They’re Down With BBG
Posted by anastasia on 11-15-2005
My dad forced me to join BBG in Nashville, TN — BBG stands for B’nai B’rith Girls and is a Jewish youth group. I was already dealing with my own internalized anti-semitism just being one of a handful of Jewish girls at Harpeth Hall (the upscale Nashville private girls school I was also forced to attend). The Jewish girls at Harpeth Hall had money whereas we were very much middle class so I didn’t totally fit in with them either. So I’m basically going through this phase where I felt like I really didn’t fit in with anyone (not the rich blond army of deputantes-in-training at Harpeth Hall and not the southern Jewish girls either). After attending a BBG retreat in Memphis where I was sure the girls were all making fun of me (who knows if they were), I pretty much dropped out of the Jewish youth scene all together and landed in the punk scene where I was happily surrounded by other social misfits.
That little piece of memoir was meant to set up the BBG’s new Website b-linked, which uses social networking applications as a way to get Jewish teens to join. Reaching teens in “their own milieu.” From an article in the Jewish Times:
“The site, www.b-linked.org, aims to revolutionize the way Jewish teens connect with each other. BBYO leaders hope that 50,000-100,000 Jewish teens will join b-linked over the next four years.
The site was launched in October and made available initially to the BBYO community. It already has more than 2,000 members, and the group is publicizing the initiative more broadly in an effort to attract a wider spectrum of teens.”
Here’s a fun question. If I was a teen now with the exact same issues I described above, would I have joined b-linked? Would interactitng with people online been better, worse or the same as the experiences I had with people offline? I’m inclined to think I would have rejected b-linked and would have been a Myspace groupie for some local band, but who knows….
Categorized under: Web