so going to be up there? I love him!' Shit, is this N'Sync?"

Finding that he gleaned much more meaning from text than from rituals, Mr. Rushkoff decided to take matters into his own hands. "It's a matter of being able to recognize a non-local network of Jews who are resonating with a kind of secular, humanist, progressive, rebellious, revolutionary mind-set," he said. "They're all around, and they're looking to resonate with something." Which is why, he added, he's going to write books for them.

But Mr. Rushkoff said his work is cut out for him. Jewish identity is "like a tuning fork," he said. "If you hit it, it keeps on going. But the minute you grab it, it stops. The whole point is if we each make our own loud sound, all the others will start hearing, and they'll start looking and think, 'Wow, isn't that cool?' If you do this whole outreach thing, you just kill it."

So what does he suggest? Let people do what they are going to do, and Judaism will run its natural course. Judaism "informs the way you connect with everybody throughout your day," he said. "So first you aren't going to connect with people who are thinking what you're thinking. But then one day you will, and you'll get that cool synergy. And then you say, 'You know...why don't we just invite some people over Friday night and see what happens?"

The problem with Jewish professionals, Mr. Rushkoff said, is that "they look at these Jews here, Jews there, all these so-called lapsed Jews. This is the world, and to me, these are the Jews," he said, pointing first to his plate, then to various leftover pierogi clumps, "and this is the appendage that's dying," he said, holding a dish of applesauce intended to represent the Jewish establishment.

"It's happened before," he noted. "When we moved from Temple Judaism to rabbinic Judaism, there were all these Jews who tried to get the Temple back. There were other Jews who became Christians and Romans, and there was this weird, tiny little bunch that started rabbinic Judaism, and it turns out that everything we do today is from them."

A lot of Mr. Rushkoff's vision for the future of Judaism depends our willingness to let go of past tradition. "Being a chosen people means we should set an example for everyone," he said. "If we want to do anything special — as the precocious, special little child the Jews used to be — we've got to be the first ones who go, f- - - it. We're willing to abandon all claim on race, the past, all that, and actually push this thing forward. Who else is ready to drop their flag and join the human race?"


Reader Comments (3)

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November 27, 2011 | Unregistered Commentermisscsdcoco

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