New Jersey and you. And you. And you…

The newspaper you hold in your hands may look like an only child, but it’s actually one of a family of newspapers. New Jersey Jewish News is published in five separate editions, serving five distinct Jewish communities, whose borders are defined by five Jewish federations, each of which, by mutual agreement, considers the community it serves its “own.”

Our promise to each of our community “clients” (that’s you) is that while we share resources on our end and share with readers common features like world and state news, we ensure that each edition has its own separate identity. The local sections report only on that community’s towns and institutions. When we do report on statewide events, we make sure that, when appropriate, the story is “localized” for each edition.

This localization, however, leads to some dilemmas. I like to joke that if an event happens in Belarus, we can put it on the front page, but if it happens in Bergen County, it doesn’t exist. Localization also drives our staff members to distraction, as they write the same story or design the same page five different ways.

More seriously, we sometimes wonder if we are contributing to the atomization of a relatively compact state Jewish community. New Jersey’s Jews are now served by 12 different Jewish federations, which in turn have spawned 12 different bureaucracies, overlapping social service agencies, multiple JCCs — I could go on.

This isn’t just a Jewish challenge, but a NJ thing. “Home rule” is the bane of the state’s planners and reformers, who repeat a few statistics like a mantra: The state has 566 municipalities, the most per square mile of any state. There are 611 school districts, including 23 districts without a single school, and 172 with only one school. A study once found that if you took all of New Jersey’s mayors, police chiefs, fire chiefs, school superintendents, and freeholders and put them in one room — you probably should have ordered more dessert.

Joking aside, every taxpayer pays the price for duplication of services, a lack of regional planning, an over-reliance on local property taxes, and competition for the kind of land-gobbling development that contributes to sprawl. And some of the effects are even more insidious. As Jon Shure of New Jersey Policy Perspective points out, NJ public schools are among the most segregated in the nation, “because New Jersey breaks itself into so many tiny pieces that it’s easy to find one where everyone is pretty much like you.”

Shure also discusses another aspect of home rule that should worry our state’s Jewish leaders: “Fragmentation,” he writes, “narrows our thinking and limits opportunity.”

Thoughts like these formed the backdrop when leaders of the five communities the paper serves met in Watchung Sunday for an NJJN retreat. The idea was to capitalize on the newspaper’s “neutral” position to create a sort of cross-community summit. The NJJN board of trustees already includes representatives from federations in MetroWest, Central New Jersey, Greater Middlesex County, Greater Monmouth County, and Princeton Mercer Bucks. To this mix, we invited federation presidents and executive directors, community relations directors, and other agency heads.

The topic of our discussion was The Next Big Think, the year-long project we’ve initiated asking readers and experts (not mutually exclusive) to imagine what will be the biggest Jewish challenges of the next decade.

Nothing was decided, but the conversation itself was the important thing. The clear idea that merged from our discussion of Israel, continuity, social services, community relations, and philanthropy was “paradox.” Ours are perhaps the richest, safest Jewish communities in history, but we remain tremendously insecure. Anti-Semitism is a shadow of itself, but assimilation and apathy create the specter of a shrinking, flagging people. The end of the Cold War removed the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation and the human rights abuses of the communist world, only to be replaced by a militant Islam that if anything feels even more threatening.

Other paradoxes emerged. Take, for example, philanthropy. A number of participants talked about the rise of “boutique” fund-raising and the need to raise funds among people who want a direct connection to the people and projects they support. That’s a threat to the federation movement, which represents a community chest approach: one gift, multiple recipients, including allocations to serve “unsexy” needs like an aging institution’s heating system or employees’ health care. “The market today is more segmented, and that’s a challenge to our mission,” said one federation exec. “But my fear of designated giving is that the givers are not in it for the long haul. They support a project, but not a sense of community. How do we instill that?”

In a sense, we were back to the idea of Jewish “home rule” — recognizing the needs of the individual, but also the necessity of building a community. There are good reasons federations — like municipalities — hold onto their turf. There’s pride of place, shared history, family ties. People need to connect to the people who lead them and the institutions they support. We like to put a face on our giving — and our getting.

The challenge — for New Jersey as a whole and its Jewish communities — is to preserve a sense of place while sharing when we can, learning what we can, and meeting when we can. Somewhere between a big faceless bureaucracy and a crazy quilt of fiefdoms, there has to be a middle ground.

Sunday’s retreat was the first in a series of conversations about finding that middle ground. The next stage is to invite the wider public. We’re already talking about a public forum that will include Jewish “insiders” and “outsiders,” the young and the not-so-young. You’ll come, you’ll talk, and perhaps you’ll learn — or teach — something new.

We’ll bring the dessert.

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