October 2006

I just read an incredibly articulate column on Ynet which for me sums up why the Gay Pride Parade should be taking place next friday, here in Jerusalem. The article calls for gay Haredi Jews to come out to the march as well, which is something I support but don’t really expect to happen. What I loved about the column was Benyovits’ passionate call for all people to come out to support the parade:

I don’t know if you’ll read these words. But I have a request: Next weekend, if the minister of internal security has guts, a gay pride parade will take place in Jerusalem, the capital of all of us. This parade has become a symbol this year, a symbol of courage and freedom in the face of oppression and the trampling over human rights.

I hope that all who can will join me and ensure that love and freedom overcome hatred and violence.

Check out the conversation going on at Jewlicious about young Jewish identity in reaction to my article in the Jerusalem Post. I’m looking forward to seeing what they come up with.

And for more on the subject, check out this article in the World Jewish Digest, where Tobin Belzer reports from the front of the synagogue-membership-struggle.

(Frankly, I don’t care much for synagogue membership, since I think it continues the metaphysicalization of Jewish identity; but I like the fact that he mentions Bethamie Horowitz’s excellent study, “Connections and Journeys.”)

Update: The American Jewish Committee just published a rather large and extensive study on Young Jewish Adults in the US today (PDF here). The most interesting aspect of the study, in my opinion, is the following:

Interestingly, the literature about young Jewish adults often tends to ignore Orthodox young Jewish adults, as the focus is placed on Jewish disengagement from Jewish communal life. The young Orthodox are somehow out of the picture, differing culturally and associationally from the rest of young Jewish America. However, demographically not only are they in the picture, but they are likely to be an increasingly important part of the picture. The percentage of young Jewish adults between the ages of 18 and 29 who are Orthodox (16 percent) is nearly double the percentage of Orthodox among Jewish adults ages 30 to 39 (9 percent). Thus, while a small group today, young Orthodox Jewish adults are likely to be a much larger group in the future, especially in the context of earlier marriages, higher percentages of young Orthodox adults being married, and higher fertility.In summary, the future Jewish community is going to be shaped by paths not yet taken by the young Jews in the largest group: non-Orthodox young singles and those who are married to other Jews and do not have children. If young single Jewish adults marry other Jews and have children, the percentage of those for whom being Jewish is very important will go up, as will most other measures of Jewish engagement. If more young single Jews intermarry, this percentage will go down. As the Orthodox population is likely to increase, overall identification is likely to increase.

I’m looking forward to read it–once they send me the study in the mail (boy it’s long).

I was horrified reading this article in Ynet about how the Haredi Jews protesting the Gay pride parade coming up in less than two weeks in Jerusalem. I am all for counter-protesting, I feel it is everyones right to express their opinions, but this is way over the line. Haredi leader Yitzhak Tuvia Weiss met with the chief of police for Jerusalem Ilan Franko to discuss the upcoming counter protest to the parade.

According to the article, “A source close to the rabbi said that Weiss told Franko that he cannot promise the police chief that there won’t be Haredi violence at the march.” 

The Haredi counter march is set to begin at Hillel Street and one plan in Haredi fourms is “to to infiltrate the march with some fifty men who ‘don’t look Haredi…who will ‘blast’ the parade from the inside,” .

Additionally, the same source close to Weiss stated that said “every cop seen along the way should be beaten. After all, the police will try and stop us…so we should be prepared and bring sticks to hit them,” he stated, adding “a direct order hasn’t been issued, but everyone knows.”

I have absolutely no problem with peaceful conter-protesting, everyone should be able to express their opinions. I do however have a very big problem with people threatening, and even promising violence against the parade marchers and even the police. I can understand how people can be so against this parade, and even though I don’t agree with them, I won’t take away their right to protest it. What it unnacceptable is saying that you are going to hurt or kill people who take part in this protest, for whatever reason. Every human life is sacred, gay, straight, black, white, jewish, gentile, or otherwise.

