Shidduch vetting in the Orthodox world has gotten out of control, writes Tamar Snyder in the Wall Street Journal:

Just as the economy is headed to recession, the shidduch system is in crisis mode. Or so the rabbis moan, noting the surplus of women eager to marry and the corresponding shortfall in the quality and quantity of available Jewish men. It’s not that there are more Orthodox women than men out there; experts instead attribute the shortage to the broader sociological trend of postponing marriage, which works to the disadvantage of women looking for spouses their own age or just a few years older. Men who are 30 will date women as young as 18 and may turn their noses up at dating any woman past the age of 25. The 20% or 30% of women who don’t get hitched right away begin to worry they’ll be left out in the cold for good.

Glynis Ann Ritchie has a touching essay in The New York Times’ style section about how she, a starry-eyed American Jewish girl, fell for a hunky Israeli soldier on a Birthright Israel trip. Though the Israeli turns out to be part of the parade of callous men that Ritchie says “opened up my chest, scooped out the contents and tossed them into the trash,” he does leave her with something positive and long-lasting: a healthy self-image.

The Jewish Transcript in Seattle profiles Joel Blatt, a twice-married consultant who invented a new dating site with the goal of meeting a nice Jewish girl. Plus, click here to listen to Blatt’s interview with ABC News Radio.

Here’s the opening of the Transcript article:

Getting by — and dating — with a little help from your friends may have just gotten easier, thanks to a local entrepreneur’s spin on matchmaking.

In March, fed up with the online dating world, Joel Blatt created Sparkbliss.com, a Web site that he describes as “LinkedIn, for dating.”

Blatt, 42, who works for a Bellevue consulting firm, has been married twice — both times to non-Jewish women. While Sparkbliss is not specifically a Jewish dating site, Blatt said he did create it with the goal of meeting a Jewish woman.

“I’ve tried JDate, I’ve tried other online dating sites, and they don’t work very well,” Blatt said. “I couldn’t take anymore of those awful dates. I wanted to meet the right people.”

The trouble with most online dating sites, he contends, is simple: profiles can be viewed — and judged — based on search criteria entered by site users, but those profiles are not always true representations of the singles on the site. Blatt said that he wanted that possibility eliminated from the equation.

Newsweek reports that rabbis are adopting a new strategy to prevent intermarriage: JDate.

For the first time in its 10-year history, the site is offering a bulk rate to rabbis who want to buy membership accounts for their congregants. According to Gail Laguna, JDate’s vice president of communications, singles who sign up through their congregation get a slight discount on the site’s $149 six-month subscription fee. “This is a way for us to break down the walls of the synagogue,” said Rabbi Michael Cahana, who leads the Congregation Beth Israel in Portland, Ore. “We should use all the technological tools that are available to us.”

Rabbi Kenneth Emert, of Temple Beth Rishon in Wyckoff, N.J., turned to his synagogue’s discretionary budget to purchase a dozen three-month memberships for single congregants. Only one rule: “No mothers, no grandmothers.”

Singles, in other words, have to sign up themselves. The financial aid is appreciated. If not for Emert, says 29-year-old public-interest lawyer Noah Mamber, “I would have had to choose between JDate and food.”