Jewish Megatrends: Charting the Course of the American Jewish Future

Praise for

Jewish Megatrends: Charting the Course of the American Jewish Future

Schwarz combines remarkable institutional building experience, [an] extensive network of relationships with the best and the brightest in Jewish life, and keen knowledge of the American religious landscape to produce a must read for those concerned with the genuine challenges of the next era in American Jewish life.... The book is insightful and creative ... sober and hopeful, realistic and idealistic, temperate and optimistic, pragmatic and visionary. Brims with wisdom and confidence....

—Rabbi Irwin Kula, president, Clal—The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership

Provide[s] an invaluable framework for understanding the challenging dynamics of contemporary American Judaism [and] a blueprint for the future that will inspire and motivate leaders of our community. Anyone who wants to see American Judaism thrive in the twenty-first century should read this book!

—Rabbi Marla Feldman, executive director, Women of Reform Judaism

Face[s] difficult issues head-on. The faith we share in a creative Jewish future is due in large part to people like Schwarz and those visionaries he has gathered around him in these essays. Rabbis and other Jewish leaders should pay careful attention.

—Arthur Green, rector, Hebrew College Rabbinical School; author, Ehyeh: A Kabbalah for Tomorrow and Radical Judaism

"Throws down the gauntlet to Jewish community leaders seeking to engage the next generation in this perceptive book.... The result: a thoughtful road map for the future of the Jewish people in North America based on wisdom, justice, community and purpose. 

—Dr. Ron Wolfson, author, Relational Judaism: Using the Power of Relationships to Transform the Jewish Community; Fingerhut Professor of Education, American Jewish University; co-founder, Synagogue 3000/Next Dor

Spot-on in its analysis of the biggest changes in American Judaism.... Read this book to become informed, but more importantly, read it to become inspired to build the next vibrant chapter of Jewish life.

—Rabbi Elie Kaunfer, executive director, Mechon Hadar; author, Empowered Judaism: What Independent Minyanim Can Teach Us about Building Vibrant Jewish Communities

A thought provoking, challenging and important book at this critical time of transition in Jewish life.

—Rabbi Laura Geller, senior rabbi, Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills

Delivers an excellent and well thought out set of assumptions ... combined with some of the best thinkers and doers in the American Jewish community. I recommend this book to anyone searching to learn more about the major trends and direction of our Jewish community.

—David Cygielman, founder and CEO, Moishe Houses

Challenges us to do much-needed big picture thinking about the nature of American Judaism today.... By gathering and challenging major American Jewish thinkers in one volume, Sid Schwarz has given us the gift of a critical conversation wrapped into one important book.

—Dr. Erica Brown, scholar-in-residence, Jewish Federation of Greater Washington; author, Inspired Jewish Leadership: Practical Approaches to Building Strong Communities and Spiritual Boredom: Rediscovering the Wonder of Judaism

A thoughtful work that challenges the traditional biases of decision makers in the Jewish community and empowers them to take risks and step into what could be a glorious future.

—Rabbi Charles Simon, executive director, Federation of Jewish Men’s Clubs; author, Building a Successful Volunteer Culture: Finding Meaning in Service in the Jewish Community

[A] compelling twenty-first-century case for a Judaism of four key value propositions—wisdom, social justice, community and sacred purpose—gains a fifth—honest conversation—through the voices of some of American Jewry’s most creative leaders.

—Shawn Landres, co-founder, Jewish Jumpstart

Wisely and skillfully offers a multi-dimensional platform for reinvigorating the Jewish experiences and charts a course for a future of Jewish relevance.

—Rabbi Will Berkovitz, senior vice president, Repair the World

Brings ... many ... exciting developments [in modern Jewish life] into a focus that provides a fuller understanding of where we are and where we can go. It is a must read anyone thinking about the future of American Jewish life.

—Esther Safran Foer, director, Sixth & I

Insightful and honest analysis [as well as] specific ideas for how we must evolve as a community.... Offer[s] innovative strategies for building a Jewish community so compelling that future generations will be inspired to connect.

—Nancy Kaufman, CEO, National Council of Jewish Women

Offers us a roadmap to the unparalleled changes affecting the Jewish world today.... Uniquely lays out a new reality filled with challenges and opportunities that could not be more timely. After reading this book, one thing is for certain: the Jewish world of tomorrow cannot and will not look like the Jewish world of today.

