A Happy and Kosher Passover.

Jameel & Crew
The Muqata

And speak for itself? Don’t you LOVE the discussion inspired by your comics?

That’s too bad. I make serious coin.

And I get to have lunch with Kelsey and dinner tonight with two more infamous bloggers.

– or by overexcited imbeciles whose agenda may or may not be pernicious. I give them the benefit of the doubt and conclude they’re simply imbeciles. It’s the community’s responsibility to see through the bloviation and blather and stop latching itself on to the latest trends. But as the community is led by so many of the imbecilic persuasion, and as the community is desperate to be “hip” to the “next-gen,” the phenomenon feeds itself quite nicely, and will continue to do so with whatever trend appears next on the horizon.

Anyway, I didn’t comment mostly b/c I would like my comics to speak for themselves without explanation, but I do think the distinction re. “hucksters” is worth pointing out.

So whose skin tones did you use? Mine?

That’s too bad. I make serious coin.

I dare someone to fight me on this…

Glad you found the coloring delightful. Me? I find you delightful!

I like to think I’m pretty transparent. Unless I’m obligated by the terms of an NDA, I take no measures to hide any of my professional work. To date I’ve written 1259 (!!) posts, none of which I get paid for. The money we generate from advertising is so little it would make you cry and barely pays for our servers. In any case, there’s a link on top to the Jewlicious Festival site which contains a thorough list of all our Festival sponsors ever. I made a web site for ROI 120, I’ve helped run a few Birthright Israel trips, We were paid to produce a video for Birthright, we’ve done work for 2 trip providers, a wide variety of Jewish organizations have advertised on Jewlicious – I can’t even remember them all… given that I don’t get paid to blog, having to figure out all the possible connections and interconnections a blog post might involve is simply not realistic. I don’t have the time to do that. I think it’s enough that the information sought is publicly available AND anyone wishing to dispute my impartiality is free to do so on Jewlicious. We never delete critical comments. So yeah, given all that, I think it’s fair to say that I do a reasonable job at being both credible and transparent. Also, I am not a journalist! Jewlicious presents our posts free of charge and as is.

Oof. Thank Hashem for my non-Jewish clients!

Per your remarks separating the Festival from the blog: Jewlicious.com and the Jewlicious Festivals are the same brand. You can’t separate the Festival from the blog in terms of funding sources and coverage. It’s natural that coverage will tend to be hagiographic when money for the Festival is on the line. So whenever the blog covers an organization for which it receives money for its festival, there is a conflict of interest that needs to be clarified through a disclaimer in that very post, period.

Also, I was talking about “direct” and “indirect” funding sources. The latter category would include any instance in which David Abitbol designs a website for a Jewish organization and then writes a flattering post about that organization on Jewlicious. I’m only singling out Jewlicious because Abitbol posted about this. The same would apply to any blog that aspires towards credibility.

I really hope Jewish blogs — and ultimately all blogs — will move towards a culture of total transparency, as that was one of the ideas behind the emergence of blogs as forces of news commentary in the first place.