Once there were hardly enough Jews on the micro-blogging network to form a minyan. Today Members of the Tribe of every denomination and belief, ultra-orthodox as well as secular, rich as well as poor, and young as well as old all waste thousands of potentially productive hours a day sitting in front of their computers tweetin' away like mindless morons!
If you’re one of them, you’d probably like to learn how to increase your Jewish following. Well, look no further; all those Jewish people standing behind me are my Twitter followers! Even though there’s a few of them that are lawyers I’d frankly prefer to keep strictly in front of me.
If you heed the guidelines below, you’ll soon have more Jewish followers than Moses, without having to part the Red Sea. And if you actually can part the Red Sea, you might wind up with almost as many followers as the least popular of the Kardashians.
Guilt Following. To develop Jewish followers, you must first follow them, a practice referred to as Guilt Following because you’re hoping to guilt them into following you back. If they do not, it will be for one of the following reasons:
1) You followed @Mel _Gibson497. Hopefully by accident.
2) You followed @SaraKSilverman, who frankly just doesn’t need any of us.
3) The person you followed is either (a) not Jewish or (b) totally impervious to guilt. If (b) is correct, (a) is almost certainly correct as well.
Content. On Twitter, Content is King.
That’s notwithstanding the fact that the person tweeting incessantly about Justin Bieber’s tattoo has enough followers to invade the nearest galaxy while the guy who tweets cogent and thoughtful concepts and ideas about solving the budget crisis can’t get @crudface99 to follow him.
To attract Jewish followers, however, you must provide Jewish-oriented tweets with insight and intelligence, such as:
• While “thou shall attend a motion picture and eat Chinese on Christmas” is more a guidance than a commandment, were we to add commandments, this would have to be either 11 or 12.
• Why is this night different from all other nights? Because on this night when Elijah visits our home, Mom doesn’t complain that he should have called first!
• Thou shalt honor thy father and mother but understand that this doth not require eating brisket more than once a week.
Abbreviations. With only 140 characters in which to get your message across and no ability to gesture with your hands, Jewish tweeting has no space to spare. Hence abbreviations are employed for oft-used familiar expressions, some of the most popular being:
1. IMHO --- In my Hebrew opinion.
2. LOL --- Latkes or Lox?
3. SAHM --- Saul and Harry Mandelbaum
4. LMAO --- Little mayo (on my sandwich)
5. BTW --- By the waters (of Babylon)
6. ROTFL --- a female character in Fiddler on the Roof
Hashtags. These are used to link together tweets with common themes so they can all be accessed together. Frequently used hashtags include:
#canwetalk?
#I’mkvelling
#amkvetching
#ButForYou,Only….
Emoticons. Emoticons are a couple of keystrokes of letters and punctuation which usually form a smiling face denoting an amused or happy response to something tweeted.
I rarely use emoticons because they seem to me to be Twitter’s version of a laugh track. Instead of using emoticons, I prefer to perform my tweets in front of a live audience of typewriter symbols. But were I to use an emoticon to express laughter or happiness in Jewish oriented tweets, it would look something like this:
תי :
For the Hebraically challenged, that is a colon followed by the Hebrew letters het and yud, which together make a chai. The chai represents L'chaim, which means to life. And if you use our little friend L'chaim, you’ll be on your way to attracting all the Members of the Tribe and all the other great folks you’d ever want to meet on Twitter.
You'll be a modern day Moses in no time!~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Not a Member of the Tribe?
minyan - ten Jewish adults required for certain religious observances.
Elijah - legendary Biblical prophet who "visits" Jewish homes during the Seder guzzling free wine wherever he can.
kvelling - bursting with pride.
Letter het - well, it may actually be a tav I used up above. But it makes a cuter emoticon than a het. Just look at it! ( : תי ) Awwwww!
By the Waters of Babylon - Biblical psalm in which the Hebrews in captivity in Babylon yearned for their homeland of Israel.
@SaraKSilverman - Twittername for Sara Silverman, Jewish- American comedian, who truly doesn't need any of us.
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