emerged unimpressed with and alienated from
Jewish communal institutional life. As a result,
an array of programs has been created by these
philanthropists operating, unimaginably, within
the Jewish communal structure itself; these programs have changed the landscape of the
Jewish community today, a possibility we could
never have envisioned in 1973.
When I look back on the things we did get
right, I marvel about how very right we were.
For example, we knew that the established
Jewish community was intellectually and polit-
ically bankrupt, and that the real innovation
was emerging at the fringes. This is, in many
ways, (save for the large philanthropic projects
mentioned earlier), still the case. Neither the
rural Shabbat communities of Jews in the
Woods nor the retreat center’s Adamah: The
Jewish Environmental Fellowship would have
been dreamed up in a Jewish communal set-
ting — nor Limmud, a Jewish community of
learning imported from England via some de-
termined and innovative philanthropists and
currently spreading around the United States.
Interesting minyanim spring up, meeting in syn-
agogue libraries, people’s homes, or borrowed
church space. All — whether they know it or
not — are modeled on Havurat Shalom and the
underlying notions in The Jewish Catalog. More
opportunities for serious Jewish learning have
emerged in the last decade than in the five
decades that preceded it. Most important,
though, is that today’s Jewish entrepreneurial
projects ratify our deepest conviction, which
permeated everything we wrote: We believed
that, in the end, people can be trusted to know
what they need, and they will figure out ways to
create it when they can’t find it anywhere else.
This slightly anarchic reality has been the
strength of the Jewish community and its deep-
est resource and we celebrated it 40 years ago at
Havurat Shalom as we do today.
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The New Jewish Organizing
STEVEN M. COHEN
The last ten years have seen an efflores- cence of “new Jewish organizing.” Led primarily by Jews in their 20s and 30s,
this phenomenon encompasses five domains:
spiritual communities (independent minyanim,
rabbi-led emergent communities); culture (
filmmaking, magazines, music, drama, etc.); learning (e.g., Limmud); social justice (many areas);
and new media (Jewish-oriented pages on the
Web; social networking; etc.).
Structurally and culturally, new Jewish organizing breaks with prior patterns of Jewish
communal life as embodied in the “system,” the
long-standing complex of federations, Jewish
Community Centers, congregations, defense organizations, and human service agencies.
These new forms of organizing consist of
small-scale projects and communities. They
tend to center around energetic social and cul-
tural entrepreneurs who recruit small circles of
staff and volunteers who, in turn, reach out to
specialized constituencies. All are still low-bud-
get operations with small paid staffs. Their
funds derive in large measure from third par-
ties, often from well-known philanthropists in
Jewish life. Many benefitted from association
with the likes of Bikkurim, Six Points
Fellowship, and Upstart Bay Area (incubators
for innovative projects and people), or
Slingshot (the guide to Jewish innovation), or
Joshua Venture Group (the initiative to identify
and support talented innovators).
Steven M. Cohen is a research
professor of Jewish social
policy at the Hebrew Union
College-Jewish Institute of
Religion in New York and he
directs the Berman Jewish
Policy Archive at New York
University’s Robert F. Wagner
Graduate School of Public
Service.
