Photo Credit: Official White House Photo by Amanda Lucidon

Here’s First Lady Michelle Obama taking a selfie with Baltimore student Lawrence Lawson’s phone at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Va., Feb. 5, 2014.

Many folks have been putting down the selfie as evidence of our ever increasing vanity. After all, in medieval literature there are hardly any references to mirrors, and then, during the Renaissance, people can’t seem to have enough of them. Having increased interest in how we look seems to go hand in hand with prosperity, scientific curiosity and a penchant for wearing colorful tights.

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The selfie takes the mirror and makes it a group experience. We never had trouble with the self portrait as an artistic genre, we didn’t think they were a show of vanity on the part of the artist. On the contrary, we appreciated how hard it is to model for oneself.

Turns out it’s really easy to do with a smartphone…

Here’s one of my selfies, shot on Laguna Beach, California, on our last trip to the left coast before making Aliyah.

It was a cold and rainy day in April, and I was out, running on the beach. How cool can one man get, right?

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Yori Yanover has been a working journalist since age 17, before he enlisted and worked for Ba'Machane Nachal. Since then he has worked for Israel Shelanu, the US supplement of Yedioth, JCN18.com, USAJewish.com, Lubavitch News Service, Arutz 7 (as DJ on the high seas), and the Grand Street News. He has published Dancing and Crying, a colorful and intimate portrait of the last two years in the life of the late Lubavitch Rebbe, (in Hebrew), and two fun books in English: The Cabalist's Daughter: A Novel of Practical Messianic Redemption, and How Would God REALLY Vote.