I think Tahl is right. I applaud the effort. If anything, we need more Jewish cultural infrastructure. Jewcy is excellent. Nextbook is great. J-Dub is exactly right. But we need more.

The concern with Jewish culture has got to become a mainstream concern within Jewish funding and continuity circles. Post-secondary education, the playground and site of experimentation for so many, is an excellent site for much more cultural infrastructure. Yet it's not happening nearly to the extent it could.

Example: Bar Ilan has a wonderful MA programme in Creative Writing, in English. The big donors should be funding scholarships to that programme, for a dozen outstanding Jewish English-language writers, each year.

Example: thousands of Jews earn law degrees yearly (yes...). There is a great hunger among Jews to rediscover our cultural heritage, including our intellectual heritage. You would think a Jewish law graduate would have somewhere to go to study Jewish law, as s-he studied the common or civil law, in a portable format, like an LLM. Yet there is almost nowhere to do such a thing (exception: Yeshiva University, but only extremely recently). The big donors should be funding such programmes. An English-language LLM in Jewish Law at a big-name school like Hebrew University. A dozen scholarships to the YU programme in Jewish Law, for secular Jews with outstanding results in their law degrees.

Example: more Jewish arts awards envents, like the ones recently pioneered in NYC re: music -- but in more places, and bringing together Jews from even more of the diaspora, mixed with Jews in Israel. With anthology CDs released, and all the rest of it.

In other words, more cultural infrastructure.

Not overly optimistic . . . I think you're right on -- especially if the shift, over the past decade or so, in Jewish fiction, a move back toward an understanding of Jewish ritual and tradition (albeit sometimes in a re-configured fashion, one applicable in a more contemporary context) is any indication of this. Jewish writers aren't writing assimilationist literature anymore. They (writers like Steve Stern, Allegra Goodman, Rebecca Goldstein, Tova Mirvis, Pearl Abraham, Nomi Eve, Myla Goldberg, and many others) express in their fiction a more profound longing for Jewish community rather than a desire to blend in to mainstream culture or shed the tell-tale Yiddishisms of their grandparents and great-grandparents -- something that we did not see for the greater part of the 20th century.

I work for a Jewish organization and didn’t think they mattered until I got here. It’s been six months and I am still trying to figure out, as a Jew who has never practiced or been involved with Jewish life in any way, why I think that. 

I’ve been reading the conversation and comments between Tahl and Shmeul and I’m grappling with a commenter’s opinion that Jewish organizations should take more responsibility for funding Jewish culture and continuity and a study that found Jews today don’t know or care about mainstream organizations.  

If Jewish organizations are ultimately responsible for sustaining Jewish culture but no one knows or cares that they exist where does that leave us?  Usually, I am the last person making a case for mainstream anything. The kid of a Jewish mother and Catholic father, religion has never played a role in my life. My mom said she was a heathen if anyone asked.  

Heathen roots aside, here I am surrounded by, and working to promote, Jewish life and culture—not the hipster, ironic, cool Jewish life and culture that appeals to me on a personal level but mainstream Jewish organizational culture.  My position here has forced me to consider why Jewish culture matters and how I am responsible for making my organization appeal to … for lack of a better example, me: the totally unaffiliated, un-bat mitzvah’d person who had way more than four questions on Passover. 

What won me over is the work we do—we do cool things. We give grants to independent filmmakers who are bringing current Jewish issues such as genetic testing to the public, we bring Jewish performers like Howie Mandel to Chicago and host speakers like Al Gore, we provide education and job training for Israeli immigrants and locals, we help business owners rebuild after terrorist attacks in Israel, we provide counseling services to families and teens in crisis, send kids to camp and feed the elderly.  

We fund a wide variety of programs to make both Jewish daily life and cultural growth possible. I think that if the cool Jews knew more about what went on around here and at other Jewish organizations, they would care. As Tahl also pointed out in his response, embracing the polarities between hip and un-hip is not going to help anybody.  It’s the exchanges between the new Jewish culture and the mainstream organizations, I think, that will matter a great deal and, ultimately sustain Jewish culture.  

Which leaves a huge question: If you’re not going to be wooed to an Israeli folk concert at the local JCC and my organization isn’t going to sponsor a Jewish punk show at a bar, how does the conversation begin? How do I let you know that while the work of sustaining and growing Jewish culture happens online, it’s also happening within the mainstream, old school Jewish organizations?

I was the one who posted on funding Jewish culture -- I think. Maybe someone else did, too, and you're responding to them. From my standpoint, though: not Jewish continuity. And not that federations, particularly, should be the ones to do it. Simply that investing in Jewish cultural infrastructure is a good investment for those spending money, whoever they be.

It sounds like what you are grappling with is very much a branding issue: federations have stodgy brands, your activities don't overcome that brand. I dunno. One thing you could is package the things that you fund that appeal to a particular audience, wrap a Web site around those particular things, and bring that audience into the conversation. Break it down. Parcel it out in pieces. Connect each piece with the appropriate set of different people, and solicit their participation in the conversation about that piece, what makes it work, and how to further improve its bang for the buck.