For my practicum, I was assigned minority groups and I decided that the group I would explore is the Jewish community. To start off, I simply typed “Jewish online community” into Google and had over 8 million hits. It seems like every city has some sort of website that provides information about Jewish events in the area, holidays coming up, and a way to get into contact with other Jews nearby. I narrowed down my search by adding Madison and the Jewish Federation of Madison (http://www.jewishmadison.org/) immediately popped up. After clicking through the website, I found that the Madison chapter of the Jewish Federations of North America helps support more than 20 local programs, including the UW-Madison Hillel. The site provides a lot of Madison Jewish news and ways to get involved with upcoming programs and events. Although there is a lot of interesting content here, I can’t see myself spending 15 hours observing a site that has little room to participate.

The next site I explored was http://www.jvibe.com/, a “magazine for Jewish teens and an online Jewish teen community.” At first glance, JVibe seemed more promising as it has blog posts and discussion boards. Unfortunately, neither has been updated in more than a year so it seems pointless to observe and participate on a site that does not keep things up to date.

I will definitely need to continue my search to find more appropriate community Web sites.