Posts
The Revolution Will Be Digital
By Shmuel Rosner / April 16, 2007
[Last week, Ha’aretz Chief U.S. Correspondent Shmuel Rosner featured Jewcy editor in chief Tahl Raz as a guest on his site. Raz answered questions about the future of Judaism, Jewish peoplehood in America, and the volume of debate about Israel in the U.S, among other topics. He also responded to inquiries from readers, like the one below.]
Dear Mr. Raz,
I read your comments with interest and with many of them I agree. I do feel, though, that you offer only the analysis, and not the solutions. How do you maintain this sense of "Judaism is important" in this postmodern Jewish world—any ideas?
Thank you. Mike Bental, NJ
But analysis is so much easier, Mike. I can relate to the undercurrent of desperation in your question. Adrift in a landscape of institutional fragmentation and moral vertigo, amidst growing calls for God's death, subjected to the schizophrenic behavior of a Jewish establishment fearful of the advancing shadow of its own mortality, present-day Judaism might seem properly personified by the wild-eyed figure shrieking in hopeless angst in Edvard Munch's painting "The Scream." 
I don't buy it, however. Maybe that's because I try to avoid whenever possible all the statistics and talk and writing these days on the questions of who is a Jew, and more provocatively, who is a good Jew, and even more provocatively, how do we make two Jews have sex on a regular basis to produce other Jews. Sometimes it can seem as if all of institutional Judaism today is an industry producing endless provocations leading to nowhere and to nothing. The adjudication of all this outdated theo-social arcana misses the whole point, namely, that people don't believe in the importance or power of Judaism (or for that matter, God) because of good marketing or successful reproductive strategies ginned up by their elders, but because they are compelled to by their own experience. We need more great Jewish experiences. Experiences that are fun, edifying, inspirational. The relevance of Judaism is, and has always been, the capacity it offers to change our lives, our communities and indeed our world. We need to be shown how it can do that. We need access to the tools and information it provides. Some of it is going on now on the Internet, in Jewcy and elsewhere. Revolutionary things are going on, driven by spiritually entrepreneurial young people who are using the mediasphere and its technologies to create their own affiliations, start their own organizations, and infuse the community with innovation, creativity, and change. I really do believe, and Jewcy is working to exploit, the opportunities for self-growth and community I think this information age offers. I believe these opportunities will be something qualitatively different, better, than the opportunities of the age that it superseded. How about them overly optimistic apples?
Yours, Tahl
POST A COMMENT
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.
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 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.
Wanna post your own comments? Gotta log in first!