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Thursday November 15, 2007

The next generation is now

General Assembly puts younger speakers center stage

by jacob berkman
jta

nashville, tenn. | A self-described professional Jewish lesbian. A Web guru who calls himself the Orthodox Anarchist. A young, Oscar-winning producer.

The United Jewish Communities looked to this group and their disenfranchised peers for help at its annual General Assembly in the Tennessee capital this week, giving them an entire plenary to talk about themselves, what they need from the North American federation system and why they have a hard time becoming part of it.

Jewish federations are fretting over how to bring young Jews into their fold because the failure to do so could cause a crisis down the road for a system that takes in more than $3 billion annually in charitable dollars.

“What you saw is a beginning,” the UJC’s chair, Joseph Kanfer, said. “It strikes us that the federation system needs to become a capacity builder and an engine to bring people together.”

Kanfer envisions a future federation system in which “we will have not created the new ideas but we have support for the new ideas.”

In this future, he said, “many great things would have died out if not for the support of the federations. The federations will have not always had the early passion surrounding great ideas, but they have the capacity to allow ideas to flourish.”

The plenary session featuring young Jewish innovators signaled a change in thinking for a system that critics perceive as one that collects money primarily from major, older donors and allocates those funds to the same local, national and international projects and service agencies year after year.

Looking at the federation system as an enabler of new projects rather than the organization that has to own all the Jewish projects is central to a new operational strategy adopted by the UJC in June. The plan is designed to help sagging campaigns and maintain the federation system as North America’s Jewish backbone.

Kanfer described a bleak alternative future for the federation system if it does not embrace new ideas.

“If we are simply a system that hangs onto the old ideas and wants to do that, then we will have done a magnificent job in promoting those old ideas and our day will sunset.”

On Nov. 12, the G.A. opened its only plenary of the day to seven young Jewish innovators and activists — leaders that stray from the typical mold of the federation “leader.”

They included an up-and-coming film producer, Ari Sandel, who won an Academy Award for his short film “West Bank Story,” a farcical musical about a love that springs between the scions of two warring fast-food joints in Israel — one kosher and one hallal.

He was followed by Sarah Chasin, a senior at George Washington University, who after seeing the devastation of post-Katrina Mississippi while on a Hillel Alternative Spring Break took a year off from college to volunteer in Mississippi with AmeriCorps.

Chasin was followed by two Israeli young men who were trying to settle the Negev and the Galilee by building youth villages there. They were followed by Idit Klein, the director of Keshet, a Boston-based gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community.

Next up was Esther Kustanowitz, a noted blogger and senior editor of the startup magazine PresenTense, which is focused on the next generation.

Closing the plenary was JTA’s director of digital media, Dan Sieradski, a Jewish Web maven. Known outside JTA as Mobius, the Orthodox Anarchist, Sieradski started the influential and iconoclastic blog Jewschool, and is prone to post-Zionist outbursts.

The speakers offered some critical advice. Sieradski scolded the established Jewish community as too parochial in its funding, and he called grant makers “disconnected” and “soul crushing.”

The next big Jewish idea, in fact, “has probably already come and gone, and been shot down by no less than a dozen Jewish grant-making organizations,” he said. “And because the innovator will have no resources at his or her disposal with which to continue his project, he will probably walk away from it crushed and discouraged. And a revolutionary idea that could have transformed American Jewry forever will never come to be.”

Still, Sieradski envisioned a future federation system much like the one desribed by Kanfer, in which the federation is not the seed bearer for new Jewish initiatives but the system that nurtures those ideas by accepting and funding them.

At the G.A., where some 3,000 Jews from across the country had gathered, the hallways buzzed with praise for the young speakers. Many in attendance called it the best G.A. plenary they had ever attended.

“We have to make room for them at the table,” Ron Rosensweig, a lay leader from the UJA-Federation of Northern New Jersey, said , referring to the next generation. “Though we may not like their music or like what they say.”

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