A Big Jewish Reboot

Like most blogs, the Big Jewish Blog had a life-cycle.  It started strong, it petered out, it got some new blood from new contributors, it petered out again, and for the last year or so, it's been more or less sincerely dead, as the Munchkins say.

This year, I'm giving it either a Big Jewish Reboot, or just a Big Jewish Boot.  We'll see.

I've written the "various hands" that I brought on board a few years back, and asked who wanted to continue contributing on a more or less regular basis, and I quietly culled the names of folks who haven't contributed in several years.  I'll continue to prune and add voices, and see what mix seems to work here, to get the job done, whatever that "job" may be.

(If I took you out, and you want back in, let me know.)

I'll be going through the links to your right and testing them to see what's still live and what's gone, daddy, gone.  Might even add some more, if the mood hits.

(If the mood hits, bear it.)

The other thing I've done, after much hemming and hawing--I do that a lot; it gets noisy 'round here--is start up yet another blog for my various religious misadventures:  the Alte Rockers Purim spiels, the angsty posts about synagogue membership, etc., the sermons and musings and so forth.

That blog is called "In the Rain," after a Stanley Moss poem I quite like.  If you want to see what I'm up to on that front, take a look.

My hope is that by separating the more personal Jewish (and non-Jewish) me into its own separate blog I'll be able to take a more curious, agile attitude towards the poems, poets, and poetics issues that will make up the Big Jewish Blog.  ("Poesis, not religion," as Rothenberg says in Exiled in the Word.)

If that doesn't happen, then it doesn't happen--now that I have my Promotion to Full (trumpet fanfare, please), what goes on here in the blogosphere is pretty well meaningless, professionally speaking, so I won't worry one way or the other.

The one question I have--and it's an open one, for now--is whether to turn off the comments here entirely, rather than leaving them on and moderating.  The comments you get on a Big Jewish Blog can be awfully upsetting, even when I delete or reject them:  political hate, religious venom, trolling of various kinds.

I just don't want that in my head, and I'm not sure that the potential for conversation here is worth the cost.

For now, I think I'd rather have the comments and conversations over at Facebook and Twitter and so forth than here.  If you don't like that idea, find me and let me know.  We'll see what we can do.

Wish me luck, and welcome back A Big Jewish Blog.