—David Bryfman, The Jewish Education Project; co-designer, The Jewish Futures Conferences

A must-read for anyone who cares about the future of the Jewish community.... Present[s] a realistic, yet hopeful view of how the Jewish world is changing and how those with leadership responsibilities in the community can respond.

—Rabbi Laura Baum, OurJewishCommunity.org and Congregation Beth Adam, Loveland, Ohio

Engaging and spirited.... Calls for authenticity—a renewed focus on community, prayer, learning, social justice, Israel travel and cultural participation as ends in themselves, rather than as mere instruments to some other end. To get the best results, just do the right thing.

—Professor Steven M. Cohen, Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion and Berman Jewish Policy Archive @ NYU Wagner

If you want to understand the here-and-now of the Jewish community in the twenty-first century, then read this book today.... Helps us better understand the new narratives and urgent challenges of Jewish identity, engagement, and continuity.

—Lori Weinstein, CEO and executive director, Jewish Women International

"Schwarz’s essay-as-premise and its responses reflect a Jewish world that is recalibrating and transitioning rather than floundering, and testify to the wealth of options for today’s Jews to express Jewish identity and connect to core values, texts and tradition.

—Esther D. Kustanowitz, program coordinator, NextGen Engagement Initiative, Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles

Powerful ... provid[es] a compelling and nuanced vision of what a meaningful Jewish future can look like and the change-agents who are working to realize this vision.

—Rabbi Ari Weiss, executive director, Uri L’Tzedek

A tour de force... I encourage all committed Jewish professionals and lay leaders to absorb and process the vision in this book.

—Jakir Manela, executive director, Pearlstone Center, Baltimore, Maryland

An impressive body of thought leaders offer their perspective on the key challenges of the twenty-first century, as well as their insights on how the community can respond with intelligence and creativity.

—Rabbi Jason Kimelman-Block, rabbi-in-residence, Bend the Arc: A Jewish Partnership for Justice

Gather[s] together an all-star cast of movers and shakers who have broken boundaries in their respective ways. Each contributes powerfully to a larger thesis that is important reading for all who take leadership seriously.

—Rabbi Avraham (Avi) Weiss, founder, Yeshivat Chovevei Torah and Yeshivat Maharat; author, Spiritual Activism: A Jewish Guide to Leadership and Repairing the World

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To my children

Daniel, Joel, and Jennifer

Fortunate is the generation in which the elders listen to the youth.

Talmud, Rosh haShana 25b

Contents

Foreword

Ambassador Stuart E. Eizenstat

Preface

Part 1 The Changing Face of Jewish Identity in America

Jewish Megatrends: Charting the Course of the American Jewish Future

Rabbi Sidney Schwarz

Part 2 Perspectives from the American Jewish Community

Jewish Culture: What Really Counts?

Elise Bernhardt

Synagogues: Reimagined

Rabbi Sharon Brous

Jewish Family Foundations: Come Together, Right Now

Sandy Cardin

Israel and Jewish Life: A Twenty-First-Century Educational Vision

Dr. Barry Chazan and Anne Lanski

Denominationalism: History and Hopes

Dr. David Ellenson

Getting the Next Generation: Young Adults and the Jewish Future

Wayne L. Firestone

Jewish Social Justice: Looking Beyond Ourselves

Rabbi Jill Jacobs

Jewish Community Centers: Not Just a Gym and a Pool

Rabbi Joy Levitt

The Orthodox Difference

Rabbi Asher Lopatin

Interreligious Collaboration: American Judaism and Religious Pluralism

Rabbi Or N. Rose

On Tribes, Food, and Community

Nigel Savage

The Federation System: Loving Humanity and the Jewish People

Barry Shrage

Jewish Education: From Continuity to Meaning

Dr. Jonathan S. Woocher

Part 3 The Way Forward

Toward a Jewish Renaissance

Rabbi Sidney Schwarz

Notes

Suggestions for Further Reading

About the Author

List of Searchable Terms

Copyright

Also Available

About Jewish Lights

Email Sign-up

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Foreword

Ambassador Stuart E. Eizenstat

Sidney Schwarz has written a critically important book. In addition to his insightful and important lead essay, he assembled thirteen of the most important American Jewish thinkers and practitioners to provide a dramatic challenge to the major institutions of the American Jewish community—from synagogues to Jewish community centers to Jewish Federations—and their leaders to adapt to the megatrends impacting American Jews, and particularly younger Jews who are no longer gravitating to the traditional organizations of the established Jewish community. The book offers a constructive way to deal with revolutionary changes impacting the world’s largest Diaspora community.

No one is better positioned to provide this novel analysis and prescription than Sid Schwarz. Rabbi Sid, as he is affectionately called, has held senior positions in Jewish communal organizations and was a leader in organizing the Jewish demonstrations to help free Soviet Jews. He is the founding rabbi of an innovative and flourishing Reconstructionist synagogue and created a highly successful national institution, PANIM, which brings thousands of young American Jews to Washington and trains them—with a unique methodology using Judaism and Jewish values—to become change agents on the political and social issues facing our country and the world. Those who read the book will also see that he is a wonderful writer and a deep thinker.

Schwarz analyzes the dramatic drop in Jewish identification and affiliation in the United States against the backdrop of the successful integration of Jews into American society. He wrestles with the challenges that our atomized and individualistic society pose to a Jewish community that has always stressed collective responsibility, both toward other Jews and for the larger world.

Schwarz identifies a distinction between what he calls tribal Jewsand convenantal Jews. Tribal Jews see their identity in political and ethnic terms and are focused on threats to Jewish survival from enemies of the Jewish people and Israel and from rampant assimilation. Covenantal Jews, prevalent among next-generation Jews, have a weaker commitment to Jewish group identification even as they seek ways to live lives that are consistent with Jewish values, of which many may be unaware. Unless this younger generation is brought into the Jewish community, they could be permanently lost. Schwarz offers a novel four-point prescription for the Jewish community that needs to be taken seriously by the lay leaders and professionals who serve as the stewards of the American Jewish community.

Schwarz’s analysis complements my own understanding of emerging trends in the world that I set forth in my new book The Future of the Jews. I look at how twenty-first-century global trends—the shift of power from the United States and Europe to nations of the East and South; globalization; the battle for the direction of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims; new security challenges, including the Iranian threat; a new form of anti-Semitism aimed at delegitimizing Israel as a Jewish state—all pose a risk to the status of the Jewish people in the world. I believe that we can successfully meet these new external challenges. However, it is critical that as we do, we not lose sight of the many internal threats to Jewish continuity, which may be even more difficult to overcome. This is where Jewish Megatrends has so much to teach us.

I see the American Jewish community of five million as being like an enterprise with two, roughly equal divisions: one healthy and engaged in all aspects of Jewish life—religious, cultural, political; the other division is near bankruptcy and challenges the health of the overall American Jewish venture. This second division is underscored by soaring intermarriage rates with low rates of conversion by the non-Jewish spouse, birth rates below replacement levels, and a dramatic decline in Jewish philanthropy for Jewish causes and membership in major Jewish organizations.

We need to strengthen the healthy division, creating a massive Jewish educational endowment to lower the increasingly unaffordable costs of Jewish day schools, reach out to intermarried couples, and dramatically increase support for Hillels on campus and for Birthright Israel. The State of Israel must realize that strengthening the American Jewish community in ways that Jewish Megatrends suggests is in its national security interest.

Jewish Megatrends offers a vision for a community that can simultaneously strengthen the institutions that serve those who seek greater Jewish identification and attract younger Jews, many of whom are currently outside of the orbit of Jewish communal life. Schwarz and his collaborators provide an exciting path, building on proven examples, that we ignore at our peril.

For more than three decades, Stuart E. Eizenstat has served in senior positions with the United States government, including chief domestic adviser and chief White House policy advisor to President Jimmy Carter and in a variety of positions in the Clinton Administration, such as U.S. ambassador to the European Union and special representative to the president on Holocaust-era issues. He has received awards from the governments of France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Israel, and the United States, and holds seven honorary doctorate degrees. He has also served in many leadership positions in the Jewish community, and is now co-chairman of the Jewish People Policy Institute in Jerusalem. He is the author of The Future of the Jews: How Global Forces Are Impacting the Jewish People, Israel and Its Relationship with the United States and Imperfect Justice: Looted Assets, Slave Labor, and the Unfinished Business of World War II.

Preface

The nineteenth-century Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard was quoted as saying that life is lived forward but only understood backward. I think of that saying when reflecting on the trajectory of my own life and career serving the Jewish people and the Jewish community. Nothing that I’ve done was part of a grand plan. Yet in reflecting back on my career, I now see that, time and again, I was more inclined to forge my own path, create new institutions, and invent new programs rather than fit into more conventional career boxes.

My first book, Finding a Spiritual Home: How a New Generation of Jews Can Transform the American Synagogue (Jewish Lights), was a result of twenty-five years of thinking about how to do synagogues differently. It started with a course I was invited to teach at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College by Ira Silverman (z"l) soon after I was ordained. Some ten years later, as the founding rabbi of Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation in Bethesda, Maryland, I had the great privilege of working with a community that was open to risk taking and thinking outside of the box. Adat Shalom became an ideal laboratory for me to experiment freely in the realms of religious worship, social action, life-cycle events, and community life. When I decided to step down from that pulpit, I wanted to better document how and why the congregation was as successful as it was in attracting Jews who would not otherwise be inclined to affiliate with a synagogue. I undertook a study of three other congregations, one from each of the major denominations of American Jewish life, to create a composite of new paradigm synagogues that had the ability to attract next-generation Jews. I called the new paradigm the synagogue-community. Ever since the publication of Finding a Spiritual Home I have worked with dozens of synagogues and hundreds of rabbis to help transform synagogues into places that challenge the minds and touch the hearts of Jews.

In Judaism and Justice: The Jewish Passion to Repair the World (Jewish Lights), I set out to articulate the history, theology, and sociology of the Jewish engagement with justice, service, and social responsibility. My laboratory for this work was PANIM: The Institute for Jewish Leadership and Values. I founded PANIM in 1988 to bridge the gap between the fields of Jewish education and Jewish public affairs. Over the course of more than twenty years, PANIM became a training ground for young people, educators, and rabbis to inspire activism, leadership, and service in the context of both the Jewish community and the larger world. Our tools were Jewish texts, Jewish values, and the role model of Jews who came before us and played leadership roles in many of the progressive social causes of the twentieth century. It became clear to me that PANIM was creating a new framework for contemporary Jewish identity, one that integrated serious Jewish learning with a commitment to heal a broken world.

I am not unaware of how many Jews seem uninterested in Jewish life, nor do I take lightly the studies that show rising rates of assimilation and intermarriage. Yet I served as the rabbi of two different congregations for eight years each and I worked with thousands of young people through PANIM programs. Week in and week out I was able to see how Judaism could excite the passion of Jews. Judaism was neither seen as irrelevant nor as a burden but rather as a framework to make life more meaningful and a source of wisdom that helped people navigate the most challenging issues in their personal lives and in society.

In Jewish Megatrends I build on my previous two books, Finding a Spiritual Home: How a New Generation of Jews Can Transform the American Synagogue and Judaism and Justice: The Jewish Passion to Repair the World. I attempt to paint a picture of the challenges that the Jewish community faces as it tries to adapt to a new social landscape and a new generation that comes with a very different set of assumptions and expectations than any generation that came before it. I have taken that which I found works and shaped it into a four-part prescription of what I think needs to be the new playbook for any Jewish institution that hopes to speak to the next generation of American Jews.

I then reached out to some of the top leaders of different sectors of American Jewish life and asked them to react to my prescription. Does it sound right to you? What are you seeing in your particular sector of Jewish life? To what extent is your sector adapting to the dramatic changes taking place in American society? What are the most exciting innovations that you are trying, and what makes them work? What emerges is not only a portrait of a community in transition but also some clear patterns of how we can effectively engage the next generation of American Jews.

It is true that some established institutions are stuck in old paradigms and are becoming increasingly irrelevant. But a handful of established institutions are taking bold risks to reinvent themselves. And then there is an amazing array of relatively new organizations and initiatives, many led by and aimed at the next generation. They are not only worth watching, but they are also worth our investment of time, attention, and financial resources. I believe that over the course of the next decade there is a unique opportunity for cross-fertilization between the established institutions of the American Jewish community and the robust innovation sector of American Jewish life. If each side recognizes the value of the other and commits to a program of collaboration, I believe that we are on the verge of a renaissance of American Jewish life. I hope that this book contributes to that conversation and that collaboration.

I am grateful to my thirteen contributors for being willing to engage in this dialogue with me. Each, in his or her own right, has been a pioneer, rising to the top of their respective fields not by being conventional but by being risk takers. In the process of developing each essay I learned much from them. More than once I returned to my original lead essay and made revisions based on the conversations I had with the book’s contributors and the observations that they made about the Jewish community. I want to particularly thank Rabbi Joy Levitt, Nigel Savage, and Dr. Jonathan S. Woocher, who took the time to give me very helpful comments and feedback to later versions of my lead essay. The book also benefitted from the feedback of several other cherished colleagues, including Dr. Erica Brown, David Bryfman, Rabbi Elie Kaunfer, Rabbi Jason Kimelman-Block, and Shawn Landres. I am grateful to Rabbis Irwin Kula and Brad Hirschfield, who welcomed me into the Clal family of thinkers and communal leaders after I stepped down from the presidency of PANIM. I feel privileged to be able to continue my work in training the next generation of rabbis under the auspices of Clal—The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership. I am also grateful to Emily Wichland and Stuart M. Matlins of Jewish Lights, who guided this book from concept to publication.

I dedicated my first book to my parents, Allan and Judy Schwarz, and my second book to my wife, Sandy Perlstein. I am fortunate to still have my parents in my life. And I can’t imagine my life without Sandy, who is a constant source of encouragement and love. It can only be considered b’shert (fated) that my third book is about the future. Thus it is appropriate to dedicate this book to my three children, Danny, Joel, and Jennifer. They are now young adults making their way in the world, and I could not be more proud of them.

Some people say that parenting is the hardest job they ever had, but, for me, it has been a source of great joy. To the extent that I hope that this book helps make the Jewish community an ever more vibrant and creative place, my fondest wish is that my children, and theirs, find it to be a place that gives them both roots, to know where they came from and who they are, and wings, so they can become who they are destined to be.

The Jewish community is in a time of transition. Those who are active in the community certainly know this. Many of the institutions that have been the backbone of the organized Jewish community—synagogues, JCCs, Federations, membership organizations—have been losing market share for more than two decades. This is a decline that cannot be attributed to bad leadership or a bad economy. The decline is deep and systemic, and it will require dramatic rethinking on the part of those who are the stewards of the Jewish world.

This essay offers a framework to help us better understand the dramatic changes taking place within American Jewry and how those in a position of leadership in the community—Jewish communal professionals, rabbis, lay leaders, and foundations—might be able to address the challenges that face the major institutions that compose the organized Jewish community. It reframes the conversation away from more typical hand-wringing and doom and gloom expressions, which are hardly constructive, toward a clearer understanding of the challenge that we need to collectively confront.

From Generation to Generation

I begin with a personal narrative. My parents typify the Shoah (Holocaust) generation. Both their families came from Poland and emigrated from the poor backwaters of the Polish shtetl to the more cosmopolitan Berlin in the 1930s, where the families came to know each other. My maternal grandmother sensed the dangers of Nazism and prevailed upon my grandfather to move to the Yishuv, pre-state Palestine, where my mother was raised. Financial hardships in the Holy Land then brought them to Baltimore and, after that, to New York.

Most of my father’s family perished in the camps, but two siblings survived. At age fourteen my aunt went on Youth Aliyah to Israel, where she raised a family and lived her whole life. My father was ransomed out of Germany by relatives in the United States when that was still possible. Just two weeks before Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass, which launched the physical assault on Jewish people and property in Germany in 1938), he came to New York at age sixteen without his family. He was a passenger on the last successful voyage of the St. Louis, a boat whose next voyage would be termed the voyage of the damned, because it was forced to return to Europe when the ship was not allowed to disembark the Jewish refugees aboard even though the ship was within sight of Miami. Half of the passengers of that ship subsequently lost their lives in the Shoah.

As were hundreds of thousands of other Jews who came to these shores, my parents were deeply scarred by the Holocaust, in awe at the founding of the State of Israel, and eternally grateful to the United States of America, which allowed them to build a new life. Their lives revolved around their synagogue, the events of the Jewish community, and the fate of the State of Israel, where dozens of their family now lived. As immigrants, they could not imagine navigating American society without the intermediary agencies represented by the Jewish community.

I was born in 1953. My most powerful childhood memories include the anxiety in my household in the weeks leading up to the Six-Day War. My parents felt certain that Jews were about to face another holocaust if Israel were to be overrun by invading Arab armies. The subsequent Israeli victory was seen as a miracle—David slaying Goliath.

Nine years later, in 1976, I was on a public bus on a crowded street in Israel when all traffic stopped. The bus driver turned up the radio, and we heard the news bulletin that an Israeli commando team had succeeded in flying twenty-five hundred miles to an airport in Entebbe, Uganda, to rescue more than one hundred Jewish passengers who were being held hostage by terrorists and the soldiers of dictator Idi Amin. The rescue