September 18, 2008
You’re familiar with the term “elevator pitch”? That’s a venture capital term (remember venture capital?) for the kind of lightning sales spiel an entrepreneur can use to impress an investor or CEO, should she ever find herself riding in an elevator with an investor or CEO.
Probably the most successful elevator pitch in Jewish history took place in Egypt, when Joseph was given the chance to interpret Pharaoh’s dreams. Plucked from jail for his brief audience, Joseph uses just 282 words (according to my English translation) to lay out his plan for a Strategic Crop Reserve that would see Egypt through a looming famine. Pharaoh bought it, and you know the rest: Joseph becomes a big shot, and the Jews flourish in Goshen (until they don’t — at which point Jewish history begins again).
The spirit of the elevator pitch is felt throughout Slingshot, the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies’ annual guide to the 50 “most inspiring and innovative organizations” in American-Jewish life.
As you read through the list of projects, you can almost hear the elevator pitches:
- “Let’s get free Jewish children’s books into the hands of young families.” (PJ Library)
- “How about a multimedia learning festival to mark Shavuot?” (Dawn)
- “Imagine teen trips that focus on social service projects instead of tourist traps.” (Etgar 36)
The 124-page guide divides the innovators into five main areas: ritual, history, global and domestic issues, language, and literature and culture. There are new organizations finding innovative ways to tackle old challenges, including Centropa and the Four Seasons Project, which are trying to find fresh approaches to Holocaust commemoration and education. There are established organizations facing new challenges, like the JCC in Manhattan, which is offering educational and cultural programs on Shabbat for unaffiliated Jews looking for alternatives to the synagogue.
And then there are projects that address a challenge you didn’t quite know existed: A group called Footsteps provides a haven for young people who have left the world of the fervently Orthodox but are still seeking Jewish connections.
None of these groups by itself is going to change the Jewish world, or cure what ails it. But the list is a gentle rebuke to those who say American Jewry is going the way of Lehman Brothers.
Last month, The Jerusalem Post published a sobering story by its reporter Judy Siegel-Itzkovich, who paid a brief visit to the United States 26 years after having immigrated to Israel. She spends a few days with relatives in Westchester, where she finds Jews affluent but Jewishly disengaged. She attends a Hadassah convention in Los Angeles and is disheartened by statistics suggesting that the organization’s membership is shrinking and contributions were down 20 percent in the past year. Even worse are the “many” delegates who say they have non-Jewish grandchildren or no grandchildren at all.
Concludes Siegel-Itzkovich: “U.S. Jews have enjoyed a magnificent century of surging wealth, political and cultural influence, and primacy in scientific research, medicine, the media, and many other professional fields. But I fear they have passed their peak and entered an irreversible decline.”
The author acknowledges that a week in America is not much to go on, but she pushes a lot of familiar buttons for nervous Diaspora Jews. There’s no denying the high rates of intermarriage, the falling number of affiliated Jews, the growing disengagement from Israel. Focus on these trends, and you might agree with Siegel-Itzkovich when she wonders, “If Hadassah is struggling, what about the future of smaller and much less influential Jewish organizations?”
And yet, this is a little like saying, “If the British Empire falls apart, what about the future of all its poor colonies?” What Siegel-Itzkovich and other pessimists miss is the sense of Jewish reinvention that is alive and well in Jewish life and the historical perspective that suggests Jews don’t “survive” as much as they adapt.
If many American Jews no longer find the largest and most established Jewish organizations relevant, that doesn’t mean they won’t find what they’re looking for among the emergent alternatives. Siegel-Itzkovich doesn’t mention, in her list of American-Jewish accomplishments in the “magnificent century,” the religious responses that preserved American Jewry when Orthodoxy lost its hold. Indeed, as Old World traditions waned, younger Jews created their own institutions — some, like the National Yiddish Book Center (another Slingshot honoree), dedicated to preserving and cultivating traditions from an earlier era.
Of course, efforts like the Book Center can end up being museums of extinct cultures if they don’t create their own cultures of participation, engagement, and commitment. In its fourth year, Slingshot is a list of intriguing, inspiring possibilities. It will take a few years to see which groups make the jump from “innovators” to “establishment.”
If you’re looking for reassurance, you can do worse than the Joseph story. At a transitional moment in the Jewish story, and from the literal depths of despair, Joseph found a way to adapt Judaism to a new and even alien culture and laid the foundation for its survival. And when the wheel of fortune turned again, another Jewish leader offered yet another new vision for revival.
