How is JDate Shaking Up Judaism?

In 2001, I met my soon-to-be husband on JDate. I remember several of my friends and coworkers being shocked that I a) used on an online dating service to find a guy, and b) was admitting it. I never once felt sheepish; I was just so glad that I met him at all. Julie, the designer of 614, just got engaged this month to her JDate match, and these are different times. Finding matches online is practically a given for most daters—and single Jews using JDate is as common as seeing hearts on Valentine’s Day. There are 400,000 JDate members in the U.S. alone! Given its popularity, we wondered here on staff how JDate might actually be changing the way single Jews think about being Jewish.

Michelle Cove, Editor, mcove@brandeis.edu

In This Issue

• The Online Shtetl

  How JDate is like a reprogrammed and updated version of the original.

• Dating Profile or Religious Check-In?

  Filling out the JDate questionnaire made me evaluate how religious I could picture myself becoming.

• Meet the President of JDate

  Find out what Greg has to say about rabbis using JDate, how the service can act like your junior high school friend, and why even non-Jewish singles might use JDate.

• Single and Overexposed

  Sometimes the world of JDate can make the Jewish community feel just a little too small.

• What I learned about Love from Tony Soprano

  How one JDater used a DVD boxed set of “The Sopranos” to figure out what works and doesn’t work in relationships.

• Reform Romeo, Conservative Juliet

  As if dating isn’t tricky enough for Jews who want to marry within the religion, there are also complications when staying in the tribe.