The following article was published in Haaretz in Hebrew and is appearing for the first time in English on BlogsofZion, thanks to one of Danny Lewin’s friends. Despite its length, BoZ felt it appropriate to publish this piece because of who Danny was: a modern day hero and the type of chalutz/fighter/worker/thinker who embodied the hope of the Zionist dream. The cruel disapearance of Danny and his promise on 9-11 makes this a difficult piece to read. But the Jewish People have always stood on the shoulders of the leaders and visionaries who came before, and that is our hope here. May Danny’s memory continue to inspire young Jews and Israelis to work toward a better future in Israel, and toward a State that shines with the values that suffused Danny’s life, and sanctified his death. Please read on.

September 15, 2006 (English Translation of Ha’aretz)

Danny tried to stop them. That’s his nature.

The life and death of Daniel Lewin, who was murdered in the terrorist attacks of September 11 in New York. His brother Jonathan and his friends tell of the high-tech entrepreneur who tried to overcome the plane’s hijackers.

By Haim Handwerker

New York – A backpack containing a laptop, a t-shirt and a pair of jeans – Daniel Lewin, one of the Internet bubble’s whiz kids didn’t really show off his immense success when he boarded, on September 11, 2001, the last flight of his life. He arrived at the Boston airport to embark on a business trip, and boarded an American Airlines flight towards Los Angeles. An Israeli-American who was born in the United States, made aliya and served in an elite unit of the Israel Defense Forces, Lewin was one of the first victims on the day the sky collapsed.

Lewin spent the flight preoccupied by the hardships dogging Akamai, his start-up company. Despite the problems plaguing the high-tech industry at the time, Lewin was the first to believe that he can pull through. The five terrorists who took over the plane, however, probably interrupted his chain of thought.

Making threats and releasing noxious gas into the cabin, the hijackers took over first class, leading the plane towards the northern tower, crushing the aircraft and everyone inside straight into the building. According to the Black Box recordings and the telephone conversations between the flight attendants and ground control, two flight attendants stationed in first class, as well as one passenger, were murdered even before the crash. That passenger was Daniel Lewin.

“It was his nature”

Why was Daniel Lewin murdered even before the plane hit the northern tower? According to the congressional committee that investigated the day’s events Lewin, who had served in the IDF for four years, probably tried to resist his hijackers. The flight attendants, the report suggested, were murdered as the hijackers tried to force them to open the door to the cockpit. Lewin tried to stop the terrorist Muhammad Atta, but another terrorist, Satam al Suqami, approached Lewin from behind, stabbing him to death with a knife. The remains of Lewin’s body were among the last found and identified in Ground Zero.

“We have no doubt that Danny tried to stop them. That was his nature,” said his younger brother, Jonathan, 34, a yeshiva graduate and a student of mathematics at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University. “He wasn’t one who sat still while such things went on all around him. And it wasn’t just his military background – that was just him. He cared a lot.”

Lewin left behind another brother, Michael, who also launched a computer start-up, Kashya, that was eventually sold to the American high-tech giant EMC for $153 million. While Kashya specialized in data protection, Danny Lewin’s company, Akamai – the name, picked by Lewin himself, means Smart in Hawaiian dialect – specialized, symbolically, in data distribution.

Looking for Challenges

Lewin made aliya from Denver when he was 14. His parents – Charles, a psychiatrist, and Peggy, a pediatrician – came to Israel out of Zionism and settled with their three children in Jerusalem.

The move wasn’t easy for Danny. He studied at the Ort high school in the city, and struggled to adapt to the language and the culture. “For the first few years he was bitter about being separated from his friends,” his younger brother recalled. “With time he became more observant – he told me a story about putting on tefilin in an airport in the United States and attracting security guards who wanted to check out his ‘suspicious behavior’.”

During his military service in Sayeret Matkal, an elite unit, he participated in operations behind enemy lines, and was discharged with the rank of captain. Searching for a challenge that will keep him busy after his army service, he chose the Technion university, where he studied mathematics and computer engineering, graduating cum laude.

“He was brilliant and funny, the kind of guy you love being around, even though there were moments when he was cold and distant,” said his brother. Danny classmate, Ronen Sarig, who currently resides in the U.S., added, “Danny was very humble, even shy, but a very thorough guy. Almost a perfectionist.” The job Danny held at the time, as a researcher at the IBM labs in Haifa, failed to satisfy him, and he decided to study in the United States, eventually receiving a scholarship to MIT.

