15 Mounting Challenges Facing the Jewish World

"All in all, the vast majority of these challenges our Jewish world faces are self-inflicted."

May 22, 2022

Judaism, Jewish life, Jewish Peoplehood, and the Jewish state are a profoundly unique collection of stories, cultures, lifestyles, philosophies, religion and spirituality, and moral codes.

Jews have not only survived extraordinary waves (tsunamis, as well) of persecution and discrimination for thousands of years, but we have also disproportionately contributed to much progress locally, nationally, internationally, and globally.

At the same time, Judaism, Jewish life, Jewish Peoplehood, and the Jewish state are all experiencing mounting and in many ways unprecedented challenges that threaten our current and future persistence.

This is why — in a fittingly tachles (Hebrew for “bottom line”) way to say it — we can no longer ignore the potentially destructive reality: Jewish Peoplehood is “reaching its next inflection point,” as Zack Bodner wrote in his book, Why Do Jewish?

Enough momentum has built up around the cognitive dissonance that Jews are experiencing what Rabbi Benay Lappe calls “a sociological crash.”1

Tal Keinan, author of God Is in the Crowd, wrote: “Our choice as a community is stark: Create meaning in Judaism, or accept extinction.”2

Inside the 15 Challenges

Our growing and in many cases unusual challenges read like a lavish laundry list. They are, in no particular order:

1. Dropping Institutional Affiliations

According to the most recent Pew survey on Jewish Americans, only 35-percent said someone in their household is a member of a synagogue.

“Newer generations of Jews are identifying, practicing, and connecting to Jewish life in new ways, some of which are more ‘do-it-yourself’ and less program — or institution — centric than in the past,” wrote Valerie Feldman, a former senior project associate at Rosov Consulting.3

“Quite a few congregations fail to inspire,” Jack Wertheimer, a professor of American Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary, wrote in his book, The New American Judaism: How Jews Practice Their Religion Today. He also said that confining Jewish rituals to the synagogue rather than home results (for the non-Orthodox) in “a minimalistic and enervated Judaism” is “not only unfaithful to the teachings of Judaism but deeply destructive.”4

In another damning data point, the Jewish Community Federations of North America — “American Jews’ central address for organized umbrella giving to Jewish causes” according to Bodner — giving to Jewish federations has dropped nearly 38-percent in inflation-adjusted dollars over the past 25 years.5

“In this condition of chaos and change, as we transition by generation, as we encounter shifting institutional models and absorb the waves of cultural and social influences, the Jewish communal enterprise is experiencing a major reset,” wrote Steven Windmueller, Emeritus Professor of Jewish Communal Studies at Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles. “We are facing a set of unknown and complex challenges that will fundamentally redefine our institutions and recalibrate our community as we move forward.”6

2. Shifting Jewish Ethnography

According to the most recent Pew survey on Jewish Americans, if one excludes and looks only at non-Orthodox Jews who have gotten married since 2010, 72-percent are intermarried. And, among Jews who got married since the beginning of 2010, 61-percent have a non-Jewish spouse, compared with 18 percent of Jews who got married before 1980.

“We need to start thinking of intermarriage as a plus-one, not a minus-one,” Zack Bodner wrote in his book, Why Do Jewish? “Some may not like that it is happening, but it’s a reality; so we need to embrace it and find ways to use it to make Judaism better. I fear that if we don’t, and if we try to erect walls, then we will inevitably push our young people … into walking away from doing Jewish altogether.”

According to the same Pew survey, 82-percent of Jews who only have one Jewish parent are likely to marry a non-Jew.

“The number of times that we hear stories about people being rejected outright because their family has said something untoward, or these microaggressions around being a member of an interfaith couple or an interfaith family that often happen in Jewish life and institutions, that’s where the work has to be done,” said Jodi Bromberg, the CEO of 18Doors. “We’re still here, but there are lots of folks who aren’t because they thought, you know what, it’s not worth it.”7

“I don’t think the problem is interfaith couples,” said Samira Mehta, the author of Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Interfaith Family in the United States. “I think the question is whether synagogues and, quite frankly, churches are doing a good job of helping people understand why it is that they are relevant in contemporary society.”8

3. Israel and Israel-Diaspora Relations

A survey of U.S. Jewish voters taken after the 2021 Israel-Gaza conflict found that a quarter of U.S. Jews think Israel is an “apartheid state” and 22-percent believe “Israel is committing genocide.”9

According to the most recent Pew survey of Jewish Americans, among Jews ages 50 and older, only half said that caring about Israel is essential to what being Jewish means to them, and an additional 37-percent said it is important but not essential. By contrast, among Jewish adults under 30, one-third said that caring about Israel is essential and 27-percent said Israel is not important to what being Jewish means to them.

