•  
  •  
 

Abstract

Hey Alma (@hey.alma), a Jewish cultural publication with an Instagram account with over 150,000 followers, began posting followers’ personal ads over a year ago. This article analyzes the ways in which Hey Alma classifieds carve out a space of and for not only subversive resistance of personal identity at the margins of mainstream, but also a specific construction of what it means to be Jewish. Using the framework of “collective identity” that theorizes about the process and tension in creating a shared and interactive sense of “us” (against an explicit or implicit “them”), including a moral, intellectual, and emotional connection to a larger group, this article explores how a progressive, even radical, youth-based Jewish collective identity is formed—and contested and transformed—through these personals, the captions, and the comments from followers. By defying gender and sexual binaries and norms, and fusing traditional Jewish cultural signifiers, Hey Alma classifieds work to contest a static and uniform Jewish collective identity. Moreover, social media as a space for this formation and contestation of collective identity is crucial to this process. As a noninstitutional space disconnected from the physical places connected to Judaism, Hey Alma offers social interaction where young Jewish users collectively negotiate meanings (of gender, sexuality, nationality, Jewish identity) more generally through the affordances of social media and Instagram more specifically: visibility, persistence, editability, and association. In this way, Hey Alma’s classifieds on Instagram work as an imagined community, and a space for the development of a contemporary youth-based Jewish collective identity.

Download

Share

COinS