Anthony Weiss accepts Rosenberg’s self-presentation at face value. He doesn’t probe. He doesn’t use other sources on Rosenberg other than Rosenberg.
I’ve been friendly with Shmarya since 2004 and am a regular reader of his blog.
Very little in this profile is new. There’s no digging. There are no multiple points of view.
It’s very lazy. It’s something a blogger would churn out in a couple of hours.
Picking up the phone at 4:30 in the afternoon, Shmarya Rosenberg answered in a voice still bleary from sleep. He explained that he was just napping after having blogged the whole night, and most of the morning.
“It’s hard to do one of these blogs,” Rosenberg said. “It owns you. It’s terrible. If I had any idea four years ago that it was going to do this, I don’t think I could’ve started it.”
Rosenberg is the man behind FailedMessiah.com, one of the essential stops on the Jewish blogosphere. Rosenberg blogs full time, often posting multiple times a day to report on the shortcomings that he sees in the world of Orthodox Judaism — a beat that endlessly supplies him with material. Rosenberg’s primary targets are what he sees as examples of hypocrisy and the misuse of power, and he is relentless in cataloging the failures of rabbis and others who hold positions of authority, citing examples ranging from a recent ban on a concert to corruption and child abuse. With the outrage of Jeremiah and the surgical delicacy of a meat cleaver, Rosenberg goes after his targets in plain and aggressive English.
“It’s raining nutcase rabbis over in the Holy Land,” one post begins.
“Rabbis Call for Jewish Terrorism, Vigilante Violence” is the title of another.
Though many of his frequent postings are links to news reports on other Web sites, Rosenberg also does original reporting. On July 9, he made headlines when he caught public relations powerhouse 5WPR leaving comments on blogs under false names. As this newspaper has reported, 5WPR denied his accusation, then reversed course.
Rosenberg says that he is driven by a sense of outrage and by a determination to look out for causes and people that are being ignored.
