Jewish

The Jewish New Year just happened and I noticed that JDate has more to celebrate than Rosh Hashanah. They just released the results from a survey by ResearchNow (an independent research company) which shows that JDate is responsible for 52 percent of all Jewish marriages that started online. From the survey of 948 married Jewish internet users they also concluded that 63 percent of the online dates originated at JDate, this is many times more than the leading competing dating services. The survey also showed that 76 percent of Jewish internet users who used an online dating site to find love, became a member of JDate.

For more information and statistics you can read this post from the JDate blog. To find out if this dating service is something you would be interested in you can also check out our review of JDate.

According to Ilana Angel, a popular blogger for the Jewish Journal website, earlier this month she had gone out to lunch with a few people who work at the online dating site JDate. JDate had wanted to see how her search for a Jewish match was going. Her previous two relationships with men had been the result of using JDate but this time when she joined, she found she wasn't having the same success. One thought Angel had was, that the men were scared away because she blogs about her dating experiences (even though she doesn't use real names). JDate decided on this lunch to share their recommendations on how Angel can use their site better to find a man she likes and who is not worried about dating a professional blogger.

She hasn't posted yet on how the lunch went with JDate. When she does we will make sure to let you know.

You can read Ilana Angel blog post here and you can find out more about the dating site she talks about by reading our review of JDate.com.

If your faith is important to you, then you want to date people who share in it. You want someone you can take with you to church or to temple, someone to celebrate the holy days with, someone who you can pray with daily. It can sometimes seem difficult on the mainstream dating sites to tell whether or not someone selects "Christian" or "Jewish" because they are practicing or just because they grew up in that faith.

On Mainstream Sites

On mainstream sites like Match.com, it's hard to tell sometimes how serious someone is about their religion. (At least with OkCupid.com, they can select "and serious about it" after their religion choice!) This leaves you in the position of having to tell from their profile text if they are as serious about their faith as you are. Some people make this very easy! I see profiles every day where people say, "God is the most important thing in my life" or "My match should share my faith."

But what if you don't see anything like that? Then, you'll have to send them an email. Don't word it like an interrogation about their religious practices - that will put anyone on the defensive! - but add the question on the end of your email:

Spark Networks Jewish dating site called JDate got a nice bit of publicity in The New York Times last week. The paper publish an article about a JDater's success story in their Fashion & Style section.

After a 13 year marriage, a 48 year old man named Ron James decided to get right back into dating. In the same month as his divorce he joined JDate.com. In the beginning months, every night for 2 or 3 hours he searched for woman between the ages of 30 and 50, and who lived within 50 miles of his apartment. He kept his profile full of energy but not head strong. In 18 months Ron emailed between 500 and 600 women, in which he dated almost 50 of them. This many dates was expense since, he had to pay for the date and usually commute an hour into New York City. This was all done on a modest salary. What Ron ended up doing to save money was stacking first meet dates. Every other Sunday he would have dates with as many as 3 women. He kept the date times spread apart and at different locations so he could "retain some sense of integrity".

Surprisingly over 2 percent of users on JDate are not Jewish. This doesn't mean 2 percent of users have lied on JDate, they have just answered profile questions like Do you attend synagogue? or Do you keep kosher? with the options "I will tell you later" or "Never". They usually also select “Willing to convert” under religious background as well. Anonymous non-Jewish JDaters have noted a number of reasons for using a dating site designed just for Jews. Reasons include having a number of Jewish friends and knowing a lot of the religion, to hearing about other single's success on the dating service.

Some of the Jewish members have complained about allowing non-Jews on JDate. They use the site specifically to meet other single Jews, and do not want to deal with any members who are not. I understand were these members are coming from but I do not see the harm in allowing non-Jewish members from joining if they are serious about meeting someone. All members, who don't want to see non-Jewish profiles, have to do is update there search preferences and deselect "Willing to convert" and "Will tell you later" from the Religion preference. Once the preferences are saved these members will never come up in a search again.

I don't think JDate.com will ever not allow non-Jewish members from joining. The percentage who do join is small and if they ever did prevent them then, JDate may get slapped with a legal suit by a unhappy member like eHarmony was in a similar case were they did not allowing same-sex relationships (see Story).

For more details on this Jewish dating community, read our JDate review.

The Philadelphia Jewish Voice has an article about the Jewish dating service JDate. In it the author Gabrielle Loeb, talks about the problems of intermarriage in the Jewish community. Intermarried couples usually raise Jewish children but, by the next generation only 13 percent of the grandchildren identify themselves as Jews (according to the NJPS 2001 study). Also, a Jewish Population Survey reported that Jews who married between the years of 1996 and 2001, 47 percent of them did so outside the Jewish faith. As a comparison, in 1970 only 13 percent of Jews intermarried. It seems that intermarriage is resulting in a decrease of the over all growth rate of the Jewish population in North America.

Part of the reason the founders of JDate decided to create a dating service in 1997 was to combat this problem. They realized Jewish singles needed another way to meet someone of the same faith. Since then, this site has become very popular. Even Rabbi's have been promoting this service (see story Rabbis Helping Single Jews with Subscriptions to JDate). The media seems to love JDate as well. There are a ton of articles on this Jewish dating site and it has been mentioned in several TV shows over the last few years which also has helped it popularity.