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Why tweets are kosher on Rosh Hashanah

The Jewish High Holy Days are serious business. Except on Twitter.

 

Fernando Alfonso III

IRL

Posted on Sep 29, 2011   Updated on Jun 3, 2021, 2:30 am CDT

In celebration of the Jewish New Year, a handful of Twitter accounts have been poking fun at the historic holiday.

Even though Rosh Hashanah calls for no work, the people behind two of the Jewtastic parody accounts, @JewAmerPrincess and @jewboyproblems, can’t resist their favorite social media addiction, Twitter.

For example, today during services at his upstate New York college, @jewboyproblems, who’s 21 years old,  snuck off to the lobby to live-tweet the event.

“Religion is so much more than ancient texts,” @jewboyproblems told the Daily Dot. “To me, prayers mean very little. I have always been extremely cultural, and I feel like many people forsake religion because they have traumatic experiences of memorizing prayers.”

@jewboyproblems created the parody account about 10 months ago in response to all the “girl-centric problem” accounts out there, he said.

One of those girl-problems accounts is @JewAmerPrincess which is run by Michelle, 28, and Brittany, 25. They’re two real-life Jewish-American princesses  (or JAP, for short) who have full-time jobs but aren’t afraid to admit that “daddy is always a phone call away.”

“@JewAmerPrincess is a compilation of every jappy girl you know, what she looks like, what she owns, what she’s wearing and what she thinks,” the two wrote from a shared email account. “That’s why girls love it.”

Michelle came up with the idea for the Twitter account about a year ago and recruited her friend Brittany as a writer. The pair pride themselves on keeping their JAP-life tweets realistic and tied to current events: They often live-tweet award shows, holidays, and most importantly, “Gossip Girl,” they said.

But as they are for most Jewish people, the High Holy Days are the most crucial events for Michelle and Brittany.

“While we observe the holiday, technology is not off limits,” they said. “The account is just for fun and if more observant Jews don’t want to read over the high holiday, they don’t have to—that’s the beauty of Twitter.”

Here are some tweets from @JewAmerPrincess, @jewboyproblems, and other Judaism-inspired accounts that made us chuckle.

Illustration by Fernando Alfonso III.

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*First Published: Sep 29, 2011, 8:07 pm CDT