While at the university, considered one of the most prestigious schools in the United States, Lewin published a few papers that generated much attention, one of which concerning the relation between algorithms and the Internet. The Internet, at the time, was experiencing a great leap forward, but the leap was neither smooth nor secure. Various junctions along the web suffered from “traffic jams” and difficulty of data transfer. With the algorithm he had developed, Levin believed he could solve the problem.

Three billion dollars, no credit card

The critical moment of Danny’s studies at MIT came in 1996, when he met Tom Leighton, a professor of applied mathematics who appointed Danny as his teaching assistant. The bond between them grew stronger, and the two spent hours brainstorming. “We spent 12-14 hours a day together, and the usual distance between professor and student became blurry. We became friends,” Leighton said.

The idea to try and promote Lewin’s idea commercially began to take shape when the two submitted their proposal to a prestigious competition for business plan held by the university. The passed the initial stage, but failed to make it to the final round, which, far from deterring Lewin and Leighton, encouraged them to continue and try.

“Thanks to that experience we met a lot of people in the industry,” said Leighton. “there were moments when we thought about dropping the whole thing, but eventually we decided to go at it ourselves. I took a pay without leave, and Danny decided to take a sabbatical from the university. He took a $20,000 loan from a relative, and we were in business.”

Leighton acted as the company’s chief scientist, and Lewin as the chief technology officer. “At the time, there were three problems the business world had with the Internet,” said Jonathan Seelig, one of Akamai’s founders, who was, at the time, an MBA student at MIT. “The reliability of websites was low, and they crashed easily. The traffic online increased substantially. And, more than anything, the importance of intercontinental traffic grew dramatically.”

Akamai’s idea for coping with these problems was to set up company servers around the world. And so, instead of Japanese users trying to get to CNN in Atlanta, the would be connected to servers in their own country, and those servers would then connect to Atlanta, greatly speeding up communications. In October of 1999 the company went public, boosted by the idea of the localized servers. In its first day of trade, the stock jumped 458 percent.

At its peak, the Akamai stock sold for $345. At 29, Lewin was worth three billion dollars. His lifestyle, however, was not influenced by the worth of his stock options – friends speak of a period in which he didn’t even have a credit card. Still, when he decided to return to MIT and complete his PhD, he began to cash in on his fortune. He sold $50 million worth of his stock options, bought a house in Brookline, near Boston, and two motorcycles. When he was murdered, he owned 7.3 million stocks worth $26 million.

The idea survived

In March of 2000 the Internet bubble began to lose the hot air that propelled it upwards. High-tech stocks began to plummet, and Akamai’s was no different. The stock dropped hundreds of dollars, reaching, at its lowest point, the 56-cent mark. “The days when the bubble burst were very tough,” said Leighton. “On September 10 we sat up talking until late at night. We had to cut down and fire people. But Danny was a leader and he believed that despite the difficult situation he could get the company back on track.”

On September 11, 2001, Lewin arrived at the Boston airport in order to catch a flight to Los Angeles, where he was slated to attend an Internet convention and hold a few meetings with clients. He never made it. Back at Akamai’s offices, Lewin’s colleagues knew quickly that he was among the dead. “We hoped maybe he missed his flight,” said Selig, “but it was clear pretty early on that we lost him.”
“It was a very painful time,” said Leighton. “We all knew he was a brilliant guy, we all loved and admired him greatly. We were shocked. On the other hand, however, because of the shock of the disaster, we had a lot of work. September 11 became Akamai’s big test: Phone lines were down and there were communication problems in many areas, but the Internet was working. Of course that the traffic in many websites, especially of government and news organizations, was heavy, and there were also hackers who attacked government websites, so there was a big mess. But for those who didn’t have a phone line, the Internet was an important source of information, sometimes the only one. We, with our systems, saw to it that many websites could continue and function despite the difficulties. It was our most trying moment, and we proved that the idea behind Akamai is real and necessary.”

After Lewin’s death, Akamai continued to struggle for survival, not a simple thing in the post-bubble market. Finally, the company became one of the few that managed to stay afloat, and today it retains 800 employees, serving 2000 customers (including Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, CNN and CBS) connected to 20,000 servers in 71 countries. According to “Forbes Magazine,” 15 percent of traffic online goes through the company’s servers.

[If you would like to reprint this piece, please contact Haaretz.]