The Future of Haveil Havalim

In the most recent edition of HH, I received some feedback, expressing concern about the political future of the carnival. A number of people criticized the trend of including mostly right-wing bloggers or, in the cases where left-wing blogs were included, excluding their posts dealing specifically with Israel. The main point of these sentiments was that HH is skewed to the right, and not necessarily reflective of the Jblogosphere in general. This type of criticism is very similar to what I've observed during the Jewish Blogging Awards, hosted by Israellycool. Here's my own take on the issue: *personally*, I included EVERY SINGLE POST that was sent to me, regardless of the political ideology. Moreover, I went out of my way to find as many relevant posts to include as was possible, and even included posts by such bloggers as Orthodox Anarchist, which I haven't really seen being included in HH in the past. In addition, Soccer Dad was kind enough to forward me a number of posts, with which he specifically disagreed, and I included them as well. Here's the problem: the overwhelming majority of people who sent in their posts were right-wing. The left-wing bloggers for some reason did not respond at all and didn't send me anything. Secondly, since I'm right-wing myself, I generally interact with the same community and tend to look through the same blogs and links. A few blogs include a variety of links, but most blogrolls are fairly homogeneous, so I'm not really "introduced" to the left-wing blogging community... and therefore simply don't know where to look. This may also be the problem with other hosts. Furthermore, most of the bloggers who regularly contribute to HH are either American (and mostly observant to some degree) or Israeli, in which case most of them are Americans, who've made aliya (and a few Russian-speaking center right or right-wing bloggers). I'm not denying that there are many left-wing Jewish blogs, but they are either a)secular American - and I don't know too many of them or b)Hebrew-speaking Israeli and I don't read Hebrew. In this edition of HH, I suggested broadening our community by including Hebrew bloggers in the future editions of HH. I will leave it up to the future hosts and people who read Hebrew, since I, unfortunately, don't. I did include a Spanish-speaking post, and will continue to try to broaden the horizons by reading other Spanish blogs (and perhaps looking for some Russian ones as well), and forwarding them to the future hosts. I know there's also a Portuguese-speaking Jblogging community, and I hope that someone who speaks the language, will take the trouble to look through them and forward the posts in the future. I think that HH would do even better than it's doing if it included non-English-speaking bloggers as well as English-speaking ones. It would serve the goal of uniting the Jewish world much better. However, that is my suggestion, and I cannot do all the work by myself. So here's what I'm asking everyone to do: 1)If you speak any other languages, and know any relevant Jewish blogs in those languages, please let us know about them and help us welcome them to the Jblogosphere. Also, please send in their entries to HH, with a brief summary of the post. 2) Left-wing bloggers (yes, this means YOU!!!), you're more than welcome to send entries to the future editions of HH. We want HH to be as inclusive as possible, and hoping this effort to transcend petty political squabbles, so frequent in the blogosphere. 3)Right-wing hosts of future editions - please take the trouble to look for alternative points of view and include them, even if you disagree vehemently. I think more intellectual diversity will improve the level of discussion, and in the end, truth will come out in the debate. Or not. But at least we will become aware of other points of views and how to deal with them. 4) Right-wing and left-wing bloggers - please don't shun each other. We're the Jblogosphere. We can disagree and we WILL disagree. We will even fight, sometimes. But in the end we're part of the same nations, and have more important goals than just winning some stupid flame wars. Please, Jewish bloggers of the world united. Sounds familiar? ; ) But hopefully, will work better. I'm looking forward to your suggestions and feedback!