According to another poll, 95-percent of Israeli Jews feel that they have a moral obligation to Jews of the Diaspora, but only 57-percent believe the relationship is in a good place.10

Currently, there are a number of government departments that serve Israelis living abroad, Diaspora Jews, and so forth. “Each one is working according to its own internal organizing logic,” according to a report by The Reut Institute.11

At the request of the President of Israel, the organization Our Common Destiny received input from more than 130,000 people who shared what values inspire them. The value of “Mutual Responsibility” ranked only 57-percent in Israel of the votes and only 46-percent among Diaspora Jewry. The value of “Strengthening Jewish Identity” ranked only 51-percent in Israel of the votes only 45-percent among Diaspora Jewry. The value of “Security and Well-Being” ranked first in Israel and last among Diaspora Jewry.

A hypothetical situation was posed to a panel at the 2021 Zionism 3.0 conference in Palo Alto, California: It’s the eve of Passover, in the year 2025, days after the conclusion of Operation Sushan, a military offensive in which Israel quashed a coordinated attack on several fronts by Hamas, Hezbollah, ISIS, and other Iranian proxies. While the casualties on the Israeli side are limited, the Palestinians suffered substantial losses. Thousands are displaced.

As part of the growing distancing from Israel, Goshen, a USA-based next-gen Jewish collective, publishes an insert to the Haggadah in which they compare Israel to the Egyptian oppressive slave masters and Zionism to the golden calf of our time. Across platforms and organizations throughout social media, many endorse and adopt this insert. Demonstrations across the USA ensue.

“The question with this scenario isn’t whether or not it’s going to happen. That’s irrelevant,” said Andres Spokoiny, president and CEO at Jewish Funders Network, who sat on this panel. “The question is whether it’s plausible — can this scenario happen? And the truth is it can. If it can happen, funders and foundations need to ask themselves: ‘What can we do today towards that?’ Taking this scenario seriously … is going to be critical.”

4. Unengaged Younger Generations

An increasing number of Jews, particularly those under 50, do not see “day-to-day” value in any form of Judaism like past generations. To more and more of the next generations of Jews, Judaism as a religion, nationality, moral code, heritage, spirituality, philosophy, or culture has stopped being, or was never, interesting and relevant on a consistent basis (i.e. day-to-day, week-to-week).

According to surveys, young Jews in the United States and Israel already care much less about each other or about the broader Jewish People than in past years, and their knowledge of each other’s community is declining steadily.12

To this growing group of people, Judaism, in any or all of its iterations, is nothing but a passing interest, and certainly not a core component of who they are and how they define themselves.

In 2007, in a Jewish Telegraphic Agency piece, then-Jewish Federations of North America president Howard Rieger and chairman Joe Kanfer wrote that “young Jews are not being shaped by the same existential issues [such as the Holocaust, the Six Day War, and the like] as their parents and grandparents.” And that “we live in an era of increased mobility” in which Jews “do not have the same long-term local communal ties as before.” Young Jews are also less likely “to unflinchingly trust large institutions with their philanthropic dollars” than older donors.13

At the same time, Jewish Federations of North America have “a fascination with its own structure” and “is not seriously engaged in crafting a message for American Jewish life.” Are other Jewish nonprofit organizations really any different?

Jewish Americans under 30 appear to be taking divergent paths — almost half of young Jewish adults do not identify with any particular branch of American Judaism.14

Perhaps young Jewish adults would feel more engaged if the Jewish community did a better job of engaging them. For example, speakers at the 2021 Zionism 3.0 conference in Palo Alto often referenced “the younger generations,” but there was not a single young adult speaker. The youngest speaker looked to be no younger than 40, and this is being generous. How can we expect our younger generations to care, to reconnect, to stay engaged, to speak positively about Judaism, Jewish life, Jewish Peoplehood, and the Jewish state when they are infrequently afforded the opportunity of a real voice or seat among the table?

“The old people don’t move over. They don’t give space and power to the young people,” Roland Loefler, former CEO of a Jewish Community Center in Sweden, told us. “The older people are kidnapping the important positions.”

5. Nonprofit, NGO, and Government Predominance

Judaism and its parts (i.e. the State of Israel, Zionism, Diaspora Jewry, political activism, social activism) around the world have been inadvertently and organically relegated to nonprofits, NGOs, and government entities. In fact, a report by The Reut Institute found that, of all the organizations in the fields of Zionism, hasbara, Diaspora Jewry, and the like, only three percent are businesses.

The problem with the predominance of nonprofits, NGOs, and government entities is that these types of organizations’ structure — compared to commercial enterprise — inherently creates a myriad of compounding problems, such as:

Silos of assets such as consumer and donor data, fundraising, strategic messaging, and audience follow-up strategies and activities
Financial splintering (One donor privately told us that he made a donation to Chabad on his college campus, and the following week he was approached by Hillel, “which seems to be doing a lot of the same things. It put me in an incredibly uncomfortable situation.”)
Bureaucratic inefficiencies, such as slow and arduous decision-making processes
Workplace cultures that favor hierarchical opinions and conventions over testing and data
A “one size fits all” approach in a world where consumers increasingly prefer individualism, interpersonal interactions, and hyper-customized options
Lack of financial responsibility and “skin in the game”
Capital mismanagement and underutilization
Politicizing over productivity
Keeping the status-quo at the expense of calculated risk-taking which, as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos says, causes “innovative people to flee an organization”

Ultimately, their structure minimizes these organizations’ meaning, purpose, relevance, and impact over the long-run, which means there is no real “return on investment.” In other words, the billions of dollars that are circulated throughout the worldwide Jewish ecosystem every year effectively go to long-term waste.

For example, the structure of the World Jewry Initiative, which promised to be the next big Jewish idea, “threatens to wreak enormous havoc on the very community it is seeking to ‘repair,’” according to Yehuda Kurtzer, the President of The Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. “By running the initiative itself, the Jewish Agency is ironically borrowing an American Jewish model — the Federation! — in its belief that a centrally organized approach can work more effectively than seeding its money in the open market.”15

Jay Sanderson noted that, prior to joining the organization, he did not see the L.A. Jewish Federation structure as effective. “It was challenging to have a lot of accountability or transparency in an umbrella of beneficiary agencies,” he said.16

In his 1896 essay titled The Jewish State, Theodor Herzl wrote: “Our present unsystematic private philanthropy does little good in proportion to the great expenditure it involves.” Has anything really changed?

“It’s a sad thing in the Jewish nonprofit sector, it’s not results-oriented,” Bob Goldfarb, a Jewish nonprofit strategist and consultant, told us.

“We have a history of forming organizations and organizations on top of organizations and because once they have achieved their initial goal, it’s time to determine if their services are even relevant even more,” Ken Toltz, a retired U.S. corporate executive said to us in an interview. “It’s really hard for them to change. The result is a failure of continuing to engage Jews in a meaningful way. The Jewish world is still basically run by baby-boomers, people with money, and that has been a barrier to bringing in the next generations and being open to new ideas and ways of doing things.”

Haviv Rettig Gur, a journalist who covers the Jewish world, noted that a major Jewish conference “dealt with organization and structure and not with the educational message and content Jewish communities need in order to give direction to their Jewish programming” — calling it “a conscious decision” by the organization’s leadership.

“The problem with the focus on structure and fundraising is not that these are unimportant,” Gur wrote. “The billions of dollars at stake are not a luxury; they are the food, clothing, and Jewish education for many hundreds of thousands of Jews across the USA and the world. The problem is that this focus seems to show that J have surrendered to demographic trends, to estimates by the likes of Hebrew University demographer Sergio Della Pergola that the American Jewish population is locked into a direction that will leave it elderly and half its current size in a few short decades.17

A national opinion study of millennial and Gen-Z Americans across ethnic groups conducted in 2021 demonstrates that the American Jewish community’s messages about antisemitism and Israel are not resonating with this group. “We get frustrated and think that people don’t care about our issues, but it’s because we are communicating in an echo chamber,” said Leah Soibel, the CEO of Fuente Latina, a pro-Israel, Spanish-language media nonprofit. “We are not engaging people through a communications strategy.”18

6. Workplace Culture & Environment

The structures of the predominantly nonprofit organizations, NGOs, and government agencies within the global Jewish ecosystem also put a low ceiling on the salaries, benefits, workplace dynamism, office culture, and career opportunities — which therefore does not attract the best and brightest from wanting to join at all levels of an organization.

One former Jewish nonprofit CEO quit, saying she feels “despondent” and “hopeless” and has been purposely searching for work outside of the Jewish world because she “has had enough.”

An executive at a major Jewish nonprofit based in the United States told us that often, young people come into these organizations with substantial ambition, motivation, and inspiration, but when they realize that the organization does not or cannot meet their wants and needs, these people leave the organization and start their own. This creates tremendous redundancies and overlaps, and ultimately generates financial splintering (donors spreading their funds across an increasing number of similar organizations).

“People are the most important assets of organizations, yet many (not all, to be sure, but many) of our Jewish workplace cultures do not reflect this important truth,” according to Gali Cooks, the Executive Director of Leading Edge, an organization that helps Jewish organizations build a robust talent pipeline. “An executive director can have a brilliant vision, but it will not see the light of day if her employees are unclear about their roles, frustrated by operational friction and feel clueless about the ways their jobs connect to the greater vision and mission of the organization.”19

Leading Edge’s 2021 survey, which included 221 organizations and more than 11,000 responses from the United States (which houses the majority of the global Jewish ecosystem), shows that:

Only 74-percent of Jewish nonprofit employees would recommend their organization as a great place to work (11 percent fewer than the U.S. benchmark).
Only 72-percent said the feedback they receive from their manager is useful for their growth (eight percent fewer than the U.S. benchmark).
Only 71-percent said their organization demonstrates care and concern for its employees.
Only 71-percent said their organization helps them stay motivated to do their best work.
Only 69-percent believed employee well-being is a priority at their organization.
Only 66-percent said their organization’s leaders generally communicate openly and honestly with employees.
Only 65-percent saw themselves still working at their organization in two years.
Only 65-percent believed leaders will support the organization in taking action as a result of this survey.
Only 65-percent said their manager, or someone else in management, has shown a genuine interest in their career aspirations.
Only 64-percent said their organization provides them with sufficient opportunities for professional development.
Only 62-percent said their systems and processes generally support them in getting work done effectively.
Only 61-percent said their team receives high-quality support from other parts of the organization.
Only 60-percent said there is open and honest two-way communication at their organization.
Only 55-percent say they have enough opportunities to disconnect from work.
Only 46-percent said the organization’s performance review process helps them grow and improve.
Only 42-percent believed their salary is fair relative to similar roles at their organization.
Only 42-percent thought there are enough people to do the work they need to do.
Only 38-percent felt they have opportunities for advancement at their organization.
Only 37-percent understood how salaries and raises are determined at their organization.

7. Lack of Transformative Leadership

A true leader is someone who puts the bigger picture at the forefront, even at the expense of their own personal and/or organizational wants and needs. How many CEOs at the Jewish world’s top organizations and brands have demonstrated this level to leadership?

Conversely, how many of them are exclusively dedicated to, as one donor calls it, “their organizational imperatives?” True leadership means juggling both organizational imperatives and the bigger picture.

“… the confusion surrounding the star-studded Jewish People Policy Planning Institute conference in Jerusalem in June — an establishment get-together looking for new strategies for Jewish life that couldn’t decide whether it was merely a ‘planning body,’ as institute president Yehezkel Dror insisted, or, as some bitter participants had expected, a mechanism for directing implementation.”20

“He’s the highest-ranking civil servant in Israel engaged in Diaspora affairs, but most world Jewish leaders have probably never heard of him,” Judy Maltz wrote in a Haaretz.21

And, in a world where most people can tell you the names of the CEOs at the world’s top companies and brands — Tim Cook, Arianna Harrington, Jeff Bezos, Oprah Winfrey, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk — how many CEOs can you name at the Jewish world’s top organizations? And if you have children and grandchildren, how many can they name?

8. Too Many Service-Providers, Not Enough Service-Enablers

Most organizations within the worldwide Jewish ecosystem are service-providers whose products, services, and experiences eventually become less relevant or wanted by a growing group of people. This is because service-providers predetermine the outcomes of their audiences’ wants and needs, some with great accuracy and others without, leaving little room for agility and flexibility and hyper-personal experiences that so many of today’s consumers desire.

On the other hand, service-enablers take into account that different groups of people within a total addressable market have different types of wants and needs. This means that products, services, and experiences must enable people, ideally at scale, to think and feel and experience whatever they desire, as each person sees fit.

Moreover, service-enables build the “tri-dentity bundle” by acting as a concierge (providing relevant products, services, and experiences via a singular vehicle), a connector (connecting people and communities), and a catalyst (initiating relevant products, services, and experiences which do not exist).

One of the main reasons why Jewish organizations struggle to be service-enablers is because they do not have the structural agility and flexibility, human resources, and sometimes even financial resources to provide a proper and scalable framework for building, growing, and developing this “tri-dentity bundle.”

9. Lack of Effective Transformation and Adaptability

What Jews outside of Israel think of as part-time Jewish education, traditionally called Hebrew school, was started as a kind of answer to the traditional Christian Sunday school, largely credited by Rebecca Graetz of Philadelphia, a devout Jew and philanthropist who wanted Jewish children raised in non-Orthodox households to have a grounding in Jewish history and traditions.

In 1818, on her birthday, the first Hebrew school was opened by the Female Benevolent Hebrew Society of Philadelphia with 60 students. “This system, created 200 years ago, has remained largely structurally untouched since,” according to Rachel Lithgow, a longtime Jewish nonprofit executive.22

In September 2007, Ido Aharoni was appointed to serve as the State of Israel’s first head of brand management in Jerusalem, designed to improve the nation’s positioning in the world by highlighting its relative advantages and increasing its relevance. They came up with the moniker “Startup Nation” — which caught the Jewish and Zionist world by storm.

In many ways it worked like a charm, but 2007 is now a long time ago, and nothing of true substance has evolved from Ido’s great work. One Jewish nonprofit marketing executive who requested anonymity told us the Startup Nation brand has become “stale” and “too narrow-minded” to garner mass appeal among a global population whose interests and passions are always expanding thanks to our digital world.

“We are having the same sterile conversation with the same insipid people,” Bret Stephens, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, said on a panel at the 2021 iteration of the Zionism 3.0 conference in Palo Alto, California.

A 2021 survey about how employees in the Jewish nonprofit sector experience their work found that more than half of participants said they do not feel a sense of influence and what they are doing changes reality.23

When asked how they would rate the job Jewish organizations are doing in providing opportunities for engagement during the Covid-19 pandemic, only two-thirds said they are doing an excellent or good job.

10. Overwhelming Exclusivity

Despite the ever-present threats of antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiments, data suggests that more and more people, especially non-Jews, are fascinated by the Jewish People; the State of Israel; and Judaism as a religion, culture, lifestyle, moral code, nationality, and heritage.

For example, the most engaging social media channels managed by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs are its Arabic-language accounts. And at IZZY, we estimate that our paid subscription base of 30,000 is around 30-to-50 percent non-Jewish.

But the Jewish world remains overwhelmingly exclusive.

When Jay Sanderson was building Jewish Television Network in the USA, he “immediately realized that we Jews spend an awful lot of time talking to ourselves.”24

How can we expect to combat antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiments if we do not consistently and creatively engage our non-Jewish family, friends, and communities? The goal is not necessarily converting them to Judaism, but simply to develop deeper, more meaningful and impactful relationships with them, both interpersonally and at scale.

“Our leaders should learn the art and teach the art to others in our communities of actually understanding what it is to know we have a tent, but not be so scared of our tent that we can’t welcome people in as they are, and then figure out how we’re moving them along to go to the promised land with us,” Rabbi Shira Koch Epstein, Executive Director of the Center for Rabbinic Innovation, said at the 2021 Zionism 3.0 conference.

Uri Keider, Executive Director of Israel Hofsheet (Be Free Israel), added: “We can definitely have disagreements and we don’t need to fear that. We need to engage. We need to understand that this is how things are going to be and we aren’t going back to how previous generations were. The narrative will not go back to being easier and back to one narrative. This is how it’s going to be and we need to understand how we’re dealing with it.”

Additionally, the Jewish conversion process is notorious for being what Rabbi Seth Farber calls “burdensome” and “taxing.”

“Conversion must be realistic in its demands, and it ought to be made straightforward and uncomplicated, rather than burdensome and taxing,” he wrote. “As a committed halakhic Jew, I believe this can be done, notwithstanding what has transpired to date.”25

According to Professor Yedidia Z. Stern, conversion is symbolically the only way to join the Jewish People, which means whoever is authorized to convert people serves as a gatekeeper, “with a monopoly on determining membership in an exclusive club. Practically, the gatekeeper’s decisions have a profound impact on the identity of potential converts, Israel-Diaspora relations, the relationship between religion and state, and the character of the Jewish collective.”26

11. Treating Symptoms, Not Causes

In the Jewish world, organizations pop up left and right, often as reactions to problems. For example, Taglit-Birthright, largely considered one of the most innovative and exceptional initiatives in the Jewish world during the last few decades, was created to combat the growing disconnect between young Diaspora Jews and Israel. This growing disconnect is a symptom — a “what” — to a problem, not the problem itself.

Perhaps we should ask more “why” questions, like why is there a growing disconnect between young Diaspora Jews and Israel? Answers to this question might very well indicate that a free 10-day trip to Israel — while incredibly generous — is not nearly enough, in and of itself, to combat this growing disconnect.

Case in point: One Jewish donor told us that he talked with Michael Steinhardt, one of founders of and major donors to Taglit-Birthright, “and he said, ‘It didn’t do what I wanted it to do.’”

This “habit” in the Jewish world of founding firms left and right creates tremendous redundancies and overlaps across organizations, ultimately resulting in financial splintering (donors spreading their funds across an increasing number of organizations). And it unnecessarily increases overhead without increasing correlated results.

F. Matthias Alexander, an Australian actor and author who developed the Alexander Technique, said: “People do not decide their futures. They decide their habits and their habits decide their futures.” If the Jewish world has a habit of founding organizations over and over again as a reaction to symptomatic problems, and these organizations do not address (no less solve) the bigger-picture issues, then we are corrupting our future by continuing to operate according to these habits.

12. Philanthropic In-Fighting

As donors and mega-donors become more polarized in their monetary gifts and other types of support, much like our communities and the individuals who inhabit them, both sides of the polarized spectrum are bound to end up in a bidding war. This will drive up giving and spending on both sides of whatever is the day’s hot topic, effectively cancel out each side’s efforts and investments, and put potentially billions of dollars every year to waste.

“Funders and foundations are going to start seeing it in their own families,” Andres Spokoiny, president and CEO at Jewish Funders Network, said at the 2021 Zionism 3.0 conference. “We saw it during the last Gaza war: One generation wanted to do something and the other generation wanted to do something completely different.”

Can you imagine two organizations, which happen to fall on two different sides of a spectrum, but are both dedicated to fighting antisemitism, and wind up essentially fighting each other?

In-fighting also exists between donors and the organizations they finance. “The main impediment is that donors trump common sense nine out of ten times,” Aviva Klompas, a former vice president at Combined Jewish Philanthropies, told us.

According to Steven Windmueller, Emeritus Professor of Jewish Communal Studies at Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles, the continuous internal institutional wars over policy and personalities add to the state of division and discord that today defines the communal order.27

“The external political environment represents another contributing factor to the unraveling of the idea and value of a single integrated Jewish community,” Windmueller wrote. “In its place we are seeing the framing of multiple Jewish communal responses around such core ideas as Israel, managing the fight against antisemitism and anti-Israel expression, and giving space to the emergence of differing and competing political and cultural perspectives.”

13. Lack of Effective Engagement

Engagement among Jews in Jewish activities is spiraling downhill. About one-in-ten Jewish Americans, for example, say they attend religious services at least weekly in a synagogue, temple or less formal setting.28

And less than half say they engage with Judaism through Jewish media by “often” or “sometimes” reading Jewish literature, history or biographies; watching television with Jewish or Israeli themes; or reading Jewish news in print or online.

“Most Jews have little Jewish education and can read little or no Hebrew,” wrote Gary Rosenblatt, The New York Jewish Week’s editor at large. “On a deeper level, in an age of self-help and self-actualization, most Jews don’t believe in mitzvot as obligations or a God of ‘Thou Shalts and Thou Shalt Nots.’”29

On a panel at the 2021 Zionism 3.0 conference, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bret Stephens said: “You have to change not only the kinds of arguments you are making, but the kinds of people you are engaging and the settings in which you are engaging them. My fear is that we are engaged at the moment in a trench warfare version of a Jewish conversation, and it’s really boring. So let’s start thinking about a very different conversation that we might be able to have with discussions we never previously imagined. Outside-the-box thinking is useful right now.”

Heather Paul, a Senior Jewish Educator at Illini Hillel at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, wrote: “Too many Jews don’t see a place for themselves in Jewish community. Engagement goes beyond ‘a welcoming environment,’ ‘inclusion,’ or even ‘pluralism.’ It means Jewish professionals must ask the community what they’d like to see.”30

Lack of follow-up by organizations across the Jewish ecosystem is also viewed as a major issue. However, it is a symptom, not a cause, of more people becoming less engaged, and of organizations not being truly engaged with each other. Instead of meaningful, compounding, and consistent collaborations, many Jewish organizations play the zero-sum game — a byproduct of their obsessively territorial, self-serving, and short-sighted behaviors.

