June 15, 2009

Welcome the Chosen Google: Koogle

Photo by flickr user cjbakker used under Creative Commons license

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


It’s been a busy week for Israel. First, Obama laid down the law in Cairo, demanding a two-state solution to the protracted Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In response, Israel’s far-right prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu announced that he *might* be open to the *possibility* of a Palestinian state. Iran *almost* elected a president who doesn’t deny the Holocaust, while sporadic protests around the United States sought (ineffectively) to coerce popular supermarket chain Trader Joe’s into ditching Israeli products.

But none of that could prepare us for Koogle, the rabbi-approved, egg-noodle-punning Hebrew language search engine for the country’s exploding Orthodox population.  

Yes, Koogle—a play on Google and Kugel, a jewish noodle (or potato, or really anything) casserole—is better than all of these. The search engine (currently available only in Hebrew), filters all traif content, from sexually explicit or immodest images, to television, which is forbidden in most ultra-Orthodox communities. It also disables online shopping during the Jewish sabbath (Friday sundown to Saturday sundown). Creater Amos Azizoff told The Guardian he hopes the software will help more Hasidim—Judaism’s fastest growing sect—make the leap from the 18th to the 21st century.   

Koogle may be the most ambitious web application targeting the Orthodox, but it’s not the only one. Top 3 Orthodox-only websites after the jump:

3) Voz is Neis: Think Good magazine for Orthodox Jews. The online newspaper, “What is News?” in Yiddish, tries to answer that question with folksy stories on things like the record number of births in Borough Park and why gossip is actually good for your health. 

2) My Mikvah Calendar: You have a busy life, so why not use the magic of the Internet to help you maintain the ancient practice of “family purity”? The rabbi-approved application tracks a woman’s cycle, and actually texts her just before the prescribed period of separation between husband and wife around menstruation.

1) Shaindy.com: This site advertises itself as a place for married Orthodox Jews of all stripes (that’s Hasidish, ultra and regular Orthodox) to cheat, mutually, with other married Orthodox Jews. Yes, you read right—what would Yentl say? I don’t think the rabbis approved this one. 

 

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate