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Boomer activists confronted “the establishment”
of their day, demanding changes in power and
priorities — to change the “system.” Today’s
change agents seek primarily to create opportu-
nities for like-minded people to express their
Jewish commitments in their own way — out-
side the “system.” They generally carry a socially
and culturally progressive sensibility, but with-
out the ideological stridency of an earlier era.
While both sought/seek a better Jewish world,
today’s activists are engaged more in building al-
ternatives than in changing the “system.”
The newer forms of Jewish community
transcend traditional divisions of function in
that they blur the boundaries between such
realms as education and entertainment, prayer
and social justice, learning and spirituality.
Social justice advocacy, text study, passionate
prayer, and good music can, and should be, in-
terwoven in a single experience.
To many innovators, the established Jewish
world is overly preoccupied with sustaining divisions. It is seen as stressing boundaries between Jews and non-Jews, or between Jews and
Jews (by denomination, gender, age, class, etc.).
Jews under 40 see these distinctions as exclusive, judgmental, and coercive. Accordingly,
the innovators maintain relaxed stances on intermarriage, patrilineality, denominational identities, and institutional loyalties, thereby
softening the putatively artificial and dysfunctional boundaries.
One wonders: Why now? Why are we in
the midst of this period of innovative organizing, dating back only to the late 1990s? Several
answers come to mind.
On the broadest scale, nongovernmental
organizations worldwide have exploded in
number. In 2000, Robert Putnam’s Bowling
Alone charted declining numbers of national or-
ganizations with local chapters. About the same
time, massively increased small-scale organiz-
ing hit the entire world, partly propelled by the
Internet. Jewish start-ups are part of that devel-
opment, one in which major entities are being
challenged by smaller, more nimble, and niche-
specific start-ups (Christopher Anderson’s
“long-tail” phenomenon).
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