January 1, 2008

We welcome you warmly to ISRAEL21c’s new, enriched and vastly expanded website. Not only do we have an improved version of our traditional ISRAEL21c news service website, but we’ve integrated our award-winning blog, Israelity, the journal of the reality of daily life in Israel.

Our new site will be going live this week, but we want to invite you to go to the beta site in order to get a sneak preview. Click here

And we’ve added free access to hundreds of thousands of photos of Israel with more videos and pictures to be added every day. We have feeds from dozens of other news organizations, and other blogs about Israel.

We’ve created this website to make it simple and easy to share virtually anything on the site with others through emailing, adding to your website as widgets, or posting feeds to your blogs, your Facebook or MySpace pages.

So welcome to our new world, one that we hope you’ll find more engaging, interesting and useful.

One thing we’re particularly excited about is our new feature “The Face of Israel Today.” Take a look at the video player in the top left corner of the homepage. Each day you’ll see an Israeli saying hello and introducing him or herself to you and telling you something about his or her life in Israel. Americans don’t know the breadth of diversity of Israeli society. Our “faces” will introduce them to Israel, one Israeli at a time.

Below “The Face” is “SNAP Israelity” a feature that streams hundreds of photos in dynamic slide shows. And the SNAP tab on the menu will link you to pages services showing hundreds of thousands more.

Because many Americans think there’s not much more to Israel than battlefields and religious sites, we offer a short video every day in “WATCH Israelity” that shows some aspect of Israel’s life, culture, land, people or achievements.

“HEAR Israelity” will feature a different Israeli music video each day.

We’ll continue to bring you the news of Israel “beyond the conflict” in our news service, as we have for more than six years, but we’ll be adding more stories each week, and many will have video thumbnails as well.

On the right hand side is a box containing the most recent posts to Israelity, our blog. Images from the blog are below it. Click here and you’ll go to the blog’s own website, but be careful: Israelity is addictive reading.

Below Israelity on the right is a new feature, “Inside ISRAEL21c.” We’ve been much better about telling the world about ISRAEL21c than we have about telling the world about our own organization. That will change as we keep you apprised of our work beyond the web, in the media and in the world Jewish community. In fact, take a look at that section today. There’s a story about “the making of the new ISRAEL21c website” and other news.

Please take advantage of our easily syndicated website: Send stories to people, post to blogs, add stories to your organization’s website. Let us know how you like it and how we can improve it.

We would like to acknowledge the generosity of the Solelim Fund of UJA Federation of New York for its generous contribution to this program. So welcome and thanks to you for your support. We hope you’ll spread the word about the new ISRAEL21c to others.

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