For example, the World Jewry Initiative, which promised to be the next big Jewish idea, was supposed to be spearheaded jointly by the Jewish Agency and Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs. “As it currently stands and as it has been marketed, the multimillion dollar plan uses the guise of an altruistic and philanthropic effort to essentially obliterate the self-defined and idiosyncratic identity of American Jewry, and to replace it with a version better aligned to its own self-interest,” said Yehuda Kurtzer, the President of The Shalom Hartman Institute of North America.31

In 2013, Israel’s Prime Minister’s Office and the Jewish Agency convened a five-day brainstorming session in Jerusalem and online with 1,500 participants to get the ball rolling. And in 2014, the Israeli government approved a three-year budget of 190-million shekels to help finance the initiative.

But Dvir Kahana, then the director-general of the Jerusalem and Diaspora Affairs Ministry, objected to proposals for pilot projects raised by the Jewish Agency that would have been implemented that year. Neither did he want to involve any organizations that were not willing to invest money, insisting on a “pay-to-play” rule. A letter Kahana sent out to all the potential partners in 2014 also indicated his intention to strip the Jewish Agency of its central role in the initiative. So after months of turf wars, the World Jewry Initiative was effectively put on hold.

As one senior Jewish world officials involved in the recent discussions lamented: “This was the first time there was ever a serious dialogue taking place between Israel and the Diaspora, and then Dvir walked in and said he wanted to start everything from scratch, with no collaboration from anyone. Basically, what he sought was to hand over control to a bunch of very rich philanthropists and oligarchs. It’s a shame because relations between the Jewish world and Israel are too strategic an asset to fall victim to this sort of petty infighting.”32

Is this story an isolated incident, or is it a flagrant pattern among the Jewish world’s organizations?

Lack of engagement is also seen in the notion of Jewish Peoplehood, which is highlighted by Jack Wertheimer, a professor of American Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary, in his book, The New American Judaism: How Jews Practice Their Religion Today. He sees a dramatic decline in this sense among younger people and “the indifference to Jews who live in other places or live different kinds of lives.”33

At the same time, there is a growing gap between the definitions of traditional Judaism engagement, and how modern-day Jews prefer to engage. This is known in the business world as a lack of product-market fit.

“Product-market fit means that you’ve found a product and a market that wants it,” according to Eric Jorgenson, a hi-tech executive. “But if that market is small, cheap, or shrinking, you still won’t have much of a company. Don’t just find a market — find a great market.”34

Valerie Feldman, a former senior project associate at Rosov Consulting, wrote: “Our community leaders often have specific expectations of what strong Jewish engagement does or should look like. Supporting Israel advocacy organizations and expressing a love for Israel are seen by most as a sign of deep Jewish engagement, as are behaviors like regularly lighting Shabbat candles or socializing primarily with Jewish friends. However, our evaluations and research have surfaced many ways that people engage Jewishly, and some of these findings run counter to dominant expectations.”35

This is seen in interfaith Jewish programming, for example, which — in evaluating Jewish interfaith programs — Rogov Consulting “learned that interfaith community members sometimes understand what it means to participate in Jewish community differently than their program providers.”

14. Hyper-Assimilation

A professor of American Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Jack Wertheimer said Reform Judaism is now the largest of the streams in the United States. It has embraced popular liberal trends like social action, care for the environment, and the welcoming of members of LGBTQ and interfaith families. But Wertheimer wonders how long the movement can sustain itself by championing autonomy without requiring any imperatives.

Wertheimer believes “the problem is when assumptions are made that Judaism and the wider American culture are part of one seamless fabric and that there are no tensions between the two.” He sees Judaism as “countercultural in some ways,” and that if we don’t emphasize the differences, “the essence of Jewish life will be distorted or lost.”36

If intermarriage rates continue in North America, for example, only one-in-ten Jews will marry another Jew within two generations.

“In Jewish practice, there is a balance between the rights and experience of the individual and the obligations that the individual has towards the community,” Evan Kominsky wrote in The Atlantic. “When you swing too heavily to one side or the other, problems start to arise.”37

Ben Freeman, author of Jewish Pride, told us: “The Jewish People are a distinct culture, a civilization. Though we can integrate into the wider world, we must never do so at the expense of our own culture. There are several instances where Jews have prized non-Jewish culture over our own.”

Freeman also argued that internalized antisemitism is a pandemic.

“Jews have been told — and believed — we are not allowed to be specific, nor should we defend and advocate for ourselves,” he said. “This is wrong. We should expect and demand to be treated as all other minority groups are treated.”

15. Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, and the BDS Movement

Let me be clear: Antisemitism, anti-Zionism, and the BDS movement are absolutely real and significant problems. However, are they really paralyzing problems, or are they more or less thorns in our side on a macro level?

This is not at all to discount or overlook anyone who has been a victim of these three forces, or who knows loved ones who have been victims to them. Any form — however macro or micro — of antisemitism, anti-Zionism, and the BDS movement is unsettling, uncalled for, inappropriate, and the antithesis of a positive, forward-moving direction for the Jewish world, and for the world at large.

If we are to allow others to legitimize the delegitimization of any minority group, we pave a wider path for the delegitimization of other minority groups, for which there is no place in this world, the Jewish People notwithstanding.

Having said that, sometimes — keyword, sometimes — we tend to give them more power than they deserve. And Jewish nonprofit organizations continue to make a fortune from fundraising off the back of antisemitism, anti-Zionism, and BDS movements.

A fundraising professional for a U.S. university affiliate of Hillel told us that when she fundraises for an amazing Jewish culture event, very few donors write the organization a check. But when she fundraises for an antisemitism event, donors line up with checks in their hands.

“You can’t fight antisemitism. You can’t cure it. You can’t fix it,” one Toronto-based Jewish donor told us. “You need to have a very strong Jewish identity and a very strong Zionist identity. If you don’t have that, all of the fighting against antisemitism doesn't matter.”

Ben Freeman called antisemitism a weed, saying: “There have been those who have tried to solve the problem by cutting the weed off at ground level. This has left the roots intact, enabling them to grow back. This is why antisemitism is still a problem today. It is why historical attempts to defeat it have failed.”

Freeman also said that “antisemitism is a non-Jewish problem, not a Jewish problem.”

Reflections on Political and Governmental Challenges

Please keep in mind that we have intentionally detailed the challenges above because they are truly “in our control.” In other words, they are apolitical and non-governmental challenges.

Some people might intelligently and justifiably consider certain Israeli government policies, for example, to be mounting and in many ways unprecedented challenges as well. But because they are not so “in our control,” we have not included any of them.

Additionally, if all the political and/or governmental challenges disappeared tomorrow, many of these Jewish world challenges above would not disappear with them. They would only continue to worsen and deteriorate Judaism and the Jewish People’s collection of remarkable stories, cultures, lifestyles, philosophies, religion and spirituality, and moral codes.

Yet, if the vast majority of these fifteen challenges were resolved, there is no doubt that Judaism, Jewish life, the Jewish People, and the Jewish state — as well as the relationships with our non-Jewish family, friends, and communities — would be incredibly enhanced!

Ultimately, we believe that, by focusing on what is in our control, we can absolutely reverse the worrisome trends created by these 15 challenges.

Conclusion

All in all, the vast majority of these challenges our Jewish world faces are self-inflicted — and therefore have the potential to be self-destructive if we do not immediately develop new strategies and recalibrate existing ones, in order to confront these mounting and in many ways unprecedented challenges.

We are building JOOL as a commitment to working with anyone worldwide who subscribes to our mission of Revitalizing the Jewish Future, Brightening the Entire World. This mission is inspired by our undying belief that the world is a better place with a thriving Jewish People and a thriving Jewish state in it. Accordingly, for the world to continue improving and progressing in directions a reasonable person ought to be proud of, it requires a thriving Jewish People and a thriving Jewish state.

If we are to maximize this hyper-ambitious mission, we must proactively develop S.M.A.R.T. short-term and long-term roadmaps that prioritize game-changing vigor, efficiency, global effectiveness (tangible and relevant results that can scale), inclusivity, innovation, creativity, vigilance, and collaboration. The S.M.A.R.T. acronym refers to roadmaps that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and anchored within a Time Frame.

Moreover, with a “what got us here won’t get us there” mentality, we can confidently reverse these worrisome trends. As Albert Einstein famously said:

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

Heck, we can also do something even more impressive:

We can turn Judaism, Jewish life, the Jewish People, and the Jewish state into one of the world’s foremost bright spots, both for Jews and non-Jews alike — for generations to come!

The end.

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